Every Single Samurai in Dungeons and Dragons

As part of my crawl through the history of Dragon Magazine, something I have noticed is that from an early age the Gaijin Gamer has always been particularly fascinated by the martial culture of Glorious Nippon. I can understand this: Samurai movies are fucking awesome. However, that often bumps up against the fact that you have Very White game designers making some...choice decisions. Even in the era of sensitivity readers, it can be interesting to look and see what exactly the fantasy of being a Samurai actually is, as opposed to a knight or a barbarian or even the actual people who held the title. 

For most of their history, samurai served largely as mounted archers, it's just that that's a lot harder to like...film. Plus swordfights are cool.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything (2017)

"The Samurai is a fighter who draws on an implacable fighting spirit to overcome enemies. A samurai’s resolve is nearly unbreakable, and the enemies in a samurai’s path have two choices: yield or die fighting."

The Samurai in 5th Edition is a fighter subclass centered around two things: the occasional bonus to the courtly arts, and being simply too Intense and Disciplined to die. Two of their signature abilities (Fighting Spirit and Tireless Spirit) both have the word Spirit in them for Christ's sake. Their capstone ability, Level 18's Strength Before Death, is about continuing to fight for an extra round even when you're at zero hit points...sorta like Half-Orcs can do at level 1. 

This is a level after the Wizard has gotten 9th-Level spells.

Don't play this subclass. It's not good.

All told, it's mostly remarkable for being about as boring as every other 5E Fighter subclass, but pulling from the fantasies of samurai movies in a way that's less racist than some other stuff we'll get to down the line.

via Xanathar's, their depiction of the Samurai. That sword feels a bit too big for that scabbard.

...I should call her.

Dragon Magazine #404 (October 2011)

4th Edition didn't have a classical Samurai "Class," but what it did have was a Samurai Theme (an optional extra set of powers bolted onto a character) in Dragon Magazine #404! 

It begins the trend of each description of a Samurai starting with some purple prose about honor and stuff. In the case of the 4th Edition Samurai, foe example, "...true followers of bushido emphasize traits such as benevolence and politeness, as well as courage". It goes on for paragraphs, across mutiple pages of the magazine, building up this myth of the samurai as a myrmidon motivated by honor and their master's orders. 

As for the Theme itself? It once again divvies things up between Swordsmanship (you get to make an Iajitsu Strike at First Level), better social stuff, and (in the optional features) literally an ability called Honorable Resolve. It's fairly...stock. The abilities seem cool once the steel starts swinging though (God I love 4th Edition).

This is also our first mention (though indirect) of Seppuku, which will be a running theme as we go further back.

Oriental Adventures (2001)

The last of these Samurai to be published after I was born, the 3.X Samurai came to be in Oriental Adventures, 2001 Edition. Like most things to come out of the 3.X era, it's really boring. It's basically just a Fighter except your bonus feats are determined by what Legend of the Five Rings Clan your character is a part of, and you have to be Lawful (and can thus fall). 

The only really interesting thing is that your character starts with an ancestral katan and wakizashi and can, through the magic of spending lots of money and levelling up, the weapons can gain magic bonuses. I'm a sucker for weapons that level up when you do-I'm the kind of person Legendary Blades was made for, and it does a nice job avoiding the Christmas Tree effect. I do think it's funny you have to spend a day in prayer per 1,000 GP you spend, meaning a max-level samurai will have spent over six months of their life on upgrading their weapons.

This one also mentions seppuku, if you were curious.

I guess L5R was big at the time? 

The Complete Fighter's Handbook (1989)

The Complete Fighter's Handbook is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a whole bunch of options for the Fighter class. It's notable for inventing the concept of "Kits" and thus ruining Dungeons and Dragons forever*, but wedged in between "Pirate/Outlaw" and "Savage" is the Samurai Kit. Based on "the Medieval Japanese Civilization," this entry goes through all the standard stuff about honor and obeying your lord, mandated lawfulness, etc. etc. 

Fascinatingly, the role of the Samurai class is to "provide a touch of the exotic" in games set outside the East. However, I'm going to give TSR some credit here, because not only is the Samurai's mastery of the bow shouted out, it is in fact mandatory (it gets three proficiency slots spent on it to the two katanas get). 

This Samurai gets the unique ability to do a Kiai and set their strength to maximum for one round, one per level per day. It's...kinda cute? I like the idea of psyching your opponents out like that.

Also interesting is the way it approaches the honor and Lord stuff. While seppuku is of course mentioned, it goes beyond that; your Lord is gonna be kind of a pain in the ass, asking you to do things that interfere with your own personal goals. A Ronin doesn't have to worry about this...but gets half XP. It's an interesting balance mechanism, and attempts to simulate the inconveniences of duty and honor are part of what makes the current edition of L5R a little more compelling.

Oriental Adventures (1985) 

That's right baby it's Gary Gygax time. I've got a lot of thoughts on the original Oriental Adventures and how it's attempts to do kind of interesting things mechanically get caught under a middenpile of racism, but right now we're gonna focus on the Samurai class. Based on the Fighter chassis from AD&D, this is where a lot of stuff from the later editions comes from: the Kiai and ronin systems get used in 2nd Edition, their ability to cause fear in 4th Edition, along with the extra bonuses of more damage, immunity to fear, and the requisite "Around 7th Level you get a base." 

Perhaps most fascinatingly, a high-level Samurai has a 20% chance that one of their followers is a ninja sent to spy on them, but only one. Two ninjas can't spy on you at a time. I guess they've got a really good union or something.

I couldn't find a mention of seppuku in this one's class description, though! It's probably somewhere else in the book, but TSR layout of this era is a nightmare to read and I'm not doing that for a blogpost yet. 

