Legend of the Five Rings vs Shadowrun

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

	Legend of the Five Rings	Shadowrun
Genre	Fantasy	Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Play Style	Career-Based, Character Building, Character-Driven, Crunchy, Drama, Faction Play, Lore-Heavy, Roleplay-Heavy, Social Intrigue, Tactical, Theater of the Mind	Crunchy, Tactical, Combat-Heavy, Heist, Character Building, Faction Play, Lore-Heavy, Skill-Based, Mission-Based, Urban Fantasy
Core Mechanic	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.	Roll a pool of d6s equal to attribute + skill, counting 5s and 6s as hits. Meet or exceed a threshold to succeed. Situational advantages generate Edge points rather than modifying dice pools directly; Edge is spent on tactical effects like rerolling dice, adding successes, or imposing penalties on opponents.
Dice	d6 + d12 custom dice	d6 dice pool
Complexity	High	Very High
Accessibility	Medium	Medium
Runnability	High	Medium
License	All Rights Reserved	No open license
Cost	$$	$$$
Publisher	Fantasy Flight Games	Catalyst Game Labs
Year	2018	2019
Best For	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.	Groups who want cyberpunk-fantasy heists with deep mechanical subsystems for hacking, magic, and combat.
Highlights	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.	Unique cyberpunk-fantasy setting blending megacorporate intrigue with magic and metahuman races. Dedicated subsystems for Matrix hacking, magic, rigging, and astral space. Edge system replaces many situational modifiers with a spendable tactical resource. Decades of published lore spanning in-world history from 2011 to the 2080s.
Considerations	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.	Matrix hacking runs as a parallel subsystem that can leave non-decker players waiting. Multiple supplemental rulebooks needed for full coverage of magic, Matrix, and rigging. Published books have documented editing and layout issues.