With the QM ruling on declares, these plans are effectively fully merged, so I'm declaring Baked Potatoes deprecated in favor of Mari's big Day
[ ] Action Plan: Baked Potatos
[X] Action Plan: Mari's Big Day
(Although if you can nudge in this scene, that would be great. I don't want to repeat the mistakes we made with the Goketsu Adoptees and welcome Tenten into uplift but never interact or bond with her.)
With the QM ruling on declares, these plans are effectively fully merged, so I'm declaring Baked Potatoes deprecated in favor of Mari's big Day
[ ] Action Plan: Baked Potatos
[X] Action Plan: Mari's Big Day
(Although if you can nudge in this scene, that would be great. I don't want to repeat the mistakes we made with the Goketsu Adoptees and welcome Tenten into uplift but never interact or bond with her.)
In general, I totally agree with you.
But for the specific use case of "one-shot the Akatsuki from outside the range of their sensory bullshit", longer range single-shot sounds like exactly what we need.
Are you designing for the general case rather than for the rift assault? Or have I misunderstood out tactical needs for ambushing the Akatsuki?
In general, I totally agree with you.
But for the specific use case of "one-shot the Akatsuki from outside the range of their sensory bullshit", longer range single-shot sounds like exactly what we need.
Are you designing for the general case rather than for the rift assault? Or have I misunderstood out tactical needs for ambushing the Akatsuki?
Aiming is a thing. These runes don't have scopes, and they don't even shoot straight.
Yes, you could build 30 runes and saturate the entire area, that might even be a preferential strategy... but just keep in mind that aiming is a thing. As we increase the distance, I doubt hitting the correct zone will remain a coinflip. Being able to adjust aim might be pretty valuable. If we're far enough away, we should even manage to get multiple shots off if the initial ambush doesn't kill everybody.
If the one and only strategy you want to rely on is "one-shot the Akatsuki from outside the range of their sensory bullshit" with no back-up plans, even then being able to fire a targeting shot then hauling the rune into position is worth considering. Minimize the effect of luck on the encounter, remove the random chance inherent to that first shot.
Believing it was done at the kitchen table scale by some precocious kid would be an even greater acceleration than knowing it could be done as an unreplicable megaproject by a deity.
(There is an unstated counterargument of 'but if that were true ninja would have approximately homogeneous skillsets like fighters do in the real world', and I concede that point, but I also don't know what to do with it.)
Sure, but the acceleration of knowing it's possible isn't magic. It happens because once you know something is possible, you can afford to devote way more resources to it than if it's an idea that might just never be achievable no matter how much you throw at it. And Akatsuki finding out we reinvented it might indeed lead them to devote more resources to it; but in this case, that would be futile, because they do not in fact have sufficient material to learn it, no matter how hard they try. Primordial Sealing isn't something you can work out by experiment, no matter how much effort you devote to it, because you'll kill yourself in a runic failure before you ever get close. You have to either have enough examples of how runes behave to work out sufficient theory to avoid that, or you have to have a good enough underlying understanding of chakra that you can predict its behaviour in runes from first principles. Akatsuki doesn't have the first, and I don't think anyone in the setting has the second.
Re. the second point - do fighters in the real world have homogeneous skillsets? You have specialists in militaries, so I don't think you can be referring to that; what do you mean by "fighters", and in what way do you think their skillsets are more homogenous than ninja ones? (Not disagreeing with the second thing, but I want to make sure I understand you correctly.)
Remember that we still have to put the Landmine functionality on, or else there will be an unknown delay between activation and firing which will probably prevent the attacks from being simultaneous (and also it won't work with MARS). We don't want to push the rune to unstagnation difficulty before then, or we might find ourselves unable to add the Landmine function. (Though I guess we could give up some of the explosive power in that version? I'm worried that might reduce the impact of veterancy, though.)
Aiming is a thing. These runes don't have scopes, and they don't even shoot straight.
Yes, you could build 30 runes and saturate the entire area, that might even be a preferential strategy... but just keep in mind that aiming is a thing. As we increase the distance, I doubt hitting the correct zone will remain a coinflip. Being able to adjust aim might be pretty valuable. If we're far enough away, we should even manage to get multiple shots off if the initial ambush doesn't kill everybody.
