[RPG] When confronted with a situation with no seeming honorable resolution, what does a samurai do in Rokugan

l5rroleplaying

During a L5R game, the players ended up in a situation extremely complicated from an Honor point of view.

While running after a suspected murderer, they stumbled upon the Empress' brother, buying firearms and powder from gaijins (highly illegal and dishonorable behavior). They have not been noticed yet.

They started struggling with what to do, as they can't find any course of action that isn't dishonorable. Which was great, as that was what I wanted them to feel. They then all turned towards me and asked "what would the honorable thing be?" Which is less great, as I have no idea.

They are mainly hesitating between attacking (not honorable), confronting (might be killed), running away (not honorable), or telling someone (might not be believed). I would prefer the question to not be completely specific to my current crop of PCs, but they are a Crane bushi, Mantis courtier and Dragonfly shugenja.

So, in this kind of situation – seeing someone from a highly superior rank doing a highly illegal thing and ready to kill to keep his secret – what would a L5R samurai do?

Best Answer

I don't know about bushido, but in Rokugan, the answer of what they should do is "nothing", at least by themselves. Now, let me explain:

Direct approaches are bad

The brother of the Empress is way too high in the social scale for most samurai to be able to deal with him in any honorable way, at least under normal circumstances. Possible outcomes of doing it the direct, unsubtle way:

  • If they try to take justice in their own hands, they will end bad. Challenging him to a duel, attacking him or arresting him can only end with them branded as traitors and executed as petty criminals, along their families and maybe even their daimyos. No honourable seppukku, but execution.

  • If they publically denounce him, it is for naught. In Rokugan, proofs have no value in law, no matter how irrefutable. Judges only take in account testimonies, and those testimonies must come from someone as high in the social scale as the denounced to have any value. Since we are talking about the Empress's brother, they will need no less than several clan daimyos to back them up, something extremely difficult. Not only that, but the supposed culprit may counter any accusation from lesser samurai with his own accusation, one of slander, against them, demanding their deaths as retribution to their daimyos. Most daimyos will obligue such demand.

The correct way to do things in Rokugan

In Rokugan, when one is aggravated or observes a dishonourable behaviour by one of superior social status and believes that something should be done, the politically and socially correct way of act is to go to one own daimyo and let him know of the facts. Then forget about it until their daimyo order them otherwise. He will then decide what to do, and if he deems it necessary, he will escalate the case up in the hierarchy. However the proper option is not really an option if you do not have the support of your daimyo, and can end really bad if you are in bad terms with him. If the later situation arises, the best adjective for a truly honourable samurai is screwed.

There is something you can still do

The proper way of resolving the situation is not available to samurai that do not enjoy support from their daimyo. For those samurai is such situation that want to address the problem, while remaining true to the code and the tradition, there are some alternatives:

  • As explained before, normal samurai cannot take meaningful actions against the empress's brother, and their word, against the word of someone of imperial blood, has little to no value. On the other hand, in the court, a samurai is his own worst enemy. If you somehow force him to make a mistake big enough and public enough, he will destroy himself. You will need to thread lightly, however, as he still has the advantage of status, and a careless approach may end with you suffering the consequences I mentioned before. This is good if you have high political skill or have very good, influential, friends (or better, both of them). It is an adequate option for Crane and Scorpion clan samurai.
  • Self-sacrifice can be very powerful in Rokugan. If you have no skill for politics, but you are a really honourable samurai and your sense of honor compels you to do something, you can make use of the right of every samurai to denounce her own daimyo by asking such daimyo permission to commit seppukku as a sign of protest against that daimyo's behaviour. The daimyo is free to allow it or deny it, of course, but refusing such petition is believed to bring bad luck to the house and displease the ancestors (and this is one of the very few instances where a samurai can openly disobey her daimyo). If a samurai decides to take this course of action, she would do well in making the request in a very public situation, to better attract the attention of the adequate persons to the case, persons that, unlike the samurai, have enough influence, resources and willingness to be able to actually do something about the problem at hand. Either if the samurai do commit seppukku or not (in which case, she will continue her live under the shadow of a probably vengeful daimyo), her attitude is irreproachable. This way of action is appropriate to very strict followers of bushido, like the members of the Lion clan.
  • Finally, for samurai that has no time nor patience for politics or other traditional or indirect ways of solving the problem, but they want to do something, there is the other way. The empress's brother may be out of your reach thanks to his status, but their gaijin allies and non-samurai underlings are not so lucky. While you cannot expose him directly, you can still clean the empire of the filth represented by his associates. The better part of this method is that, as long as you are sensible enough to never insinuate that there is a connection between that scum you are killing and the empress's brother, even the most spiteful daimyo would have to recognize that the law and the code are on your side. Of course, this way of dealing with the problem puts you at odds with a very influential enemy, which will probably seek retribution, even if he has to do it indirectly to avoid exposing himself. This may be the more appropriate solution for the less subtle clans, like Unicorn and Crab.