Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Briefvoice said:

I still think a superhero system would be perfect for Naruto. I'd run it as Mutants and Masterminds, tuned for higher lethality options.

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MadScientist said:

I recommend Mutants and Masterminds, using the optional "Power Level Unlimited" rules.

M&M is basically the most versatile system I'm aware of. It has lots of ways that you can build things, and has a distinction between crunch and fluff built into the rules (a "Damage 5, ranged, penetrating." effect could represent a plasma bolt, a magical necromantic energy blast, or laser eye-beams, and depending on what it represents, it can counter different things).

Power Levels limit how good a character can be at offense or defence. Your attack check (roll to hit) plus your effect rank (DC to wound) cannot be higher than your PL*2, your skills cannot be higher than your PL+10, your Toughness plus either active defence cannot be higher than your PL*2, and your Fortitude plus Will cannot be higher than your PL*2. This means that if you're very strong, then you cannot also be very accurate, and if you've got some kind of armour then you cannot also be good at dodging. The PLU optional rules do away with that.

I have a number of grievances with the system, all of which basically boil down to "That isn't very simulationist.". M&M doesn't try to represent how things would actually work, it has several things thrown in because "That's how things happen in comic books.", (this leads to situations where Coffee Man, a super hero who carries a thermos of coffee, cannot drink it himself because you cannot use a "Healing, energizing." effect on yourself, and if he offers his coffee to someone else he becomes as tired as they were before they drank it because when you use such an effect on someone else you take on all their fatigue ranks) but you could always run house rules to override things like that.

Overall, I think M&M is a very good system, and I'd be happy to try converting some stuff if you asked.

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Briefvoice said:

Propose System: Mutants and Masterminds

Why is it a good choice:

Mutants and Masterminds is a very simple system when it comes to dice rolling, using a D20 roll to resolve everything. However it's built as a superhero system meaning it's perfect for building esoteric ninja powers and abilities. It also includes many elements from your existing system, including an emphasis on degree of success on determining how effective an action is. There is a large and active community which has almost certainly already converted Naruto characters into the system and has many other antagonists you can easily steal. Sealing can be simulated using gadgets, gears, and magical rituals.

Overall, I really think the game does a lot of what you want.

Link to zero-cost rules sources:

d20HeroSRD

This is a System Reference Document that gives all the game roles.

In addition, here is an active forum where dedicated fans have already made many characters.

Roll Call

EDIT: I also recommend reading the Design Diaries in this thread to help understand the system.
Jab's Builds!!

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Cariyaga said:

So, here are my main concerns with transitioning to a new system:

1. Breadth of power levels
2. Bell curve of dice rolls
3. Simulationism vs. Narrativism

Each of these crosses over to some extent with the others.

1: Many systems have very constrained power levels. D&D (et al) is generally contstrained from 1 to 20. World of Darkness has dice rolls that are constrained fairly stringently between 7 and 15 for a competent character. GURPS has no real benefit to going above skill level 17 without excesses like targetting specific body parts (which adds to QM load), because you roll 3d6 to meet your skill level, and 18 is autofail (which is also bad). By this metric these systems have difficulty representing large differences in skill level.

2: While the large number of dice rolled and formula have their own problems, they do serve to a) average out dice rolls over high skill levels, and the formula b)Make the numbers actually usable. On the other hand, systems with simple single-die (d20, d6, etc.) resolution mechanics, in combination with stuff like autofails and autosuccesses which I dislike greatly, particularly in simulationist storytelling, are mechanics designed to make large complications and grand successes a relatively-frequent affair. Which is fine for roleplaying, but less so here. Systems like White Wolf's World of Darkness, and to a lesser extent Shadowrun have the issue of granularity in results: They measure the number of dice thrown that exceed a given value. This means that any results below that value are disregarded, so it's relatively-easy to roll low on a bunch of dice and strike out.

3: This is one of the bigger problems I see. I doubt we will find a game system designed to be simulationist, so everything within the systems will be tinged with narrativist conventions, from the dice rolling mechanics themselves, to critical failures and successes, to the way abilities are designed. I'm not sure how this disconnect can be resolved.

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Sampatrick said:

I think that y'all need to remember that one of the biggest reasons why you want to switch systems is because of complexity of combat and for the most part you're not really going to make it any easier by changing systems. You're still going to have to do all the emulation that you have to do under the current system. You're still going to have to spend time creating a pile of characters. The Quest format just isn't great at handling combat in general and is especially poor at handling larger combats; I don't really think there's much you can do to deal with that without turning combat encounters into extremely long and very involved events. That being said, I do see a lot of benefits for switching over to something like Mutants & Masterminds. It provides you with some good tools to simplify the construction of new opponents, it's pretty good at handling scaling, and it's not particularly complex. I would like to briefly point out that I don't think that the argument that M&M is too narrativist really holds water - if you strip out all the fluff, there's not really any part that sticks out as not being good at simulated a world.

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eaglejarl said:

I've always been a fan of large numbers of dice, both because they make things more predictable and allow for a wider power spread, but also because it's fun.

As to simulationism vs narrativism, I contend that is mostly down to the GM. If we're being honest, MfD is terrible for simulationism -- as one simple example, there's no way to do anything you haven't specifically trained in. In most systems you can call back to stats, but not here. There's also no way to answer questions like "can Hazō jump from here to the tower?", so it becomes pure narrativity.

The quest is simulationist because we make it simulationist, not because the mechanics necessarily make that easy.

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huhYeahGoodPoint said:

Could we just steal the invention system then? Or am I misunderstanding something fairly fundamental about MM?

It seems to me the largest problems are jutsu/seal development; having a good way to generate that would fix a lot of problems.

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MadScientist said:

Yeah, would be (Senses: chakra awareness, radius. Removable.) @ 2PP. Not too bad. Well within even Hazou's spare PP per PL.



The invention system is basically "build a power using the M&M effects, and then pass a check with a DC determined by how much those effects cost". So unless some other system has as versatile a power-building system, you couldn't really translate it that well.

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Cariyaga said:

I would certainly be down for developing a standardized measure by which techniques and seals are developed, but the invention system in M&M is linked to the power level system.
e:

Yeah, I still don't really like the idea of Seals and stuff as Devices. I mean, they are by their nature consumable. That screams "invention" to me, and they aren't subject to PP limit anyway, as far as I'm aware.

In addition, part of our previous system was that developing new stuff like that explicitly didn't cost XP to do. It's part of what makes sealmasters so potent as a ninja-archetype.