If the one and only strategy you want to rely on is "one-shot the Akatsuki from outside the range of their sensory bullshit" with no back-up plans, even then being able to fire a targeting shot then hauling the rune into position is worth considering. Minimize the effect of luck on the encounter, remove the random chance inherent to that first shot.
Given the one-round delay even in the landmine version, I don't think we get a chance to reaquire for a second shot.
Once the everything explodes around them, surviving Akatsuki are going to be jumping around like mad while they look for the source. I think we only get one shot anyways; when they're sitting still and don't know they're under attack yet.
Remember that we still have to put the Landmine functionality on, or else there will be an unknown delay between activation and firing which will probably prevent the attacks from being simultaneous (and also it won't work with MARS). We don't want to push the rune to unstagnation difficulty before then, or we might find ourselves unable to add the Landmine function. (Though I guess we could give up some of the explosive power in that version? I'm worried that might reduce the impact of veterancy, though.)
I don't think this is the case. IMO all Landmine functionality does is make it MARS compatible, which is completely unnecessary. Since we have SCs to do the aiming
Remember that we still have to put the Landmine functionality on, or else there will be an unknown delay between activation and firing which will probably prevent the attacks from being simultaneous (and also it won't work with MARS).
You misunderstand. EJ explicitly addressed it earlier- the REs not being designed to work with MARS is the only issue barring egregious length of MARS chains.
The current Remote Explosive Runes (REs) don't work with MARS but there's no reason you couldn't research such a variant. Assuming you do, MARS chains normally start and finish on the same initiative (although we might rule differently in the face of egregiously long chains), so ordinarily all of the REs would be firing at the same time mechanics-wise. As such, all of the explosions constitute a single attack. On the other hand, MARS chains do have a few milliseconds of lag in them from one segment to the next, so the REs aren't firing *literally* at the same time. In essence, the air explodes and then a few milliseconds later it explodes again, then again, etc. Not sure that makes sense by physics but sure whatever.
You misunderstand. EJ explicitly addressed it earlier- the REs not being designed to work with MARS is the only issue barring egregious length of MARS chains.
Could we get clarification on this before we commit to a long chain of research?
In the optimal scenario we can get barrage fire from RERs without adding Landmine (primed) functionality to the rune, is that something we can do? Or is a primed rune required for effective barrage fire from a Remote Explosive variant?
In this scenario, rather than using a MARS to activate the barrage, we'd signal our SCs (perhaps by popping a clone?) and have them all activate their RERs at the same time. Does the vanilla design of RER allow for barrage fire in those circumstances?
Given the one-round delay even in the landmine version, I don't think we get a chance to reaquire for a second shot.
Once the everything explodes around them, surviving Akatsuki are going to be jumping around like mad while they look for the source. I think we only get one shot anyways; when they're sitting still and don't know they're under attack yet.
I'm not going to get into the multiple shots debate. It could be useful in a number of scenarios that fall somewhere in-between 'total failure' and 'total success', but if you don't want to plan for those possibilities then whatever.
But could you address the aiming problem, at least? Since that was the core of my post.
You misunderstand. EJ explicitly addressed it earlier- the REs not being designed to work with MARS is the only issue barring egregious length of MARS chains.
The section you quoted does not explicitly take into account the firing delay. Lower down in the same post, there's a mention that the delay is being ignored, and in the original post, it's mentioned that the delay is still under QM discussion.
Hazō opens combat by firing 5 REs, which collectively hit at 135. That is a single attack that happens before combat. As soon as it is resolved, combat starts. Sasori moves, then Kei fires 5 more runes which collectively hit at 135 (assume no delay for Runic Explosives firing), then Hazō moves again.
Activating the rune is a Standard action. Upon activation, the air within 3 zones of the rune starts to faintly ripple and warp and there is a clearly audible hum that steadily builds in intensity. Shortly thereafter, the rune triggers, and the effects of an explosive rune occur within a zone in front of the crystal's point and distance-to-target away.
