@eaglejarl, @Velorien, my analysis of modified Youthful Fist: 6 levels of Youthful Fist are roughly equal to 2.5 levels of Taijutsu (1 level of Youthful Fist equals 0.4 Taijutsu levels).
The plot is below.
Considering that Youthful Fist doesn't actually increase chances of victory, I'd say it's still somewhat weak.
Roki just adds its level as additional Taijutsu dice if Hazou wins (Deception+Roki) vs. Deception roll. This means 1 Roki die = (probability of successful roll) Taijutsu dice.
Here is how these probabilities change depending on opponent's Deception:
So, against genin to low chuunin (up to 10 Deception) Roki levels equal Taijutsu levels,
against combat-based Jounin or social-based chuunin (18 Deception) 1 Roki level equals 0.5 Taijutsu levels,
against an average jounin (20 Deception), Roki level means 0.3 Taijutsu levels,
and against social-based jounin (25+ Deception dice) Roki is worthless.
Mind, the situation will improve when Hazou levels Deception and Roki (plot will move to the right)
On average, I'd say Roki level equals 0.5 Taijutsu levels. So, Akane's style is slightly weaker than Roki.
I'm now unsure if Akane's style is in need of rebalancing or not.
EDIT: Right now, if Hazou and Akane tried fighting all out, Akane would lose and take damage 85% of the time.
One buff to the style that would fit the fluff and doesn't just make it more like Roki would be to let her soak physical non-energy damage outside of taijutsu. So, if she fails TacMove against explosives or a trap, or if she falls or something falls on her.
That... seems like a combat summon she could feasible secure in 1 day. Though I have no idea what her power level would be and am not sure if she's worth spending a summon slot.
I will note that it not truly up to us who Keiko will go after for the summons, if anything she might look into getting one of the Rollers. They have a strong leader and might be willing to let Keiko summon them if she can convince them. Summons will have a greater and more diverse experience fighting on the human realm and the lower risk of death that being a summon could help them work out some of their more trickier moves as they don't have to worry about failure equaling their death. That would be the kind of argument I would use to try and convince a fighter to becoming a summon for our group at least.
While we have low-ish chakra capacity, having some low-level combat-summons would be useful, because summoning a level 1 or 2 pangolin doesn't drain Kei too much and she'll still have CP to boost skills and substitute.
If we want to keep a clean reputation in the pangolin kingdom and not annoy the polemarch, then diving head-first into the criminal underworld isn't going to help.
@MadScientist In what way are they part of a criminal underworld. Pandaa was the one to recommend the Rollers in the first place, unless you are saying that Pandaa is a gang member too. How are they a criminal organization? Where are you getting this information?
@MadScientist In what way are they part of a criminal underworld. Pandaa was the one to recommend the Rollers in the first place, unless you are saying that Pandaa is a gang member too. How are they a criminal organization? Where are you getting this information?
The QMs told us in the "wait we didn't want the players to take that quest hook" debacle that there would be social/reputation maluses for associating with that sort of group. Seems pretty "criminal gang" to me.
@MadScientist Then one would imagine that a lesser contract with the members of the group would be fine, so long as we do not try and gather the support of the boss whose name I can't be bothered to look up. I vaguely remember that but took it as more of less wanting to deal with the book keeping that such a group would cause, along with the hivemind's usual penchant for creating tons more work/munchkin tendencies.
e: Speaking of which, I have this niggling idea of how we can make modular sealing work even if it ordinarily wouldn't... we "just" need to create our own sealing language of a different paradigm than sealing normally works on -- the equivalent of Object Oriented Programming, as compared to writing in Assembly, etc. (editted for phrasing)
e: Speaking of which, I have this niggling idea of how we can make modular sealing work even if it ordinarily wouldn't... we "just" need to create our own sealing language of a higher level than sealing normally works on -- the equivalent of Object Oriented Programming, as compared to writing in Assembly, etc.
It sounds like Hazou's Sealing is in the ideograph phase of linguistics. We have single indivisible symbols that mean one thing and don't tend to make sense when you try to take them apart and stitch the pieces onto pieces from other symbols. What we need to do is move to the alphabet phase, where our language is inherently modular and all seals are made of lots of little discrete chunks that can be slotted together. Then we can start defining reusable functions that can be written into as many seals as we like with ease.
Making a sealing language seems to be halfway between writing a compiler and conlanging. And it's pretty clear that Hazou's first attempt at a language was sub-optimal. But that's fine. We can make better languages, building on what we've learned until Hazou's languages go from a "Machine Code/Egyptian Hieroglyphs Hybrid" to Python.
It sounds like Hazou's Sealing is in the ideograph phase of linguistics. We have single indivisible symbols that mean one thing and don't tend to make sense when you try to take them apart and stitch the pieces onto pieces from other symbols. What we need to do is move to the alphabet phase, where our language is inherently modular and all seals are made of lots of little discrete chunks that can be slotted together. Then we can start defining reusable functions that can be written into as many seals as we like with ease.
Making a sealing language seems to be halfway between writing a compiler and conlanging. And it's pretty clear that Hazou's first attempt at a language was sub-optimal. But that's fine. We can make better languages, building on what we've learned until Hazou's languages go from a "Machine Code/Egyptian Hieroglyphs Hybrid" to Python.
Not Python. Python trades off ease of prototyping and ease of learning for early error checking and safety, which is the opposite of what we need. We need Rust.
Not Python. Python trades off ease of prototyping and ease of learning for early error checking and safety, which is the opposite of what we need. We need Rust.
Python seals: easy to draw, easy to use, sometimes cause unexpected tentacles.
Rust seals: harder to draw, rarely blow up, drawing even a storage scroll may take a while. However, tentacles are much more rare.
Haskell seals: you have harnessed tentacles.
I was going for Rust because Haskell is harder to wrap one's head around (though this may not be true for Hazō), and because it's better-suited for low-level programming and it sounds like that's what seals are.
Remember, the main reason you can actually use Haskell's safety is that someone else has written nice monadic libraries to interact with the OS at a low level (I'm talking file manipulation, networking, that sort of thing). Hazō doesn't have this advantage; he'd have to write them himself, and that nullifies some of the benefit.
Quest Rank finally got to the stage of actually graphing things, with the y-axis now displayed.
MfD wiki is expanding along nicely with some sort of edits everyday, although we could use more contributors. It still isn't an exhaustive wiki by any means, with only 47 pages.
Finally, chapter 67 got a lot of useful information we can incorporate into the wiki, but we have a massive backlogs for other sixty-six chapters as well.
You cannot have an internally consistent world where all three of the following are true:
Sealing exists as some form of physics, which is independent of intention and the other usual physics invariants. I.e. The same chakra ink drawings produce the same results no matter who drew them and there is no complex intelligence controlling sealing. These can be random, but in that case you're always rolling from identical tables with identical seals.
Making a seal is opening a communications channel to the intelligence that resides within chakra and using your own chakra system to encode directions so that the chakra flows into your blank correctly.