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Cariyaga said:

See, my problem with these things is paying anything other than the points for Sealing as a whole. To have to do so really isn't cool to me.

e: Specifically because learning sealing as a whole is very difficult and a massive investment of its own: For it to be necessary to also invest into every seal you use and for every person who uses said seals to have to do the same...

e2: That said, I am slowly warming up to the idea of GURPS, I just loathe the idea of critfails and critsuccesses as a whole

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Roadie said:

Note that if you use the method where you pay for every seal (whether GURPS or M&M or most other point-buy games), you do not pay for separate costs to create them. At most you might separately invest in a skill for sealmaster lore, but the effort to create seals is essentially thematic fluff.

With GURPS there's also an alternate method:

- Stat up each seal using the method from my last post.
- Convert the seal point values into cash costs using the ratio from Signature Gear (1 point = 50% of campaign starting wealth).
- Buy Sealcrafter: Quick Gadgeteer (Accessibility, seals only, -30%; -Chakra, -5%) [33].
- Buy ranks in Thaumatology (possibly renamed to "Sealmastery"), as well as Artist (Calligraphy).
- You can now create seals using the rules for Quick Gadgeteering, requiring skill rolls and time rather than separate points investments. You can also create seals with Quick Gadgeteering using the stats for printed equipment, as long as they would reasonably make sense as seals. However, none have the plot protection that come with buying the powers directly (which guarantees you can always replenish them during downtime even in worst-case scenarios).


Well, for GURPS, keep in mind that critical success/failure is more complicated than most game systems:

• A roll of 3 or 4 (about 1.9% of all results) is always a critical success.
• A roll of 5 (about 2.8% of all results) is a critical success if your effective skill is 15+.
• A roll of 6 (about 4.6% of all results) is a critical success if your effective skill is 16+.

• A roll of 18 (about 0.5% of all results) is always a critical failure.
• A roll of 17 (about 1.4% of all results) is always at least a normal failure, and is a critical failure if your effective skill is 15 or less.
• Any roll of 10 greater than your effective skill is a critical failure: 16 on a skill of 6, 15 on a skill of 5, and so on.

The effective rating stuff is important because it interacts with stuff like using Feint or Deceptive Attack, as well as with any general penalties applied to you (environmental effects, etc). For example, if you've got godlike combat skill or you're facing somebody who's a total chump, you can Deceptive Attack for a whole bunch to force an opponent's active defenses into immediate critical failure territory.

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Cariyaga said:

This is definitely not appropriate for MfD, though: There's supposed to be a significant amount of risk in the process of creating and learning sealcraft.

This looks a little more reasonable. I'm not entirely sure about the whole process of converting to moneys, but... maybe? I dunno, I'm not super familiar with GURPS.

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Briefvoice said:

Dresden Files is admittedly a pretty good form of FATE for handling super-powers. (I presume Sealing would be a hacked form of Thaumaturgy.)

So I presume we would give Hazou the Trouble Aspect, "Open Mouth Insert Foot" (or something similar) and watch the fate points roll in. Keiko would be something related to decision paralysis from the Frozen Skein and Noburi something about having to prove himself.

Genjutu takes its proper place of power if it can be used to inflict the ever-elusive Mental Damage as well as create mental maneuvers. Probably balanced by the face that you'll never get a Weapon bonus on it.

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Briefvoice said:

I played a couple of long Dresden Files campaign, so I'm pretty well-versed in the system.



@eaglejarl something you really need to understand about this stunt and use of weapons in general. When it says it adds "+2", that is only added if you "hit", which means equaling or exceeding your opponent's roll. So for instance, let's say you roll 4 to attack and your opponent rolls 4 to defend. Technically that's a "hit"... you succeeded, but because the damage in stress equals attack roll - defense roll, you did 0 damage. Ah, but what if you were using a Weapon 2 (let's say a tanto). Now you do 4 - 4 +2 or 2 stress worth of damage. However, weapon damage only applies if you hit. If you roll a 3 on the attack and your opponent rolls a 4, you do no damage even if you were using a Weapon 2. Hands of Death should really work that way. Your fists count as a Weapon 2, but do not add to the dice roll/

Now there are stunts that have give a straight up +1 or +2 to a roll, but those are always situation-limited. Like, the example in the book of +1 to Fists when counter-attacking, or +1 to Fists when making an assessment or declaration roll.

Now I would actually do Roki as a straight up skill substitution stunt.

Roki (Stunt)
You are trained in a martial art based around Deception. You may use your Deception skill instead of your Fists skill when attacking, applying bonuses from both Deception and Fists. However your opponent may defend with Fists, Athletics, or Empathy.

Iron Nerve (Bloodline Power, ??? Refresh)
Description: You can perfectly reproduce any motion on which you succeeded at once.
Skills Effected: Skills involving motion and fine motor control

Effects (at level 1):
Works Every Time: Rather than roll fudge dice, you may choose to take a 0 before adding your skill bonus for any task involving physical motion (including physical attacks) on which you have succeeded at least once. The Iron Nerve guarantees consistent performance, but its reliability prevents last second adjustments that might lead to wild success.

I will survive!: Once per scene, reroll one failed physical defensive roll that would require Severe consequence or worse to avoid being taken out or that would auto-result in being taken out. On the reroll, take a flat +1 to the roll for every point of mental stress you voluntarily accept as the Iron Nerve strains mind and body in a supreme effort of escape.

Sealmaster: Whatever the equivalent of making Seal blanks ends up being in the revised Seals-as-Ritual system.

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Erolki said:

It looks pretty smooth! I'll start by admitting that I'm mostly familiar with the edition of Fate on the SRD (which claims to be the current one), not the one they used for the Dresden Files (though the site has an edition changelog which claims they're mostly the same).

I really like the idea of using enemy takedowns to make up the FPs a bit, feels very appropriate, and the HoD stunt being cheap as an incentive to back up setting assumptions also looks solid (small potential issue: make sure to balance attack Jutsu across from that baseline of lethality).

...and the skill column totally does its job keeping higher-level skills exponentially more expensive, but by forcing you to be as well-rounded as a Jonin should be. Cool (though I can see it potentially getting silly at the very high levels, but it should be a long time before we're legitimately Kage level ). Also, @Briefvoice's suggestion of the mental stress track giving Genjutsu a home other than flat win/totally useless save-or-suck effects makes a ton of sense.

I would be more hesitant to use the Accelerated ruleset - it's great, and I'd absolutely use it for a less munchkinry game, but I think boiling things down to the Approaches might be too purely narrativist. Some of the other stuff from the book is probably useful, though (sadly, couldn't find the Scale stuff, sounded interesting).

Finally - what are your thoughts on mobs (which are a way to mechanically abstract fighting a group of similar enemies)? I imagine they'd be great for bandits and terrible for Jonin, but I'm not sure about the middle ground of Genin and low-Chunin.