The rune can fire up to 3 times and then burns out. It deactivates after firing, meaning you need to reactivate it for each new shot. [The rate of fire is still under QM discussion]
This makes it seem likely to me that that quote is neglecting variance in RE firing delays. But @Sir Stompy has asked the QMs this question above, so we'll find out soon enough.
Given the one-round delay even in the landmine version, I don't think we get a chance to reaquire for a second shot.
Once the everything explodes around them, surviving Akatsuki are going to be jumping around like mad while they look for the source. I think we only get one shot anyways; when they're sitting still and don't know they're under attack yet.
I think we could easily get multiple shots. If they decided to attack us we can hit them on their approach. If they run away like cowards we can hit them while they run.
If they try to escape underground or make a barrier we can blow up their barrier or attack their tunnel
Overall I think having multiple shots is better than more range.
[X] Interlude: When Noburi and Hazou were taught to shave
[X] Interlude: Mari "Momma Bear" Goketsu reflects on her family
[X] Interlude: Kagome's First Shadow Clone
[X] Interlude: Noburi's First Shadow Clone
I'd suggest we deal with the 50% miss chance by making twice as many runes.
I'm still not sure how we're going to sneak close enough to set up a SCSA skytower to infuse *any* kind of combat runes, but having a 2mile range should make it easier than a 1mile one. Much easier to outrange exotic sensory BS as well.
I'd suggest we deal with the 50% miss chance by making twice as many runes.
I'm still not sure how we're going to sneak close enough to set up a SCSA skytower to infuse *any* kind of combat runes, but having a 2mile range should make it easier than a 1mile one. Much easier to outrange exotic sensory BS as well.
@redzonejoe 's point was that if we double the range, but the angular variance remains the same, we also double the variance of the target point. So this will very rapidly become unreasonable.
Yes, you could build 30 runes and saturate the entire area, that might even be a preferential strategy... but just keep in mind that aiming is a thing. As we increase the distance, I doubt hitting the correct zone will remain a coinflip. Being able to adjust aim might be pretty valuable. If we're far enough away, we should even manage to get multiple shots off if the initial ambush doesn't kill everybody.
The problem is, if we commit to levelling TH and hacking ES and then it turns out that even TH 40 isn't enough to do that, we're kind of screwed without multiple unstagnations along the way. TH 40 from TH 10 is 1530 XP; we don't have to actually pay for most of that because of notes, but even if we manage to unstagnate our upcoming sealing barrier in the near future we'd be running into two combat barriers and another sealing one. We might not be able to level BoC quickly afterwards, if it turned out not to work.
Correspondingly, BoC 1 -> 30 is only 232 XP. It's less XP-efficient than levelling TH and tweaking ES, but it's faster, doesn't plunge us into stagnancy, and most importantly is guaranteed to work. I don't love the idea of essentially wasting a couple of hundred XP, but I like the idea of getting stuck unable to make substrate even less.
Buy CR up to 33 for increasing odds of summoning Cannai
Buy BoC 20 (105 XP) for 105 XP.
Now we're only 127.5 XP away from BoC 30 if we need it. That's not that much.
It's another 20 slot in the build pyramid if we dont need to level it to 30.
Buy some combat stats up a tad (~300XP or so to get Athletics to base 41 and Taijutsu to base 43 for instance. You could just slam all of that into Athletics to get base 43 Athletics though).
Hazou is a squishy marshmallow of a chuunin and if he flubs a dodge roll at the wrong time its GG.
Eat TH notes
Sets off some stagnancy issues. We will probably have to deal with that. Thus the aforementioned combat stats buy in.
If we are confident in our TH approaches we can try to only level TH up to some level that sets off minimal stagnancy issues.
Options for more substrate at this point are now:
TH tweak ES to make substrate.
Perhaps in conjunction with some rune buffing earth ninjutsu in the AOE. Though we'd have to actually research those.
??? XP stunt for the jutsu tweak. We save (127.5- ???) XP.
TH tweak ES to purify imperfect substrate (created by BoC 20).