So that's it. We've gone through every officially published version of the Samurai, and what have we learned? Mostly that the problem of having white nerds who've only seen samurai movies be put in charge of designing this stuff leads to the same thing over decades and decades. It's a snake eating its own ass-regardless of the mechanics of individual editions (and it is interesting seeing it get translated), they all try to evoke the same orientalist fantasy. Each of them is recognizably a "Samurai" in their own way, and while that's neat, it's also kinda...boring.

So how about we get a little nuts?

Dragon #49 (May 1981)

I'm going to tell this story the way it happened to me. I was perusing the letters section of Dragon Magazine #51 (the letters section is always great because it's full of the dumbest people alive), and I saw not one but two letters pissed about a "Samurai" class from Dragon #49. Joseph Ravitts, of Rockford, Illinois, talks about a samurai class that...doesn't wear armor? And uses nunchuks? 

At this point I furrow my brow-what the fuck is this guy talking about? 

Then comes Thomas Stansfield, of Eugene, Oregon. He talks about things like level titles, getting the sizes of weapons wrong, and other things we'll touch on in a bit. The part I want to highlight here is that Mr. Stansfield is racist against halflings and gnomes, believing they lack the fighting spirit to be a true Samurai. 

I'm not kidding, he actually says this.

So at this point I have to know. What is The Samurai? And why is it so terrible?

The Samurai: An Honorable NPC

Peep that wonton font.

Slight Note: The reason it says An Honorable NPC is that, for whatever reason, all classes published in Dragon Magazine in its early years were explicitly For NPCs Only, because Lord knows a poor DM couldn't handle it if someone brought in a class he had never heard of. This is gonna lead to some weirdness because of its player-facing abilities, but we just have to live with it.

The Samurai presented here was made by Anthony Salva, a practitioner of the Korean martial art of Hapkido, which he attempts to present as faithfully as he can. I know even less about Hapkido than I do about having meaningful relationships, so I can't really comment on that part of things, but you might already notice there's a bit of a mismatch there.

As promised, the Samurai can't wear any armor because it would interfere with their movements (though they do get a scaling AC bonus to compensate), and then we get to the class titles! Now, class titles have a history in D&D, with the idea being as you got more badass, you got better prefixes, just like any multiplayer game today. The ones for this version of the Samurai are...scattershot.

Play along at home! How many problems can you spot?

The Samurai is also noteworthy because, aside from 1st Level, it gets a new toy to play with pretty much every level. Highlights include:

• Jump Front Kick!
• Judo Throw! 
• Using Nunchuks (and also Katana and Wakizashi)!
• Back Roundhouse Kick!
• The ability to cast Illusionist spells.
• The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique from Kill Bill

Those are all real, and they're glorious. 

We get one paragraph into the discussion of the Samurai code before we get our mention of Seppuku, in a bit more explicit detail this time than most. Finally, and most bizarrely, must be some form of Neutral. (Neutral Good, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, etc.) Each of these alignments is represented by their own Shogun-and only one Shogun, don't you forget it-and when an erstwhile Samurai hits 12th level, the Samurai and his shogun must duel to the death, or else one of them must do a seppuku. The fact that this is a do-or-die situation based on (supposedly) an NPC gaining experience points is...extremely funny to me. 

And finally, lest we forget, "A Samurai is able to dive and roll over any obstruction which is not taller than three-fourths of his height or longer than 2½ times his height."

So...what the fuck? What is this, and how did it get here? They had Samurai movies in the 80s, so how did this get so far from anything resembling reality?

Let me tell you: racism. 

See, Editor-In-Chief Kim Mohan (of "Women should have a strength penalty but have it compensated in other ways" fame) responded, first saying that they didn't expect everyone to agree with their interpretation, and that this class is based on Salva's familiarity with Hapkido (which, I will say again, is Korean). Finally, he out and says it:

"The word was used as a generic term to describe an oriental warrior-type character which, if Mr. Stansfield’s facts are correct and his reasoning sound, is not necessarily a samurai-type figure."

So yeah. The folks at Dragon Magazine all pretty much went "Yeah, Samurai is a good generic term for an Asian fighter." That was the level of thought that was put into it. And so we got...this. 

What Have We Learned?

The first one of these I read was the one from Dragon #49, and I was initially going to write about just that, because "Look at these freaks lmao" does numbers. But going through the history of the Samurai as presented in D&D, what I'm surprised by is how...little has changed? The fantasy of the purely dedicated warrior willing to die for their lord, purely dedicated to mastery of the blade. That describes pretty much all of these different Samurai, and it's a fantasy that, much like the fantasy of the cowboy that a lot of D&D offers, is rooted in a lot of very real and thorny issues that are smoothed over in the name of alpha maleness or killing goblins or whatever.

The samurai were bad people, an oppressive landlord class just like any other, and their modern mythologization should be treated with a caution that Western media often fails to do. Making things worse, just like how Crusader imagery has been picked up by the fascists over here, Bushido has been picked up over in Japan. 

Pretty much all of these depictions are irresponsible in their own way, playing into nationalist tropes that have caused very real harm, because it's cool to replicate what the guy from the movie can do. And that's part of a broader culture that has taken these tropes and ingrained them into the manosphere, with guided meditations around being an "Alpha Male" that are samurai themed, because they're picking up on those messages too. 

Thumbnail stolen from YouTube. Yes, it is eight hours. I skipped around a bit and didn't find much in the way of specific Samurai Stuff, but I do feel more like an alpha male. 

I'm not saying everyone who plays L5R is a Japanese ultranationalist or anything, but much like the inherent colonialisms of D&D, it's something that should be handled with a bit more care. Because at the end of the day, all a samurai is is a Fighter in a fancy hat and the ability to enact state-sanctioned violence.