"Bang, you're dead!"

"Nope, you missed me!"

"No, I didn't."

That's the classic example of why we put rules in our games: to settle disputes and to give everyone a level playing field. But it's also an example of the story affecting the "rules" of the game.

The person being shot at could have responded in all sorts of ways to justify his or her continued existence: "Bounced off my titanium armor;" or "You can't see me; I'm invisible;" or even "The bullet goes right through this holographic simulation of me" The point is that the background story of the game can and should dictate how the rules work within the story.

Now, it's possible to have a game without benefit of story (chess, for example), and stories can be told without a game behind them. By far, however, the standard in the adventure-gaming industry is to combine them; mechanics are set based on the story, and story pulls together all of the mechanics. Even the name "adventure gaming" combines the two elements of story and mechanics.

Two of the big styles of games right now are roleplaying games (RPGs) and trading card games (TCGs). RPGs focus more heavily on the world and background as the players work together to create an interesting story. In RPGs, winning tends to be a fairly nebulous concept and character development (and thus story development) is truly the primary goal. TCGs, however, have a much greater focus on winning. Because of that focus, the mechanics that keep the playing field level are much more important than they are in an RPG; however, neither mechanics nor story works best without the other. The best games have an interesting and absorbing world that draws in the players and a set of rules that enhance rather than distract from that world, while still providing the balance of a good set of mechanics.

But what happens when a TCG becomes an RPG? What happens when an RPG becomes a TCG?

When we began the L5R trading card game design, we knew that we had to make it different. The TCG market had peaked and was beginning its descent. Games were starting fail, where before any TCG that came along made money hand-over-fist. One of our first goals was to build the world along with the cards. Rather than creating a game in which the players had nebulous goals, we wanted our players to be able to answer the basic "Ws" of journalism ("Who?", "What?", "Where?", "When?", "Why?" and "How?") while they played: "Who am? "What am I fighting?" "Where are we?" "What are we fighting about?" If the players had those questions in mind as they played, then the story of each game would write itself; but if even one of those questions couldn't be answered, then the game would be as abstract as moving pieces around the board in Risk or Monopoly.

To answer all of those questions, we had to create a large back-story within which all of the "mini-conflicts" played out by the players would make sense. Even in the beginning of the TCGs development, we knew that we would need to do as much world development as companies typically spend on their RPGs' world development. So, that's where we started. We spent the first month of the TCGs development without any mechanics or cards; we only worked on the world of Rokugan and the people in it. So, when we were ready to work on the actual card game, we already had a detailed and (hopefully) interesting world in which to set it.

Then, as we continued to develop the card game over the next couple of years, the world gained detail. Three years after we had begun, when we finally began developing the L5R RPG, we actually had more detailed story information than we could possibly fit into a core rulebook. We had to decide on which information to pass along in the first book and what to save for future books. After that we chose a set of mechanics that we thought fit the style and flavor of Rokugan, and sent the book to press. It was possibly the easiest core RPG that anyone has ever written, just because we had spent three years getting ready to write it.

The Legend of the Five Rings brand is an entire property at this point, with a trading card game, a roleplaying game, and a miniatures game-line going strong and developing into other areas. When the story and the mechanics enhance each other, you've got a game that's really fun to play. When they don't, it's time to go back to "Bang, you're dead."

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