Dungeons & Dragons vs Legend of the Five Rings
Compare Dungeons & Dragons and Legend of the Five Rings side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Dungeons & Dragons | Legend of the Five Rings | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Play Style | Tactical, Heroic, Character Building, High-Fantasy, Classic Fantasy, Vancian Casting, Ascending AC | Social Combat, Social Intrigue, Faction Play, Drama, Career-Based, Crunchy, Lore-Heavy |
| Core Mechanic | Make a D20 Test by rolling d20, adding relevant modifiers, and comparing the total to a target number. Ability checks, saving throws, and attack rolls use this procedure. Advantage and disadvantage use two d20s and keep the higher or lower result. | Roll-and-keep with custom dice. The player picks a skill and an elemental approach (Air, Earth, Fire, Water, or Void): the approach determines how the action is attempted, so a Fire approach to combat is a reckless overwhelming strike while a Water approach redirects an opponent's force. The pool is Ring dice (d6) equal to the chosen ring's value plus Skill dice (d12) equal to skill rank; after rolling, the player keeps up to ring-value dice. Kept faces show some mix of successes, explosive successes, opportunity, and strife symbols: successes meet a target number, opportunity spends create narrative effects, and accumulated strife eventually drives the character into Compromised. |
| Dice | d20 | d6 + d12 custom dice |
| Complexity | Medium | High |
| Accessibility | Very High | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | Very High |
| License | CC BY 4.0 (SRD); core books proprietary | All Rights Reserved |
| Cost | Free | $$ |
| Publisher | Wizards of the Coast | Fantasy Flight Games |
| Year | 2024 | 2018 |
| Best For | Groups who want heroic fantasy with configurable tactical combat, broad character options, and campaigns that span multiple levels. | Groups who want samurai drama where internal conflict between sworn duty and personal desire matters as much as the sword, with structured rules for court intrigues and duels alongside skirmish combat. |
| Highlights | Advantage and disadvantage resolve common situational effects by selecting the higher or lower of two d20 rolls. Backgrounds, classes, subclasses, and feats distribute character choices across creation and advancement. Weapon Mastery gives qualifying weapon users distinct tactical effects without replacing the action economy. | Approach choice means the same skill check resolves differently depending on which ring drives it, mechanizing personality and method instead of relegating them to flavor. Strife accumulates from dice rolls and triggers Compromised when it exceeds composure, turning emotional pressure into a tracked resource without a separate sanity subsystem. Ninjō (personal desire) and giri (sworn duty) are written into each character sheet, and the conflict between them is the engine of advancement and downtime scenes. |
| Considerations | Spell preparation, spell slots, class features, and conditions create several interacting resources for players to track. High-level characters combine many spells and features, increasing adjudication work for the DM. Bastions add a separate downtime procedure for campaigns that use the stronghold rules. | Custom dice are required and not easily substituted: physical sets must be purchased separately or the official dice app used. Honor, glory, status, strife, composure, void points, and conflict-specific resources all track separately, so social bookkeeping is heavy outside of skirmishes. The mechanical structure is tightly bound to Rokugan's clan system and Bushidō expectations: reskinning to other settings unwinds large chunks of character creation and technique progression. |