Quote Originally Posted by BWR View Post
You mean like they can in any other RPG setting? Like how any player at my table can somehow change what WotCF decides to do in FR or Greyhawk. Fun fact, no PCs can ever canonincally change an RPG setting, and L5R with it's player win storylines is the closest thing you can get now. Around the table you can do whatever the **** you want. Honestly, what are you trying to say here?
This is irrelevant. Nobody is talking about changing the setting at the level of affecting what gets published - what's being talked about is how the setting is initially set up, how the characters are placed in that initial setting, and what the implications of that are for the characters changing the setting in the context of a home game. Rokugan has a lot of deeply entrenched institutions, several of which are essentially organizations that actively hunt down anyone who threatens to change them. Meanwhile the PCs in L5R are relatively low ranking (though several steps up from the bottom of the social strata), and aren't the people running these deeply entrenched institutions who could actually effect change. Personally, I like that about Rokugan - it fits with the other themes of the game well - but it's absolutely there.

As examples of settings that go in a different direction, I'll point towards REIGN and Warbirds. REIGN has a fairly detailed default setting, but it doesn't have the same level of deeply entrenched institutions. There's an old empire, but they're a shadow of their former selves and several territories have broken off completely already. Most of the other significant nations are younger up and comers, the borders are all sorts of unstable, and the status quo is just generally precarious. The PCs are then assumed to be people with an institutional backing, and the rules explicitly have rules for large scale conflicts between organizations that can be affected by individual heroic action, letting the PC's organization punch above its weight. The cultures are also set in conflict, where new institutions pose credible threats to old ones, and the status quo is an uneasy equilibrium easily tipped, with large reserves of people ready to get behind major social changes if a strong enough leader starts pushing them. Warbirds takes a different tack, where the entire setting is effectively really new and there just hasn't been enough time for it to ossify. It's set in the Carribean, after the Carribean islands were transported by a storm to the eye of a gas giant in the 1800's, becoming floating islands and not land masses above the ocean. You've got the colonial powers entirely stripped away, contact between the islands cut, a drastic change in climate for most of the islands, and the island of Cuba broken in two, and this is less than a hundred years before the setting present. People are adapting to a new and alien world, cultures are drifting apart, and technology continues to improve, pushed in a different direction by the sudden change in circumstance. Then the islands reconnect, and that's a whole new upheaval, even closer to the setting present. The PCs meanwhile are members of a mercenary guild of ace pilots, who also have the benefit of planes a solid decade ahead of everyone else. They're being brought into active conflicts, and it is downright expected that things will change in the setting. On top of that is the Go Gonzo chapter, which has rules for PCs doing mad science and changing the world that way.

I also like both of these settings a great deal, and as with Rokugan the extent to which the settings are resistant to change fits the themes of the setting, with the fit in this case induced by how incredibly unstable and precarious everything is.