The storyline for Kotei 2014 has now been announced, and while there are a number of moving parts the central mechanic is that players will earn Glory points for their Clan, and then the Clan will be able to spend those points on several different effects. The initial batch of options is:
1000 – occupy the lands of another Clan
750 – kill a daimyo
500 – crushing military or political victory over another Clan
250 – the child of another Clan’s daimyo/champion is fostered to your Clan as a hostage
100 – a hero of the Clan defeats a rival in a duel
We don’t know the exact way the voting will be done, but we do know how you can get glory points.
1 point – attending a Kotei
1 point – making T8
2 points – finishing 3rd or 4th
3 points – finishing 2nd
5 points – winning
4 points – winning the honor contest
So the most you can get for playing at a Kotei would be 11 – 1 for attending, 1 for making T8, 5 for winning, and 4 if you also won the honor contest.
I think this then begs the question of how many points Clans are going to tend to accumulate. We know in advance exactly what a large portion of the point tally will be. There are 63 Kotei, and each Kotei awards exactly the same number of points for everything except the attendance figure. So that’s 24 per Kotei (8 for T8 + 4 for T3/T4 + 3 for T2 + 5 for T1 + 4 for honor) x 63 Kotei, or 1512 Glory points. On top of that, there are the attendance figures, and based on prior years and arc patterns, I’ll put that at 4000, because it’s a nice round number and I’m optimistic about attendance going into the Ivory launch, even with the delay in the actual product showing up. So there will be something like 5500 points awarded during Kotei season.
If every Clan got the same number of Glory points, then that would be a bit over 600 per Clan, enough for everyone to have a crushing victory over somebody. But, of course, that’s not how life works, and some Clans will end up with more than others. How much variance might one expect in that? Well, conveniently for me, I have numbers hanging around from prior Kotei seasons, so I can use those as something of a starting point (including the fact that the Kotei season will be broken up between two environments, which generally means that the results are more balanced than a single-environment examination). So, let’s say we had this environment:
| 2014 Kotei Made-Up Environment | |||||||
| Players | T8 | T3-T4 | T2 | T1 | Honor | Glory Points | |
| Crab | 550 | 85 | 21 | 11 | 11 | 7 | 793 |
| Crane | 355 | 32 | 8 | 2 | 2 | 7 | 447 |
| Dragon | 438 | 56 | 14 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 614 |
| Lion | 479 | 75 | 19 | 10 | 10 | 7 | 700 |
| Mantis | 440 | 59 | 15 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 629 |
| Phoenix | 425 | 49 | 13 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 568 |
| Scorpion | 528 | 57 | 13 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 703 |
| Spider | 386 | 39 | 10 | 2 | 2 | 7 | 489 |
| Unicorn | 399 | 52 | 13 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 569 |
| 4000 | 504 | 126 | 63 | 63 | 63 | 5512 | |
That’s taking realistic participation and T8 numbers (for a hypothetical environment, that is – I’m going to be rather surprised if Crane only brings in 2 wins this season), and then obviously an unrealistically smooth breakdown from the T8 (which I’ve modeled using “make the cut” numbers) and wins (which are also realistic quantities). And, more importantly, I obviously just divided the honor wins up evenly. But I don’t think it’s too bad for a back of the envelope calculation.
Unless I’m doing my math wrong, it looks like it would be really tough for anyone to hit the 1000 point reward. The 750 point reward could get hit by a couple of Clans. And “bad clan” (like Crane and Spider were in the environment I used for this little bit of math) might miss out on the “crushing victory” 500 point reward. But it looks like everyone should be able to get a couple of rewards, even if they’re “only” taking hostages or winning duels.
Whether or not anyone will actually be able to properly hit the numbers here, I actually kind of like this system for representing a Kotei season of the clans screwing around with each other politically and otherwise when the Kotei aren’t being driven by Big Storylines of Absolute Bigness That Could Change Everything But Won’t.
L5R has, these last way-too-friggin’-many years, been alternating Big Storylines with ‘off year for normal shenanigans and to catch our collective breath.’ And taking something like this — which seems like the natural extension of the ‘Your clan’s courtier will shame another clan’s courtier during a festival’ Winner’s Choice tourneys — and using it for the ‘off years’ could be a really good template that people can prepare for. It gives the Story team just enough results to build on events without demanding dramatic tales of Ratlings Ripped My Flesh every week. I’m taking a break from the game myself (though I’m keeping an eye on events, obviously) but if we saw something pretty basic like this on a more regular basis for the Koteis I might not be.
(I’m aware there is also a storyline involving Minor Fortunes and such, but past precedent suggests that these things will get about a paragraph’s worth of coverage in a fiction and maybe a brief callback in a couple of years, so it’s really hard to get too invested in it.)