[X] Interlude: Hana learns Hazou's been adopted
[X] Interlude: Why Tenten's a pacifist
[X] Interlude: Anything involving inscrutable Nara conversations

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Briefvoice said:

Another aspect to Dresden Files is that compels can go the other way across the table. If you know (or guess) an NPC's aspect it's possible to compel them to act on it. A GM can refuse the compel, of course, but probably won't if it makes sense. That is a really nice aspect to the game, that understanding other people and who they are at the core is so important.

I do note that despite using the same mechanics, Social Combat is best played a little differently than regular combat. Social Consequences work great in theory, but are often hard to really explain in the fiction if the social combat doesn't seem very high stakes. How I recommend doing it is that if the stakes actually are pretty low or if typical social consequences are hard to justify, most people will just give up and be Taken Out (meaning they go along with what you wanted). Or alternately, if a Social consequence doesn't seem appropriate, default to a Mental Consequence instead.

Hmmm....

Kagome seems like someone who once took an Extreme Mental/Social consequence and is gradually trying to transition it to a less-bad Aspect instead.

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Briefvoice said:

More DF Fate comments...

Though your High Concept and Trouble Aspect are pretty fixed, I find it useful to be constantly tinkering with the other Aspects. Usually there's not much else to do with Minor Milestones, so using them to adjust less important aspects is a great way to represent how the character is constantly growing and changing.

Another thing that is sometimes hard to balance in FATE is "aspects don't do anything unless you invoke them with a fate point" versus "aspects are always true". An aspect being true should always be the starting point for the fiction even before getting to the dice roll. Often an aspect can serve as "permission" to do something which would be impossible without the aspect (or an appropriate stunt).

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kenmadragon said:

Yeah, but it's more that "All Aspects Are True" mostly only holds when you pay attention to them. There really isn't a penalty to going around your Aspects at times other than the GM noticing and deciding to make that a compel to make you keep to the Aspects. In which case, you either uphold the Aspect and get a FP, or ignore the Aspect and pay a FP to do so...

Ergo, why constantly tinkering with your Aspects' wordings every few milestones isn't a bad idea, because you'll find the character you play grows and changes, and thus their Aspects can morph over time.

Also, anyone else taken a look at DFAE for this? They've got some cool ideas for Conditions and the like to make things more interesting (like In Peril and Doomed), as well as a more free-form ruleset in general.

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Briefvoice said:

You're thinking character aspects, but a Dark Room is dark until you light it up, and you can't read a note inside it even if no one spent a fate point to invoke the Dark Room aspect.

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Briefvoice said:

Are you looking for suggestions? Don't have time right now, but I have a few ideas. Chakra is probably a stress track of some sort; the question is what sort of thing should actually hit the stress track and what should be below the level of bothering to track.

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ClawClawBite said:

One thing Dresden Accelerated adds is instead of all stunts, character types are defined by mantles. Each one is a linked set of conditions and stunts powered by those conditions. Vampired have feeding tracks that they spend on physical stat boosts, wizards have fatigue they can spend on spell bonuses.

This might be something to adapt for ninja with adding a chakra track, and keying stunts off of it, and letting stunts buy extra boxes.

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Erolki said:

Full agreement on the subject of a Chakra "stress" track.

I think one of the important questions about running Chakra is "is this something someone can be independantly good or bad at, or is it primarily a function of how good they are at more general ninja stuff?" Does it work to assume people who are equally good at Ninjutsu, by default, have rounds-to-the-same levels of Chakra Capacity and Chakra Control (using Aspects and/or Stunts for individuals who are particularly strong or weak in these fields), or do we want significant variation in Capacity and/or Control between two otherwise equal characters to be the standard?

If your Chakra track's size is going to be variable (I'm pretty sure we all expect a Jonin to be able to use any particular Jutsu more times in a row than a Genin could), I lean towards folding Chakra levels into your best appropriate *jutsu skill, because it seems odd that you could master, say, Fire Jutsu while still having terrible Capacity and Control (see how Control was a prerequisite for pretty much all Jutsu in the old system); the very act of training Ninjutsu in particular should train your Chakra (Gen- and Taijutsu are a little fuzzier, but I think can be made to work). It's a little bit of a win-harder rule (in which people who are better at Jutsu have more Chakra to use said Jutsu with), but one that seems to fit setting and theme.

(also, I have no idea how Evocation works in DF, so no idea how one deals with a challenge with it - I'm writing from the presumption that there will be one or more skills that one rolls to do Jutsu stuff with, for combat uses if nothing else, but there's a lot of different ways that could be set up and I'm not sure where the sweet spot would be. Ninjutsu and Genjutsu could just be top-level skills across from Fists, or Ninjutsu could be broken down into Combat and Utility, or by element, or some completely different methodology)

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kenmadragon said:

Another thing DFAE had was the concept of Scale - things that operated at a higher Scale level we're more deadly/effective/skilled when facing lower tiered foes/challenges. Could be a good way of representing the difference between civilian/genin/chuunin/jonin/S-rank/Kage without having bloated skills/approaches modifiers for powerful opponents - use Scale instead.

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Briefvoice said:

I mean, you're right to be worried. I played in several long-running FATE games... and the the GM who was running eventually burned out on FATE and grew to dislike the system.

He said to me, "I can't enjoy it anymore since (playername) whispered the secret that I now can't unsee... everything is just +2." By which he meant that there was no way to distinguish a big advantage from a small one.

The group has considered going back to FATE, but when we talked about it we were talking about being much more strict about when aspects can apply and more willing to say, "No, that doesn't help." To give a concrete example that sticks out in my mind, our knights in post-Roman Britain were trying to convince a ruler to do something, but he didn't have the money. So we did a bunch of rolls to go through his financial records, with various players helping out by creating advantages, to achieve a Legendary success and find the money by squeezing every possible sources.

But there were PCs in the group who couldn't have realistically helped with that, and we were letting them use skills only tangentially related to build advantages like, "inspired" and "well-led" and "well-rested" and stuff. Which, great, but when you are lax about what can reasonably create an advantage in a situation (or rather, what advantage-created Aspects can reasonable be tapped for a roll), it's easy to build up to a very high success level every time.

Just sharing a little real world experience.

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Briefvoice said:

Okay, can we pull back for a minute? If the new rituals are based on the Dresden Files RPG, then sealing will almost certainly be based on Ritual Casting/Thaumaturgy in the game.

And I'm going to tell you something... that means that sealing will be ungodly, game-breakingly powerful. Because Ritual Casting is. Forget all this shit about pulling out a seal in combat and using it. That may be nerfed a bit, but that's a mere side issue.