Less of a leap than "Make substrate wholesale".
??? XP stunt for the jutsu tweak. We save (127.5 - ???) XP.
TH a new jutsu to purify imperfect substrate (created by BoC 20).
How much this would need to be leveled is entirely a function of the jutsu block and how the research rolls go I think.
Buy BoC 30.
127.5 XP.
In general, I think the TH path to save at least 50-100 XP is probably workable depending on how we frame it, even if we're being conservative and buying BoC 20 just in case. Worst case scenario is we do this a month before we expect we need to and we are huffing and puffing through some stagnancy while powerleveling BoC via Shadow Clones with all of the groups spare chakra, or we need to do some cool research and fight some shit.
Here's an effortpost where I underscore some points with respect to "Use TH to make a thing that produces substrate to avoid leveling BoC to 30 or ES to 60 and saving a bit of XP". The commentary/analysis below is not definitive or anything, but I think it's convincing and it summarizes a few months of misc. Discord back and forth where some folks have vaguely tossed some ideas around. Written from my (obviously biased) perspective, of course.
The spoilers contain a wordy pile of analytical crap if you care about reading crap. If not then skip to the tl;dr at the end lol. I'm not sure if Xenforo ate a paragraph or two anywhere but if something seems suspiciously unclear feel free to poke me about it or w.e.
1) From a worldbuilding perspective, this checks out fine as far as I can tell.
Both Earthshaping and Bones of Creation are very complicated jutsu, actually. We know that it is easier to make jutsu that are highly tailored to a specific use case than it is to make masterwork ninjutsu that serve as swiss army knifes of their element. Earthshaping is very much the swiss army knife of utility-focused earth ninjutsu. It is a very complicated jutsu that does a very large amount of things. We have already leveled it to 50, which is about as much as we would ever need modulo buying a few levels at the tail end of things (if we raise PS sky high) or some tweaking or buffs to make it more time-efficient or chakra-efficient. Bones of Creation on the other hand, is still pretty complicated! It allows the user to manipulate and shape the targetted material physically still, for instance. Bones of Creation is not a very specific ninjutsu, it is a "Primordial Sealing calligraphy" ninjutsu and a substrate creation ninjutsu. That's still too complex, we only need the substrate part!
Even taking that into account, we do not actually need all of the functionality of the Bones of Creation ninjutsu's statblock. Its AOE is "1.75^(Effect) meters by 1.75^(Effect) meters by 1.75^(Effect) meters" as well. We can certainly trim that down if we need to, since the per chakra expenditure efficiency of the technique is not necessarily something we care about. As written, using Bones of Creation at Effect 2 (the effect needed is doable at BoC 10, to outline what portion of this technique's limitations are bound by XP investment) would be capable of converting a cube of rock 3m to a side into chakra conductive stone with 10 + 2*10 = 30 chakra points expended on the activity, if all we were doing was converting something to substrate (assuming it takes 10 minutes to fill a block of stone with your chakra). Changing the time required to 100 minutes still gives us 210 chakra points expended for a big block of substrate, as an upper bound. We have access to Noburi and at least a Mari worth of spare chakra whenever we need it, so we are far less strictly bound by (Volume of substrate produced per unit chakra).
If we cooked up a jutsu where literally all the jutsu did was convert rock to infusable substrate at level 10, did 1.5^(Effect) meters as the volume limit, and cost 3 chakra per minute to do so, then that is pretty much all we need. We could go find a soft but chakra dense target (like a small patrol of shitty EC ninja for instance), beat the shit out of the target, and use the morally dubious yet numerically massive chakra supply to whip up several tons of substrate and store it all for a rainy day. This solves our substrate problem pretty handily.
We do not need a masterwork technique, or a technique that doubles as a calligraphy skill, or a technique that has bells and whistles attached to it or is particularly chakra efficient.
We just need to convert rocks to shiny chakra rocks. That's it. That is almost as specific as it gets, however we go about it. Perhaps it is the case that making usable substrate (or purifying imperfect substrate, for instance) is simply difficult to do easily, all by its lonesome, but I haven't seen anything that would suggest that.
