I'm torn on whether everybody should get high awareness. It's a very important skill, but maybe we start by raising it disproportionately for one team member first and reevaluate later based on how it works out?
It's essential against Stealth, Trap and Genjutsu specialists. My current builds cut it at 18 for Nobby, 20 for Akane, and 21 for Keiko and Hazou; this way both pairs have one high Awareness score. I'm also assuming that we can get more dice for it through Sealing.
I'd also like to wait on raising stealth higher than around 15(depending on efficient attributes) and Transformation 20 until we have technique hacking. The basic 3 are some of the most refined techniques out there, but they're primarily designed so anybody can learn them. I'd like to see what else we can come up with before committing huge amounts of xp. In the meantime, we can purposely avoid situations that require stealth.
Getting TH for someone and getting use out of it will take a lot of time and I don't really see how we could just not do Stealth during that time.
I have a hard time fitting high TH anywhere in the current builds. Only Hazou's build has high Int as is (Hazou 20, Keiko 7, Nobby 5, Akane 2), and the only sensible way we could introduce TH to it would be to drop his Deception. If we do that though, he is no longer a Deception specialist and will get outdone in the field by people like Takahashi elder and mayor Emiya. You know, the sort of people we will keep running into.
The thing about social skills and Stealth is that in my mind if you are not doing one you need to be doing the other. To put it differently, if you are not interacting with people you should be evading them; otherwise they will outdo you in social combat and then things will look like what happened with that Irie guy.
If our non-social pair is not versed in Stealth, they will be super limited in the information gathering portions of our missions. With high Stealth they could contribute things like reconnaissance and stalking, or maybe just stay out of the way but close enough to be called in by the social pair if things turn hairy and someone needs to get stabber or something. If they don't have something to do for that time they will just be idling in the forest, and even that might require Stealth depending on the situation on the environment.
To put it other way, the three components of Talk, Fight, Evade model feed into each other. Whatever our main approach is, we can use the other two to supplement it. If we don't have high Stealth we are basically forgoing the Evade leg of the model, and the other two legs will suffer for it.
I'm kinda sad that you were the only one to drop your thoughts on what sort of positions our teammates should take in the future. Don't people like building kick-ass ninja teams or what?