Ritual Casting is so powerful because:
1. It can do anything within some very broad, narratively directed limits.
2. It can general unlimited shifts if you're willing to put the time and effort into building your ritual. You want to generate a level 30 result that lasts for 100 years? It can do that!

So if Sealing = Ritual Casting, don't worry a bit about it being depowered.

You want to create a floating sky-fortress of doom? Sealing. You want to shift an entire village into another dimension to hide? Sealing? You want to trap a tailed beast in a human soul? Ritual casting totally provides the mechanics for how to do that, so the game will tell you how to do it with Sealing.

Here's the trade-off you're going to get. Sealing will probably be a bit less useful in combat, and in return all of the really big effects that the playerbase has dreamed of will be far more within reach.

EDIT: The trick is that you will need to start thinking in terms of one-off, custom-built for a specific situation/person seals rather than mass produced seals that can be copied 1000 times.

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Briefvoice said:

"Within the limits of your sealing skill" is a very hard and low ceiling, though. Even Jiraiya, the greatest sealing master known, can't duplicate some stuff. Dresden Files is a lot more forgiving about pushing the limits of your skill if you're willing to accept trade-offs.

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MadScientist said:

That's interesting. I'm unfamiliar with FATE, and still reading DF book 1, but that does sound like something I could get behind.

I'm concerned about it not modelling what's been shown in-story correctly, but that aside, more versatility for less direct combat power is a trade-off I would be willing to make.

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Cariyaga said:

This is what I'm referring to. If you can "push the limits of your skill' safely, as you seem to be implying here, then there's no reason not to do so, and there would be way more sealmasters in the world because that implies that it's far less risky than it has been shown to be.

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Cariyaga said:

On that note, if there's any particular things y'all need help with, I'm fairly sure I can safely speak for all the players in that we're happy to break any system you hand to us. ...

Uh, that is to say, if you need help coming up with mechanics, we can mutilate them.

...Hm. Well, you know what they say. Gotta know how to break it to make it.

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Cariyaga said:

Assuming OliWhail hasn't picked this up already...

[X] Lore Update (AU): eaglejarl's, Velorien's, and OliWhail's self inserts as a team in the chuunin exams with Kishimoto as sensei

@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail

My thoughts on FATE/DF:

First off, I think rather than using the milestone system, I think it would be better for MfD if training-time was used as the metric for advancement, similar to how XP was before. This would allow for, for instance, whatever skill Sealing is to take more time to learn than, I dunno, basics-of-punching-people

I'm mildly anxious about using Ritual Casting for the basis of sealing for reasons I've mentioned over the past few pages -- particularly regarding combat effectiveness, as it's something we've built Hazou around to large extent. I had some ideas for how to beat the system into working well, though. If you could figure out a way to convert between FATE-numbers (or whatever adjustments you use re: larger numbers for MfD-Fate) and HERO-or-GURPS-numbers, you could use the two latter's balanced-ish rules for inventions, etc to determine sealing difficulty. Heck, if you wanted to get really complicated with the conversions (you don't), you could just stick to MfD-system for sealing specifically (it would certainly make calibrating risk easier for the players ).

Depending on how 'exciting' of mechanics you want for this, I had a few thoughts as well:

To properly calibrate for chakra boosting, you could do something like increasing the number of fudge dice rolled and making them 3[+], 2 blank, 1[-] instead, scaling number of bonus fudge dicebased on skill level/chakra spent, similarly to MfD-system (speaking of, we need something to call the old system). Alternately, you could adjust the system to be d12 instead so as to have the ability to change the fudge dice numbers in a more granular fashion.

Iron Nerve could reduce the number of - on physical dice by one in addition to other more narrative benefits like no-roll scribing.

Combat Frozen Skein could be something like starting out at 5[+]/1 blank while active for the first time it's used, and every dice after while not recovered given an additional [-].

These bloodlines may want to be given more room for growth -- I'm not sure how to handle that.

I'll do more research into DF over the next while and see what I can come up with regarding solutions to Ninja Magic, Sealing, and Chakra.

Regarding HERO:

I'm not gonna lie, my main problem with this system is the limiting nature of the power level system. It really, really grinds my gears that it effectively prevent Akane from punching over her level with a combination of macerators and explosive punching.

That overarching problem aside, the system seems particularly well suited, though I worry that it seems a little too... I dunno. I get weird vibes from d20 systems overall, mostly because 3.5 is a horribly balanced mess as you in particular, eaglejarl, well know. Stuff like the Advantage system being too easy to take advantage of at the power levels we're at, and Victory Points seem flat out unsuited for the setting, though they could probably be reworked into Chakra Points with some effort (and removal of options).

I haven't done as much looking into HERO as I have into Fate, so I can't say too much on the topic; I'll look into it some more later.

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MadScientist said:

From what I've seen, I prefer DF to HERO.

I think you would have to do a lot of modding to make ritual casting simulate sealing accurately, though.

Things might just end up as "because you have explosive rings, you get +1 to fists, and take another +1 for youthful fist... dear god you're punching hard.".

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MadScientist said:

I do like the aspects/stunts thing.

No idea how the DF variant works, but based on a skim of the web page, let's try making Hazou! For the purposes of this exercise, I'm saying that each element as well as Sealing, Genjutsu, Medical ninjutsu, and neutral ninjutsu is it's own skill. Fight is taijutsu/close weapons. Shoot is ranged weapons. You have to know a jutsu to be able to use it, but all your jutsu of the same type will use that element's skill bonus.

Spoiler: Hazou

Aspects

• [UPLIFT] Hazou wants to make the world a safer and more comfortable place for humanity.
• [I NOW DECLARE YOU MOUTH AND FOOT] Hazou has a tendency to speak before thinking.
• [BEEN THERE, KILLED THAT] Hazou has been living in the wilderness for two years, and has experience with survivalism.
• [I AM BECOME DEATH] Hazou has a... thing... with inventing weapons of mass destruction.
• [FLIP IT UPSIDE DOWN] Hazou has a creative mindset that lets him see novel uses for things.
• [LIST FOUR, PAGE ELEVEN] Hazou creates lists in a manner that sometimes strays into mental illness.
• [KAGOME'S PRODIGY] Hazou has been trained in sealcrafting, and is described as "freakishly good" at it. Due to the uniqueness of his teacher, his approach is rather more cautious than most.
• [THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN] After sinking a boatload of civilians, Hazou is sickened by the thought of killing more, or allowing more to die via inaction.

Stunts

• {ROKI} If Hazou has a higher Deceive bonus than his opponent's Empathy bonus, add +2 to Fight.
• {IMPASSIONED SPEECH} Add +2 to Rapport when delivering a speech.
• {SEAL DOWNLOAD} Add +2 to Sealing when reverse engineering a seal.