2) Tweaks are not the same as making a new ninjutsu.
I have seen my fellow players conflate statements with respect to the difficulty of making a new technique (see: Haruhisa talking about how hacking Earthshaping is difficult) and making a tweak.
One main difference is that one research result is something you can hand to another person, and the other is not. The former is constrained by worldbuilding limitations ("Why doesn't everyone just have the Big Fireball:But Overpowered! technique?"), whereas the latter is less constrained ("Because those people did not modify their existing Big Fireball technique to be much better while keying off of the base jutsu's level, like Sarutobi Hiruzen did.").
The other main difference is that when you make a Tweak, you are not creating a new skill that can be leveled, you are giving a ninjutsu a new statblock that you can choose whether or not to utilize. You buy a stunt to be able to utilize this new statblock in place of the old statblock, and this stunt is usually appropriately priced but not free. When you see statements about some guy you hired having trouble creating a ninjutsu you hired him for, I would argue that it is not at all guaranteed that this statement is indicative of that ninjutsu being really hard to Tweak. The guy obviously isn't trying to Tweak the thing, since he needs to share the results with you.
This neatly solves one mechanical fly in the soup in FtD, since being able to modify your existing techniques to improve them is one way you can increase the impact and versatility of those techniques without spending a lifetime of XP learning progressively-less-shitty versions of all the stuff you already leveled.
3) From a mechanical perspective, I think this is balanced just fine in a vacuum but YMMV.
I worry a bit the QMs might read too loosely into these attempts to get substrate without spending the full amount of XP on ES 60 or BoC 30 and maybe conclude that the gist of them is "Okay so the players want the substrate stuff for free now?" or something similar.
Basically, that's not really what we're going for there. It's mostly a "two birds with one stone" efficiency sort of thing, since we want to level TH high to get Minatosealing anyway. In this context, we just want to use our ability to research and/or tweak ninjutsu to research and/or tweak ninjutsu. This ability by design allows for XP to be spent in ways more aligned with a character's goals, because it gives that character a greater degree of control over what their ninjutsu are capable of, or modify existing ninjutsu in specific ways to broaden that jutsu's capabilities. Unlike the various types of sealing research, the end result of using that ability is never going to cost 0 XP. It might be more XP efficient for an individual to customize and tweak an existing ninjutsu of theirs for a given purpose than it would be to level another ninjutsu up wholesale, certainly, but thats just a perk of buying the Technique Hacking stunt and leveling the skill up (similar to how a perk of becoming a sealmaster is being able to sit down and more or less trivially scribe a bunch of ammunition). Likewise, if all that ninja needs is one specific effect, they might be able to accomplish that much cheaper by making a ninjutsu tailored to that purpose and leveling it to 10 or so, instead of getting at it tangentially by leveling some other jutsu a lot. Instead of using MEW or Earthshaping to sculpt things, assuming you don't have a lot of levels in either of those, you probably want to make a technique specifically for doing that instead of using MEW (a combat technique) or Earthshaping (a jutsu that does much more than sculpt things quickly and efficiently, and has bells and whistles you don't need).
But whether it's more efficient than our current options or not, it's definitely not going to be free, since even if its better than BoC in terms of XP efficiency, it could still cost a 50-100 XP stunt (if done as a tweak) or a 100XP or so if its "Level a jutsu to level 20", or a bit more than that if there's some combination of things that need to be bought with XP even.
Let's sketch out a few ways this could come about and what those avenues might actually cost in terms of XP, both in a vacuum (the general XP cost to pursue this, not factoring in pyramid nonsense or any secondary stuff) and at-present, just to outline some things. I'll compute what it costs in a vacuum for someone to do the same strategy if they have ES 50, or if theyre starting from scratch but have Earth Element and access to the two techniques.
1) Tweak ES to make a stunt jutsu that allows for substrate creation at level 50 through some means.
Ballpark estimate for the stunt: 50XP.
Ballpark estimate for TH required: lets say 30 levels.
Earthshaping 60: Costs 1830 XP if singlecost.
BoC 30: This would cost 232.5 XP if halfcost, and 465 XP if not.
