A Humble Proposal for Internal Balance of Seals/Bioseals/Runes/Ninjutsu/Namikaze Minato's Revolutionary Soon-to-be-World-Changing Uber-Sealing Style (Note to Self: Come Back and Name This Later) Seals
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
In hope of aiding your eternal struggles with prep days, I bring this suggestion to you. As ever, we must look to those who have done similarly in the past. The tabletop system Mage: The Ascension/Awakening (different editions of the same-ish system) features the capacity to do completely freeform magic within a moderately rules-crunchy system. When judging difficulty, benchmarks are provided for what you can approximately expect of every 'level' of experience: Apprentice, Initiate, Disciple, Adept, and Master.
For instance, Apprentice for most of the schools of magic provide you the capacity to sense varying details about your school of magic, Initiate lets you manipulate your school in minor ways or create a shield against your school for yourself, all the way up to Master giving you the capacity to, in the school of Time, to do a time stop.
I'm bringing up this example because it seems like it might be of help to you in your efforts to create various setpoints amongst yourselves (this is
not for players to see) to judge our ideas against.
For instance: It's evidently the case that seals can make basic explosives pretty easily. So, you might set up a table as follows (Obviously, your descriptions of the effects will be very different than mine, and will in the case of sealing/ninjutsu factor in how many other smart people have had access to sealing/ninjutsu):
| Level | Effect |
| 10 | Affects the target minorly. The equivalent of a cantrip in effect level. |
| 20 | Combat-level effects, though relatively minor. Buffs of ~+1-3, may provide fragile aspects. |
| 30 | May turn the tide of combat if used well, but not inherently so. |
| 40 | [...] |
And
then, you make an adjustment to what the table based on how easy what we're trying to do should be in your judgement. So, from your persepctive, you say "Well, seals should have a pretty easy time making explosives work, so let's give them a -2 on the table" and that takes them down from 30 to 10, approximately where they are in MfD.
I don't know if this will be helpful for your current disagreements, or if you already do something like this, but I feel it might help you guys work out what the crux of disagremeents are and operationalize them in ways that are easier to engage with.