Skills
Great:

• Sealing

Good:

• Deceive
• Fight

Fair:

• Earth Ninjutsu
• Will
• Empathy

Average:

• Neutral Ninjutsu
• Craft
• Rapport
• Lore

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Briefvoice said:

So the big thing is, using each ninjutsu type as as own skill is NOT how Dresden Files does things. As you see, that quickly leads to skill inflation. What Dresden Files does is have things like Fire Ninjutsu be be Powers... these are things that are sort of like Stunts, but can cost multiple points of Refresh depending on how powerful they are.

So you take a Power that gives you Fire NInjutsu, which is probably the equivalent of Fire Evocation. With Fire Evocation you can make the element of Fire "do stuff". Normally attacks, but also heating rooms or burning through walls or anything you can reasonably claim fire could do. So how does Evocation work? Two skills, Discipline and Conviction. Discipline is Control and Conviction is Power... In MfD these would would likely be the skills of Chakra Control and Chakra Capacity.

First you decide what you want to do. This normally comes down to:
Attack
Block
Maneuver (Doings stuff.)
Counterspell

When you decide how many shifts of power you want to put into it. You start off at 0, and each shift does things like add to the Weapon rating of the attack (for more damage) or affect multiple targets or affect targets farther away or give yourself a greater Defense against attacks or make the effect last longer or overcome a more resistant target. (Not going to try to type out the whole multi-paragraph explanation.) For example, a Medi-nin trying to heal an injury probably needs shifts equal to the rating of the injury at least, and may need extra shifts to keep the healing going for a long period of time.

Your Conviction/Power/Chakra Capacity is the limiter for how many shifts of power you can put in. You start with shifts equal to your rating in this skill which can be modified by things like Stunts or bonuses... So a ninja with a Chakra Capacity of 3 who is Fire Natured might have a Chakra Capacity of 5 for fire jutsu. You can put more shifts into an effect than your skill rating, but this means you take mental stress for each extra shift above your limit. In MfD this might be chakra stress as well. (Yes pedants, in DF you have to take at least one box of stress no matter what.)

Then you roll Discipline/Control/Chakra Control. You have to roll a number equal to the number of shifts you were trying to generate. If you fail this roll, bad things happen. You may take stress/consequences yourself, or it may hit the environment as unintended consequences due to your screw-up.

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Erolki said:

@Cariyaga, the issue with hacking the dice is that Fate's Fudge Dice are equally likely to be positive or negative (math), so adding more of them doesn't really change much. On top of that, because the dice average out to 0, even small differences in skill give a huge advantage - which is why Advantages or Aspects only give a +2, because that's still going from ~60-40 odds (as ties go to attacker) to ~90-10 for equal-skill combatants. Moving the set of dice from 2+/2=/2- to 3+/2=/1- means moving from an average roll of +0 (+/- 1) to an average roll of +2 (+/- 1), which is about as good as adding an Advantage every time you swing. Adding more modified Fudge dice would only exaggerate the advantage.

Athletics is Fate's mobility/dodge skill, yeah, pretty much the same as Tacmov was.

Regarding HERO - I'll admit I'm not very familiar, but I'm not a fan of the d20 - too damn swingy, no bell curve . On top of that, skimming the page and looking through a few powers and advantages suggests that the system's as vulnerable to exploits as the other d20 systems I've played, but with the way everything's turned up to 11 for superheros it's likely even messier (for example, Shapeshifting seems to just give you a big pile of points based on what your new form is. Like, a big pile of them. Jeez). So, not sure if it's going to save the QMs any effort keeping an eye on us trying to walk the line between clever and awesome or actually breaking things.

@Velorien, sympathy - when I ran Naruto in BESM I found it took a lot of ST intervention and tweaking, and my table was pretty munchkin-light; I suspect it sits in an unhappy medium between something rules-heavy like HERO and something rules-light like Fate when it comes to dealing with people trying to break the system .

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Briefvoice said:

Evocation in MfD continued....

So obviously jutsu are less free-form in MfD than in Evocation is in Dresden Files. Here is how I would do it:

To pull off a jutsu, you must learn it in advance. This ends up as a pre-built Evocation effect where you already known how many shifts of power it takes and how they will be spent. Learning a new jutus costs nothing mechanically... you merely need to have someone willing to teach it to you and have sufficient time available in game to make some rolls to learn. Or maybe not even bother with rolls? They would be written something like this:

Fireball Technique: Two shifts of power, make a Weapon 2 attack roll against a single target in the same zone. Ninja may use their Shoot skill rather than their Chakra Control skill for the Control roll.

See that last bit? Many jutsu will have odd little adders like that from how they were built during research. Things like how MEW walls become permanent rather than temporary chakra constructs if cast onto the right terrain. GMS should be generous and creative in adding odd little quirks to jutus.

Creating a jutsu takes a Chakra Lore skill and is an extended project where you must make rolls over a certain number of scenes, and if you don't get X number of shifts in Y number of attempts the entire thing fails and you don't succeed. Note that as always you can roll skills at +0. This means that many ninja are able to create very minor jutsu for their own convenience or as a signature move, especially if they bother to set up Maneuvers beforehand, but you have to be a real scholar of chakra powers to build high end stuff like Shadow Replication.

Putting Genjutsu aside for a minute as its own thing, Ninjutsu come in two types, Elemental or non-Elemental. Every ninja has at least one elemental specialty where they get bonuses to specialties of that element, both to use them and to create them, etc. Non-elemental don't benefit from that but are more flexible for effect.

You may also have a number of Signature Jutsu that do not require Discipline rolls to cast, though they may still be required for targeting or when opposed.

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eaglejarl said:

Wow, cool. Thank you for this, it looks really good. DF appears to be the leading candidate at the moment, so this is timely.

We've been talking about how to handle chakra, actually. A stress mechanic could work, although I'm more enamored of it as a resource that you spend. One idea I'd had was "you have N shifts of chakra that you can allocate among your jutsu; if you want an 8-shift fireball then you burn up 8 shifts from your chakra pool and when the pool is empty you can't do ninjutsu". There would also need to be some rules about the maximum you can put into one jutsu, how / when it refills, what happens if you run out -- unconsciousness at 0? Death at 0? Slightly random cost so you can't predict exactly when you'll run empty and you need to be careful about pushing too hard? etc. A lot of ways we could play it.

What we don't have is a good take on seals at this point. If anyone wants to make a suggestion we would be very interested.