At-present cost: 50 XP and 30 levels of TH notes XP (approximately 2 stagnancy barriers worth).
This saves us 182.5 XP relative to just buying 30 levels of Bones of Creation.
This saves us 505 XP relative to buying ES 50 -> ES 60.
In a vacuum cost for someone with ES 50: 1230 XP flat.
Chakra Adept stunt: 250 XP.
Technique Hacking 30: 930 XP.
Stunt cost: 50XP
In a vacuum cost for someone with Earth element, but no jutsu leveled: 2505 XP.
Earthshaping 50: 1275XP
Chakra Adept stunt: 250 XP
Technique Hacking 30: 930 XP
Stunt cost: 50XP
Summary: Conservatively, it costs 3x more XP in a vacuum for someone with ES 50 to be able to get chakra conductive substrate in this fashion compared to just leveling BoC to 30, and almost 10X more if they don't have Earthshaping at all. It costs 2.2x more XP compared to do this way compared to buying ES 60 if they have ES 50, and 1.3x as much XP compared to leveling ES to 60 if they have no levels in it at all. At present, it would cost us 50 XP for the stunt tweak and two stagnancy barriers worth of notes XP to do this. This would be a moderate XP discount for us compared to buying BoC 30.
2) Tweak ES to make a stunt jutsu that allows for substrate purification at level 50 through some means. Buy BoC 20 to make impure substrate and purify it with this tweak.
Ballpark estimate for the stunt: 50XP.
Ballpark estimate for TH required: lets say 30 levels.
BoC 30: This would cost 232.5 XP if halfcost.
BoC 20: This would cost 105 XP if halfcost.
At-present cost: 50 XP for the Tweak stunt, 105XP for BoC 20, and 30 levels of TH notes XP (approximately 2 stagnancy barriers worth).
This saves us 77.5 XP relative to just buying 30 levels of Bones of Creation.
In a vacuum cost for someone with ES 50: 1335 XP flat
Chakra Adept stunt: 250 XP
Technique Hacking 30: 930 XP
Stunt cost: 50XP
BoC 20: 105XP
In a vacuum cost for someone with Earth element, but no jutsu leveled: 2610 XP
Earthshaping 50: 1275 XP
Chakra Adept stunt: 250 XP
Technique Hacking 30: 930 XP
Stunt cost: 50 XP.
BoC 20: 105 XP.
Summary: Still costs more in a vacuum (about 3x more and 10x more still, depending on if they levelled ES 50 or not) to do it via some combination of TH and skill buying than it does just leveling up BoC to 30. Ditto for accomplishing this by leveling ES to 60 (still 2.4x more XP and 1.4x as much, approximately). At present this is a mild discount to us compared to having to level BoC all the way to 30.
3) Make a new jutsu specifically for the substrate creation part since both BoC and ES have some manipulation bits we don't need and tweaking them directly might not fly.
Ballpark estimate for how much it needs leveled: let's say between 10-20 levels depending on how the research rolls go.
That's between 27.5 XP and 105 XP for Hazou (since it's halfcost) or 55XP and 210 XP if not.
Ballpark estimate for TH required: lets say 30 levels.
BoC 30: This would cost 232.5 XP if halfcost, and 465 XP if not.
At-present cost: Between 27.5XP and 105 XP, and 30 levels of TH notes XP (approximately 2 stagnancy barriers worth).
This saves us between 205XP and 127.5XP relative to just buying 30 levels of Bones of Creation.
In a vacuum cost: Between 1235XP and 1390 XP to do it this way.
Chakra Adept stunt: 250 XP.
Technique Hacking 30: 930 XP.
Jutsu cost: Between 55XP and 210 XP max.
Summary: For us this is cheaper than the second option in terms of at-present XP spent. Comparable in a vacuum.
4)- 6) Research some Earth Ninjutsu Buff Rune specifically to assist the user in this task, staple that onto Steps 1) to 3) as a requirement to whatever Jutsu spec we're using. Add the titanic amount of XP that this would require to the calculus, etc etc you see where that ones going.
