How to deal with the Prefacture

Obvious things:

Exhaust Hiro using your turtle powers, then go for his lackeys so he's on his own.

Use Channel/Leach to fill a single figure up with ki to be able to heavily use their abilities (kenko is amazing for it) and beat down the people you can.

When meeting hero, if he's not got unblockable strike on the go, roll full defence, or nearly full, with 1 white dice, to optimise not being decapitated.

Remember bodyguard means that if hiro gets to an important figure, you can sling a cheaper peasant in his way to stop him cutting them down.

If you need a turn of breathingspace, use aura of serenity to block fighting for the turn.

And yes, never attack multiple opponents when they're better fighters than you. You use it pretty much exclusively for beating on bakemono and swarms.

The monks definately have the tools to deal with Prefecture. I personally think that temple are the best of the 4 factions by a reasonble margin. You have hard hitters and a lot of tricks.

An Aiko buffed Kenko gets a +7 damage fist (8+ charge, or one die less if you dont use Aiko). As long you get an ok hit its an instant kill even to armored opponents.

I managed to get a fully buffed gorilla in on Hiro and got him down to 1 health point, and was lucky enough to not die. I the spent the following 2 turns exhausting him with the turtle, before finally getting the gorilla to finish him off. Would've got Kenko in there but he was tied up with ashigarus.
I agree tho that the prefecture armour is a right pain in the ass - all to often I was not even getting one damage on them, but that was to do with some continuously bad dice rolling... It picked up by the end!

moosh wrote:

The tricky bit about RoKan i find is stacking the turtles Ki management and AoS, Aiko's blessings and the -1 Ki feat from the peasant in before attacking stuff - leaves a lot of opportunities for the opponent to get the attacks in first.

The key to Aikos blessings, as well as funneling ki to a mok, is to set them up on turn 1 if you want them. Currently the tokens last all game, Moreso, I'd not bother with them too much if you don't have gorilla, or better still, monkeys or Door gods. She makes a great Ki battery. (leech her ki, then exhaust her for 3 more, and steal that in the second leech of the turn.)

A max ki'd kenko should be able to throw two good hard hits at someone in a turn. With 4 fight dice, he can probably just spend his lot on buying strength onto his blows, and making sure he deals a good ammount of wounds. If someone else attacks him, all the better, as you have the next action to refill him to 6, and throw another hard hit for the turn.

I've had a heavily outnumbered opposing kenko use body of oak on himself instead of making a melee attack, and it worked fantastically, he could have used the Ki in the same action to kill 1 Kairai  instead he made himself nigh on indestructible keeping two Kairai and Araka stuck in melee for an entire turn, tough(2) makes pretty much any minor win in melee utterly pointless, and  with not outnumbered keeping him with a few dice Kenko did fine, its really a last ditch feat I think, but dont write it off by any means.