Just to be clear: DF hasn't actually been chosen. The list at this point is DF, Champions (+ Ninja Hero, presumably), and Mutants and Masterminds. All the discussion over the last couple days has been around DF, though. GURPS has been ruled out as more complicated than we want to deal with, and BESM didn't do what we needed.

Please bear with us. We're trying to get a choice made ASAP, but it's complicated and we don't want to have to change again in the future if the one we choose turns out not to work for some piece of the system that we hadn't considered.

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Briefvoice said:

I tend to think that chakra cost should come in two varieties.
1. I can do this all day. (Henge. Spamming a weak ninjutsu attack. Running for hours at top speed.)
2. I can only do this a limited number of times a scene and then I need to recover my chakra.



SEALING PROPOSAL

Let's start with how seals are supposed to work.

You have to research a seal.
You have to draw the seal blank.
You then have to infuse the seal.
You then have to trigger the seal.

Infusing a seal can require a very high degree of skill and it's possible to fail with dangerous consequences, though it gets easier the more you try it. Making a seal blank can be failed, but if you screw it up you can just try again under you succeed. No consequences. So that's primarily about moving up and down the time chart (page 315). So let's put all this together:

1. To do sealing, a ninja first requires a basic education in how to construct seals. You must take a Stunt, "Sealcrafter".
2. Sealing largely keys off a skill I called "Chakra Lore" but which we might want to rename to "Chakra Sense" or something similar. it's not purely academic; it's about how good you are at understanding the flow of chakra.
3. Seals are learned individually. Each seal produces a single specific effect every time it is used. You can learn a seal either by learning an existing seal or creating your own.
4. A seal has a base value called Complexity. Complexity can be mechanically determined to a certain extent, but a GM always needs to give it a final pass of "is this reasonable" to see if the numbers work.

Page 264 of Dresden Files Your Story gives the basics of how to determine Complexity, but important modifiers are:
1. How many targets does it affect?
2. How long does it last?
3. Do you need to overcome some kind of resistance?

Examples:
Standard Explosive Seal: Set difficulty of Attack at +3 (cannot be blocked, only dodged), Weapon 2 attack = 5 Complexity
Storage Seal: Stealth at +2 to conceal the item, Might at +2 to carry it, +10 extraordinary duration, +5 for turning it on and off, ad hoc -5 for cannot affect living beings, ad hoc -5 'tweaked by generations of sealmasters to be easy as possible due to its insane usefulness' = 9 Complexity
Kagome's Bang Box: Set difficulty of attack at +4 (cannot be blocked, only dodged), Weapon 4 attack, attacks every target in a zone (+2) = 10 Complexity
Air Dome: Good Block (+3), covers multiple people (+2), lasts a few minutes (+3 to get from a few moments to a few minutes) = 8 Complexity
Skywalkers: Might Roll of +3 to hold up a laden adult carrying another adult (page 321 YS), ad hoc +5 for being able to turn it on and off repeatedly, lasts 15 minutes (+4 to get from a few moments to 15 minutes) = 12 Complexity
Skytower: Might Roll of +3 (normally multiple skytower seals are used to brace the tower), lasts a day (+9 to get from a few moments to a day) = 12 Complexity
Bind Bijuu into a human host: 14 to beat best resistance roll possible, 21 to burn through all the bijuu's consequences, 19 to go from a minute to a human lifetime = 54 Complexity (this is obviously a wild guess)

You can see that as intended in the narrative, Skywalkers are a cheat... a mere 12 Complexity seal (not all that much as these things go) that allow travel through the air!

Seal Blanks
Seal Blanks take a base of 15 minutes to create, after which you roll Craftsmanship - Calligraphy (restricted (YS 214) by Chakra Lore) against a difficulty of the Complexity/4 (not sure about this number- might need to change after trying it out). For each step up or down the time chart, you can decrease/increase the difficulty by 1. So if you increase the difficulty by 4, you can write a seal in a single action. Increase it by 5 and you can write a seal blank and infuse it in the same action. That is part (though not all) of how Minato could legendarily plant a seal with a touch. Failure means it's ruined, try again.

Anyone with the Sealcrafter stunt can learn to draw any seal blank with some practice. Technically you don't even need to have awakened chakra, though you suggest to a sealmaster having his seal blanks drawn by civilians and see what expression his face shows.

Infusing Seals
So how do you infuse a seal? Assuming that you know how to do it (because a sealmaster who knows the seal has explained it to you or because you have researched it) then it's simple. If you are a sealcrafter in the first place (remember all of this is stunt restricted) you roll your Chakra Control, modified by your Chakra Lore skill, against the Complexity of the seal. Then you roll your Chakra Capacity against the complexity of the seal, and take the difference in the roll in chakra stress. Easy! Well. Okay, the first few times infusing a seal are rough. Normally you stack up a bunch of maneuvers, spend some fate points, then then take stress to improve the results of your roll 1 for 1.

Every time you try to infuse a seal, the effective complexity goes down by 1 for your next attempt. It can go to a minimum of Seal Complexity/Chakra Lore skill, round down. So if you had a Chakra Lore skill of 3 and a Complexity 13 seal, you could take it down to a Complexity 4 to infuse. A Complexity 5 seal (like say your standard explosive seal) would be a mere Complexity 1 to infuse.

Infusion always takes some nominal amount of chakra... have to let GMs determine how much and how to track how many seals you can infuse before getting tired.

Researching Seals
1. Determine base seal complexity.
2. Add "research factors". If it's totally unrelated to any other seal effect you know, +10 effective complexity. If it's a space-time seal, add +5 because screw that. If it's a minor tweak on an existing seal, -5. GMs really got to go wild here. If it affects a living being with chakra +5. If you know it's possible and are trying to duplicate an effect you've seen it's easier, etc.

Researching is a multi-roll process in which you're trying to build to the total effective research complexity of the seal. Each roll takes a baseline time increment of 1 week, and you can choose to attempt up to your Chakra Lore rating in progress every week. So if Hazou had a "good" (+3) chakra lore, he could try for 3 complexity of progress every week. To make progress you roll Chakra Control, modified by your chakra lore skill against your target. Failure is a sealing mishap.

It is possible to reduce the research time increment to "a few days" by taking a -2 to your rolls, or to "a day" by taking -4 to your rolls. Kagome will never recommend this. Jiraiya thinks he's good enough to do it all the time, and given that he has all sorts of Stunts and Powers boosting his rolls, maybe he is.

If you research a seal, you are considered to know it inside and out, and the infusion difficulty is automatically reduced to the lowest possible level. We do have some pity after all.

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Briefvoice said:

Regarding the above, you should assume that there are chained stunts and chakra powers that can drastically pump up the numbers for really skilled sealcrafters. 'Sealcrafter' is just the gateway stunt.

