Picture a 13-year-old kid at a gaming convention in Paris, France in early ’98, wandering aimlessly from booth to booth, having a grand old time sampling as many games as he can. Accident (or is it fate?) eventually leads the kid to the AEG booth, where he learns to play this game called L5R. He already plays semi-casual Magic, as well as Netrunner and Middle Earth, but he loves the flavor of the game, and purchases an Obsidian Edition Lion starter. He can’t decide who he likes better between the Fire Dragon (or rather, the Dragon of Fire, as it was known back then), with its ability to kill two guys at once, and Matsu Imura, with its glorious artwork. Right then and there, he realizes he’s hooked. What he has no way of knowing, though, is that ten years from now, he will be part of the design team for the game he just learned to play.
It almost didn’t happen, too. For the first two years after discovering L5R, I barely played enough to be considered a casual player. With no playgroup and a local store that didn’t organize L5R tournaments, I considered dropping the game several times. Yet I stuck around somehow. I eventually found another store that had weekly L5R tournaments, and the Spirit Wars prerelease saw me getting repeatedly crushed for the first time – having pulled the Towers of the Asako starter sure didn’t help. From then on, and until that store closed down two years later, my missing one of the weekly tournaments was an exceptional occurrence.
Soon enough, I settled on the Dragon as my clan of choice. An Oni’s Fury brought me Shiro Mirumoto and my first tournament victory, and by the time Broken Blades rolled around, I’d had a couple top 32s at large storyline tournaments (welcome to mid-Gold Europe, where a 150-player tournament is kind of a disappointment). I loved the competition, but most of all I loved doing well with wacky, unexpected decks. I will always have a soft spot for the Temple of Hoshi military deck that served me so well in early Diamond, when everyone was playing Lion.
I joined playtest in early 2005, right in time for Code of Bushido and Lotus Edition. In the fall of 2004, JDS and Ryan Carter, then on the design team, had decided to take a tour of Europe before going to the European Championships in Germany; while in Paris, they stayed with a friend of mine, and upon returning to the US, they asked us if we’d be interested in creating a playtest team in Paris. Three years later, as I was getting ready to pass on the position of team leader to someone else to go study abroad for a year, I received a PM from none other than Bryan Reese, asking if I’d be interested in joining the design team. I’m afraid my initial reaction can’t be described on a family-friendly website.
A year and a half later, I still have trouble believing it. Being on the design team means I get to work with these very smart and creative people, and I sometimes wonder how they haven’t figured out that I’m just faking it. These guys are not only talented, but they also love what they’re doing. All four of us were long-time L5R players before becoming designers, and I think it shows; we’re trying our best to design a game that we’d have fun playing. In fact, I think we’d all agree that we don’t get to play it often enough.
I’ve learned a lot over the last sixteen months or so. I remember the first batch of cards I turned in, for what was then codenamed “L5R Graphic Novel” (now known as Death at Koten). They weren’t bad per se, but boy were they complicated. As a player, I love cool and flashy effects, as well as cards whose effectiveness varies depending on how and when you play them. As a designer, I rapidly came to understand (with a little help from Bryan and Justin) that a more complex card was not necessarily a better card. Nowadays, I value elegance a lot higher than I used to, which might explain why I enjoy designing boxables so much; one of the designs I’m proudest of is little Isawa Yutako, an otherwise inconspicuous Personality who’s proven to be the cornerstone of at least one deck type.
One thing I enjoy doing is designing cards that are clearly over the top, and watch as playtest brings them down to a more reasonable power level. There’s a Strategy in The Harbinger, for instance, that had everyone screaming “are you crazy?” when they received the first .pdf (see if you can spot its toned down version when the set comes out). I don’t do that to satisfy my sadistic streak (well, not only), but because I believe our playtesters are good enough to turn my cool, flashy, and broken ideas into cool, flashy, and good cards. So far, they haven’t let me down.
I feel very lucky to be part of the design team that brought you Celestial Edition (although if you don’t like it, I swear it’s all Bryan’s fault). Watching two people having a blast playing a game of L5R and knowing that, in a way, you had something to do with it is rather awesome, to say the least.
