Legend of the Five Rings vs Pendragon

Compare Legend of the Five Rings and Pendragon side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Legend of the Five Rings	Pendragon
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy, Historical
Tags	Social Combat, Social Intrigue, Character-Driven, Drama, Character Building, Narrative, Tactical, Crunchy, Lore-Heavy, Strong GM Support	Character-Driven, Domain Management, Lore-Heavy, Deadly, Simulation, Crunchy, Social Intrigue
Core Mechanic	Choose a skill and elemental approach. Roll custom d6s equal to the ring value and custom d12s equal to the skill rank. Keep up to the ring's value in dice. Count successes on kept dice against a target number. Explosive successes can add rolls. Spend opportunity symbols for extra effects. Strife symbols on kept dice build emotional pressure. The core includes a conversion table for ordinary d6s and d12s.	Roll d20 against the relevant skill or attribute: a result equal to or under its value succeeds, a roll exactly equal to the value is a critical success, and a natural 20 is a fumble. Opposed actions have both sides roll under their value, with the higher success winning and a beaten-but-successful roll scoring a partial success. Personality traits and passions use the same numeric scale and are rolled the same way when a knight's character is put to the test.
Dice	d6 + d12 custom dice	d20
Complexity	High	High
Availability	Paid	Paid
Runnability	5 of 5 book tools	4 of 5 book tools
License	All Rights Reserved	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	Noncommercial only — Fan content policy	Not yet researched
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Edge Studio	Arthaus
Year	2018	2005
Languages	English, French, Italian, Spanish	English, French, Spanish
Best For	Groups who want samurai campaigns where personal desires clash with sworn duties, with detailed court intrigue and tactical duels.	Long-running Arthurian campaigns where a knight's aging, death, and dynastic succession are part of the genre, and where playing out a character's traits, loyalties, and passions matters as much as winning fights.
Highlights	Choosing an elemental approach changes how a skill tackles a problem and which opportunities a player can spend. Strife turns emotional pressure into a mechanical limit, inviting characters to reveal desires they are expected to conceal. Intrigues and duels give courtiers and warriors distinct tools for pursuing their goals.	Thirteen opposed pairs of personality traits and a set of named passions are rated numerically and rolled like skills, and a passion roll can leave a knight inspired to heroics, disheartened, or maddened beyond the player's control: the heightened behavior that drives Arthurian drama. Every chivalric act (combat, generosity, romance, piety, holding a title) feeds a single lifelong Glory total that sets social rank and rewards embodying knightly ideals over simply winning fights. A yearly Winter Phase resolves aging, estate income, and family events between sessions and passes the line to an heir on death, so a campaign can span generations from Uther's court to the fall of the Round Table.
Considerations	Players track emotional pressure and social standing alongside the action. Keeping dice and choosing opportunities can slow checks until the group knows its options. Clan duties and Bushidō shape character creation and consequences, so campaigns in other settings require adapting those assumptions.	Core rules restrict player characters to knights, with no mechanics for playing magicians, priests, or commoners, which narrows the cast to the warrior aristocracy. The Winter Phase's multi-step annual procedure adds meaningful between-session bookkeeping to every campaign year. High-damage attacks such as a couched lance or great sword can end a fight in a single exchange, making disadvantaged or improvised fights disproportionately dangerous.