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Cariyaga said:

Some things worth noting on first lookover @Briefvoice (though, to be 100% clear I am personally grateful for the work you've put into this, and these critiques should be taken as ways to improve upon it, not a personal attack):

Sealing doesn't require significant chakra control in the context of Marked for Death, as far as I'm aware.

Infusion does not require any noteworthy amount of chakra, to the point where if a civilian was capable of accessing their chakra, even if they weren't particularly good, they might be able to do it. Assuming the seal isn't stupid like Night Light seals are, anyway -- so I don't think Chakra Capacity is appropriate there.

MfD-canonically, seal blanks require ~5 minutes to create, not 15.

Explosives seem to be more contingent on the user's skill in whether they affect someone and more contingent on the explosives power in the effect accomplished by them. Not sure how to represent this. Likewise, I'm not sure that "number of people affected" is a particularly good balance point. Sealcraft isn't, in the context of the universe, as far as I'm aware, actually intended to be balanced, though that also conflicts somewhat with the QM's desire for having a system they can reference for sealing difficulty... That said, it can be a good thing, sometimes; it's dependent on the seal. For instance, something like macerators is a relatively simple modification with a lot of potential effects; I don't think it'd be appropriate to make it 'cost' more to infuse or research for the esoteric stuff like fuel-air bombs, etc.

On the note of which, I do not think it is appropriate to be able to "choose" how much progress you make in researching seals; by my read, this would allow a novice to work at large scale projects easily.

Stuff like Air Domes' Block rate can be easily scaled -- it's been stated to take at least a hit from a chuunin well enough, so that's what it can be adjusted to. (commentary, not critique)

Critiques aside, that's a great start! Thanks for this!

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Briefvoice said:

Could just roll chakra lore, though I'm reluctant to put everything on one skill. You could do it the other way around and have it be chakra lore modified by chakra control. I think it makes certain amount of sense that good chakra control would at least help.



Okay, I guess I misremembered that.



I'll leave that one up to the GMs to decide how many seals they want a person to be capable of making in a day. Note that getting it from 15 minutes to "a few minutes" would only require taking a -1 to the roll to draw it faster. I mean, seal blanks are nothing but non-chakra calligraphy. You can draw them as fast as your nimble fingers allow.



See, I don't actually think that's true. More powerful ninja rarely seem to bother with explosive. If explosives were a power magnifier they absolutely would be used more. But if they're more of a flat attack then they'd be greater for weaker ninjas and increasingly pointless for jounin who can get better results by throwing a kunai. Powerful ninja use them more for tricks like slipping an explosives tag on a thrown kunai to trick their opponent into parrying it instead of dodging it and then eating an explosion that can't be parried.

That said, if GMs want to do it that way they could just let a ninja roll an attack and use that, with the seal providing only a weapon value. (Though in that case you might want to increase the Complexity cost of the weapon.) There's ways to play with that.



Makes some intuitive sense, I think, since it's really about area. Are you affecting a person-sized area, a wide area that can catch multiple people, or a huge area? You would expect difficulty to scale up there.



Yeah, I'm really open to suggestions there. It's a tricky beast to balance between not wanting to make research impossible for a novice (and what is a novice, anyway? +2 in chakra lore? +1? +3) and not wanting to make it easy. I seriously considered some sort of "you have to make it in X number of rolls or it's impossible". I think you'd need to play with the numbers a few times and run it until you hit something that makes sense.



I recalled that air domes were specifically supposed to be somewhat fragile. Able to take "a hit" and then pop. But again, that's stuff you can go back and adjust.

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Cariyaga said:

Yeah. It does make sense in some contexts -- ie explosive or implosion seals -- but in others like macerators where the area affected is more a matter of cone size and speed, less so, or banshee seals where the area is dependent on the power of the effect itself (as decibels decrease by ~6 per doubling of distance).

Still, that's something that can be adjusted, I just wanted to make note of it.

Hm. Well, think about in this context: Jiraiya specifically asked Kagome for his implosion seals when fighting other S-rankers. If nothing else, that definitely signifies that they're a power magnifier.

As far as other ninja go, they seem to mostly rely on ninjutsu to fulfill the effect of explosive seals. For instance, the Uchiha's Grand Fireball technique doesn't seem very different from an explosive seal.

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Erolki said:

The implosion seals seem to be just better than standard explosives (unless you're trying to set something on fire, or other niche cases).

I think part of it is just OOC narrative decisions - more ninjutsu people got written than weapons people (for coolness reasons, I suspect - who's going to get added more, someone wielding the same explosive tags anybody can [and random mooks often do] use, or a shiny new jutsu?). On top of that, the explosive tags are presented in canon as pretty cheap and easy to access (think of how early and often Naruto himself starts using them, and what that says about availability). So, if they're a basic part of ninja equipment that any random Genin might have, it makes sense they don't end up getting any focus as things go on.

In the harsher, stricter setting of MfD, it in turn makes sense for the seals to get more attention - they cost a negligible amount of chakra to activate, can be produced at the cost of time and paper/ink, and do a lot of damage if they catch someone off guard (also, for the PCs in particular, most of our attention has been a) at the lower ranks and b) focused on force-multipliers; even if explosive seals and the like don't scale well enough to make it in the big leagues, they're a heck of a lot better than no area-effect attacks at all). On the other hand, the fact that sealing is more special and dangerous here than in canon makes getting even basic seals a bigger deal, which from a metagame/balance perspective lets them be more powerful.

On the bright side, I don't think there's necessarily much conflict when it comes to offensive seals; if an explosive tag counts as a weapon, that's likely more useful for lower-ranked people (who don't have high-damage jutsu) but still scales effectively with skill (suggesting high-end weapon users will use weapons enhanced with seals - and whether or not canon agrees, I suspect most-if-not-all of the special weapons [like those used by the Seven Swordsmen of Mist] were now created with sealing).

The other tricky bit is unusual applications of sealing - I'm pretty sure Kagome's "stupid box" is just a very dangerous application of a storage seal, and it's often going to be messier than an explosive tag by a fair margin. I think best use is probably going to be building the stats for seals based on standard use, and then if someone cleverly weaponizes an edge case just let it be.

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kenmadragon said:

This seems like a lot more Skills than you really need. Why not take the Skills from Fate: Core, drop Driving, split Lore into Ninja Lore (history, jutsu knowledge, technique hacking) and Medicine (for med-nin stuff), then have a Jutsu skill to handle general chakra techniques, and have another skill call Reserve to determine a stress track for chakra, as well as for other things that require great reserves of chakra. Discipline and Conviction from DFRPG get folded into F:Core's Will and Presence gets folded into Rapport.