The main takeaway is that it is actually much more XP expensive to get access to chakra conductive stone substrate in this way, compared to either directly leveling either Earthshaping or Bones of Creation. It's just more build efficient (in terms of XP and in pyramid space) if you do it via Technique Hacking, if you have strong reasons to pick up and level Technique Hacking. We have strong reasons to pick it up (Minatosealing) and leveling it plays to our strengths since we already haggled for the TH notes lootbox by trading with Orochimaru. So we're not upsetting the FtD mechanical balance all that much by doing this, if you're using "XP investment required until you get access to shiny rocks" as a metric. You could argue that this analysis does some amount of double dipping insofar as TH goes, but I would argue that this specific stat is meant to be favorable to that very thing in the first place, so that seems to square just fine. This would hold even if it required TH 40 or so to do this, but I note that this would pass the inflection point before which we'd actually be able to get substrate this way with cheaper "at-present" costs, so it probably would not actually be worth it for us to do at that point.
If the question of what is and isn't mechanically balanced is one where the context matters however, then that might not hold. If the notion of balance is one that mostly concerns itself with the cast of player characters At Present and how easy it is for them to do something In The Near Future (i.e. its less about overall capabilities than it is keeping rate of change of capabilities tightly bounded), then that's another story I think, and that wouldn't be covered by analyzing things in a vacuum so this section wouldn't apply.
Conclusion/TLDR:
Whether or not a more XP efficient route here is doable or more XP efficient at all is going to ultimately boil down to whether or not the Doylist reasoning on the mechanical side of things is going to match up with what's been said in setting a la "It is easier to accomplish results by making very specific jutsu just for that result", at least insofar as both XP investment into that skill is concerned and whether or not its possible to do some variant of that with at most 30 levels or so of Technique Hacking. I'm not ultra convinced that things will come down one way or another, but I think its worth a shot unless we truly only have a month or two left on the Apocalypse Clock. We'd need enough time to do the TH research and clear stagnations that result from eating the TH notes, basically, plus any lead time at the start to generate XP to sink into combat stats if we need them.
In terms of linear, in-world time spent, I think just buying BoC 30 is much quicker, mostly because eating the TH notes is going to trigger stagnation barriers after which our XP gain will slow to a crawl (so if the research is a dud...). It's going to cost XP though, and we will need XP to put into our combat stats when we eventually hit those stagnation barriers, or we are probably going to be caught up in the stagnation death spiral.
In terms of saving some XP and assuming we can adequately deal with some stagnation barriers that come up, I think buying BoC up to 20 and eating the notes pile and trying to make something that solves the jump from imperfect substrate to usable substrate works fine for us. As a bonus this would let us convert all the shitty substrate scraps Oro gave us to usable ones (maybe that is a lot, who knows) if we succeed.
In terms of being maximally XP efficient, we're absolutely screwed if we need to use any large amount of substrate anytime soon. Short of getting Orochimaru to give us a pile of good substrate in exchange for a research notes on a rune or two, I think we're straight up fucked on the maximizing XP efficiency front if we need a substrate source within the next 2-3 months. That might be viable TBH, but I wouldn't want to give him anything really good. Maybe Runic Air Domes or the Chakra Capacitor Rune? That's something I'd be willing to consider since we already broke the seal on Force Domes, and I'm not sure the Chakra Capacitor Rune is something that Oro would actually have a use for outside of some academic fluff stuff (he can kidnap a Wakahisa if he really needs chakra, even if we all die in a ditch before coming back to Leaf).
Regardless, if we weren't on the clock I think we'd be able to cook up something with what we have available (there has got to be some step in the process here we can hit with a wrench to make more XP efficient). The issue at the moment is mostly how much time IC that will take, not really how much XP it'll take, and what the unstag situation looks like. Tough choice, especially since we aren't flush with level appropriate unstagnation opportunities that would be guaranteed to take a small amount of time, which is the sort of thing a bunch of players would need to convince them that we wouldn't just be burning a month on that unstagnation mini-adventure while doing a bunch of dangerous combat stuff, instead of researching more stuff.