As someone who's played sessions of both: Fate Core is easier to learn/master than DFRPG. The skills of Fate Core are also a little more straightforward. Fight is melee, Shoot is ranged, supernatural stuff is usually it's own skill. Etc.

Final list would be something like: Athletics, Burglary, Contacts, Crafts, Deceive, Empathy, Fight, Investigate, Jutsu, Medicine, Ninja Lore, Notice, Physique, Provoke, Rapport, Reserves, Resources, Shoot, Stealth, Will.

Phsyical Stress keys off of Physique, Mental off of Will, Chakra off of Reserves, Social (if you really want it) off of Empathy or Rapport or whatever.

If you really wanted it to, you could have most Jutsu work off of Will as well, given Disciple and Conviction get folded under them in Fate Core. Seals will most likely work off of Ninja Lore - aka why Sealmasters like Kagome sometimes doubled as codebreakers and the like.

It might be nice to pull from DFAE as well because Mantles are a good concept, and having dedicated Conditions you can check off based on your Mantle is a cool idea, as well as special stunts and permissions that come from having such. The Magical Practitioner Mantle in DFAE is pretty good for most Ninja, as well as some of the social-minded ones like Medic and One Percent or Leader of the People Mantles that folks definitely have.

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Cariyaga said:

I mostly don't like milestones because they come across as very similar to 'levels' in D&D or whatever, and that doesn't seem very appropriate to me at all here. It just feels icky to me

Additionally, I don't think such low skill numbers as DFRPG uses by default are appropriate; it could very easily lead to a genin (or a sufficient number of them) wrecking a jounin.

Also:
(quoted under Fair Use)

The only major milestones I can think of have been us leaving Mist and researching/giving Skywalkers to Leaf, whereas your examples for Major Milestones seem more appropriate for Significant Milestones.

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Briefvoice said:

Note that Dresden Files RPG allows a skill column if you want that instead. So you need to have the same number of skills at level X-1 as you did at X, not necessarily one more. That's a rules change from standard FATE, meant to allow for more powerful but more specialized characters.

It's not particularly "realistic", but then neither is dividing everything in the world into a small number of discrete skills. One thing it does is encourage you to move skills down as well as up. You can raise a skill by switching its rating with another skill. If I wanted to describe this in-universe, it would be that part of a skill rating is how much you constantly practice and train it as well as your overall knowledge. By dividing up their 'maintenance' training, characters can boost capability in one area at the cost of slightly reducing it in another.

Imagine the team is preparing for an infiltration mission, and everyone spends days rigorously practicing their Deception to give it a 'temporary' boost. But in return they have to neglect maintenance training in other things or maybe it takes a lot of concentration, and their Alertness goes down. It's easy enough to explain this stuff with a good story if you make the effort, but it is upon the the player to explain it. System won't justify it for you.

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Cariyaga said:

Well, the thing is that with default numbers, it would be relatively easy for a genin-level compatant to stack up aspects against a jounin and beat them, at least in one roll. That's the intent of spreading the numbers out like this.

Insofar as the fudge dice goes, that's my attempt to make fudge dice meaningful at all when there are larger skill numbers. It's not a particularly good one for the reasons you mentioned, but it does allow for large amounts of variation.

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Briefvoice said:

Yes, if a jounin acts like a dumb-ass and lets genin have every possible advantage while refraining from using his own advantages and relying only on pure skill, they may in fact be able grab his bell get him once.

Maybe that's as intended?

I mean, the Dresden Files setting does have very powerful NPCs who are set up mechanically to be basically unbeatable by PCs... unless the PCs cheat like mad and set up a whole bunch of different things in their favor. Mechanically it works.

Hasn't one of the complaints about Marked for Death sometimes been that jounin are so out of reach that the PCs feel helpless? It seems to me that a system where it's possible to beat more skilled ninja, but only if you can maneuver them into a situation where you have the advantages and their abilities are negated, is exactly what we want.



It really reduces the average variation, though.

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Erolki said:

Clarifying that Fate Core only uses the pyramid for character creation - the skill column rules are exactly the same when you're adding skill points at Milestones (the character creation section even mentions the columns as, essentially, a house rule option for character creation). Of course, because skills have to start at +1 and get bought up from there, you can end up in the semi-column formation I had in the sample build (where there was 1 skill at the top, then 2, then a couple layers with 3 skills, then 4 and 5), because if you need to have an equal number at X as at X-1, then X-1 actually needs to have 2+ more before you can move one up.

Example:
+3: skill
+2: skill skill
+1: skill skill skill skill

So, in the above you could upgrade a +1 to a +2 (as that would leave three at each level), but not a +2 to a +3 (as that would leave two at +3 but only one at +2).

I really like the column system, as it strikes a balance between specialization (as it's easy enough to have a couple skills pretty high) and minmaxing (as you can't just crank a half-dozen skills up and ignore the other dozen). However, I agree that it starts having issues at very high power levels, and I'm not sure the best way to go about fixing that (looking at Hazou, my gut says post-early-Chunin seems to be where it starts failing to run smooth).

Also, I found it funny that it was actually fairly easy to build an array that keeps Hazou's skills within a rounding error of the correct proportions from each-other (just multiply the numbers I used by 5 and compare to his old character sheet ), which I consider a good sign as far as him being somewhat specialized but with tricks outside of his core competencies. Of course, the fact that I had literally over half the skill points I'd allotted left over after building said array and wasn't sure what to do with them is a little more awkward .

Again, I think part of the issue is that most games just aren't designed to handle 2-3 years of twice-weekly sessions at serious xp growth, but I'm not really sure what the best fix is.

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Tua said:

Just dipping in and out so apologies if this was mentioned but:

I am against it. I want there to be fully specialized ninjas at the cost of other skills, for example like Kagome: He basically sacrificed basic social skills for sealing. It also makes sense that there other ninjas, especially lower level ones like genin or chunin (this was specifically mentioned during one of the chapters), are not as well rounded and are supposed to have weaknesses.

I wouldn't be opposed to some stats being connected to each other though; a taijutsu master is probably going to have high TacMove in addition to Taijutsu so making Taijutsu somewhat dependent on TacMove would make sense.

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Sampatrick said:

I think Briefvoice hit the nail on the head. If the optimization that we're doing is by stacking the deck with our aspects and negating the opponent's in order to beat Jounin, I think that's a lot more interesting than a system where it's mostly just about who has more numbers. I'm pretty convinced at this point that DFRPG or some other Fate system is the best choice for the MfD system.

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Cariyaga said:

Stacking up aspects is another form of "who has more numbers". It's just a "who has more numbers" that instead of being something you have explicit control over is only applicable in certain situations.

e: See also this post by Briefvoice:

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