We'll see what Mari says when she gets back from the info broker, I guess? If Leaf got Deidara'd 20 chapters ago then its all moot lmao
Another reason to buy BoC 20: it lets us get Earth Apprentice. Which, since our Earthshaping is at level 50, gives us a +10 bonus to all other earth jutsu, so our effective BoC is 30. Earth Apprentice explicitly doesn't affect AB, but interestingly, the description for Bones of Creation suggests that we only need level 30, not AB 4:
Above level 30, the technique can produce chakra-conductive stone suitable for runic infusion.
[\QUOTE]
So uh... if I'm not mistaken, we can save about 100XP this way. More, if you consider that we would have wanted to get Earth Apprentice eventually anyways.
Another reason to buy BoC 20: it lets us get Earth Apprentice. Which, since our Earthshaping is at level 50, gives us a +10 bonus to all other earth jutsu, so our effective BoC is 30. Earth Apprentice explicitly doesn't affect AB, but interestingly, the description for Bones of Creation suggests that we only need level 30, not AB 4:
I interpret this to mean that we need BoC at level 30 as a base to do this at all, since we've asked about this before and got a "Nah you're not getting off that easy" style response about it IIRC.
Another reason to buy BoC 20: it lets us get Earth Apprentice. Which, since our Earthshaping is at level 50, gives us a +10 bonus to all other earth jutsu, so our effective BoC is 30. Earth Apprentice explicitly doesn't affect AB, but interestingly, the description for Bones of Creation suggests that we only need level 30, not AB 4:
I agree with @MMKII that Earth Apprentice is unlikely to let us cheat this. I'd also point out that it only saves us XP if we never level a single other Earth technique to level 20, and there are quite a few for which we might want to do that. Bleeding River Impalement, Reaching Arms of the Tsuchigumo or Stone Storm Barrier all seem like better long-term choices than Bones of Creation; in the long run, if it does turn out to be doable to Tweak ES into making substrate, the only thing we gain by levelling BoC is pyramid support.
Although, that said, levelling BoC to 20 would let us create scrolls of the technique. Which would be a useful thing to be able to do. So maybe it is worth doing?
I like this idea. BoC 20 makes the substrate, and if we rip out literally everything (like the insane range), and stack on Disadvantages (Alertness debuff, casting speed, etc), then it should be possible.
I really think Hazou's Runecrafting 60+ and his familiarity with Valid Substrate will come in handy here. He's been doing basically nothing but using ES (a highly detailed, extremely sensitive sensory ninjutsu that allows us to pull iron out of granite) on many hundreds of units of substrate for many months now, straight.
As familiar as Hazou-the-character should be with what Valid Substrate looks like (familiarity) and what makes Valid Substrate Valid (PS 60+), he should be able to make a Tweak (which are more powerful than making full ninjutsu) to BoC that allows for making Substrate.
I agree with @MMKII that Earth Apprentice is unlikely to let us cheat this. I'd also point out that it only saves us XP if we never level a single other Earth technique to level 20
there are quite a few for which we might want to do that. Bleeding River Impalement, Reaching Arms of the Tsuchigumo or Stone Storm Barrier all seem like better long-term choices
Stone Storm Barrier is extremely unhelpful. it doesn't benifit from any of our buffs, so it's dramatically underpowered compared to our Tai/Ath. AKA "It will only work on people we could handily beat up anyway".
Although, that said, levelling BoC to 20 would let us create a scroll of the technique. Which would be a useful thing to be able to do. So maybe it is worth doing?
I was thinking more in terms of "we could get other Earth-Element ninja to learn it and then we wouldn't have to spend our own time making substrate". But I suppose you're right, it would be a leak risk.
(I'm not on board with the whole "no proliferation of runecrafting" thing, by the way. Partly because things like the Great Seal demonstrate that sometimes you need runecrafting to fix a problem, and partly because Oro knows it anyway and I really don't want Oro to be left as the only person with PS if we die. So in particular, in the long run I want Kagome to learn Earth Element and for us to teach him PS. But as long as we're alive, I agree that I'm cool with keeping runecrafting highly restricted.)
