Hmm...given that "Death of Shikigami" won the last vote, but didn't happen (for lack of tableware), isn't it sort of a given that that'll be the next interlude (assuming adequate amounts of tableware)?
Turns out, this didn't take long at all to write. Enjoy.
Akane, MechApt (open lock):
13d100: 747
Lock, fulfill its only purpose in existence by staying closed:
?d100: 141
The lock snicked open in seconds; Akane tucked her tools away with a quietly proud smile and carefully slid the second-floor window open so she could eel inside. The rest of the team, clinging to the wall alongside her, followed her in.
Mari, Stealth:
?d100: 961
Keiko, Stealth:
10d100: 528
Akane, Stealth:
11d100: 646
Hazou, Stealth:
9d100: 85 DUDE???!!!
Sleeping Civilian, Awareness:
?d100: 87
Hazou was last through the window; the others had dispersed through the room, each to their own assigned task. Hazou waited a moment for his vision to adjust, then cat-footed to the bedroom door and eased it open a crack before peering inside. Honami had assured them that this suite had the same layout as the room next door that was occupied by Joutarou and his friends.
The room's occupants—a rich merchant and her husband—were sound asleep, so Hazou slipped inside...
...only to trip over a small valise that had been carelessly dropped near the door and faceplant on the hard wooden floor.
The merchant and her husband sat bolt upright in bed. The woman took one look around, saw Hazou, and screamed.
"Snakebite Black!" Mari called, delicate fingers dancing through genjutsu handseals with trained speed. Hazou and Akane circled left and right, coming in from their opponent's sides while Keiko sent a storm of metal from straight ahead.
The Iron Nerve took Hazou's body through the pattern of Inoue-sensei's orders without need for his attention, leaving him space to evaluate the situation. The room was just about the worst possible environment for a ninja fight: tight quarters, only one valid kawarimi target (the dresser), and poor lighting. The dim light would make genjutsu more difficult so, from one perspective, Snakebite was an odd choice. If Inoue-sensei managed to snag Joutarou with the genjutsu the fight would be over instantly. If not, she was effectively taking herself out of the fight for a few critical seconds.
From another perspective, it was the best of a series of bad options. In their planning sessions, she had made clear that his build, movements, and the sword on his back strongly suggested that Joutarou was a kenjutsu specialist. Fighting him at close range was a sucker's bet, she had said.
She was right.
Joutarou's sword swept from its sheath, slapping Keiko's kunai aside with contemptuous ease. It shifted casually to the right in order to slice Akane's throat open, then flicked to the left to cut Hazou's arm off at the shoulder. He balestraed forward and into a lunge that sent his point through Mari's face and out the back of her head. She fell back, the weight of her dead body tearing the sword from his hand and tugging him momentarily off balance.
The world froze around Hazou. He was in mid-collapse, halfway to his knees with white-hot agony screaming from his arm and shattering his thoughts into a million pieces. The geyser of blood coming almost straight from his heart seemed to take all his air with it, leaving him unable to do anything for a precious moment. He knew exactly what was going to happen. His lungs weren't working, but inside his head he was screaming for Keiko to run, get out, kawarimi away and vanish into the team's numerous escape routes outside. If she could make it to the edge of the compound and into one of Kagome's pre-prepared slips, she would be safe. Even a jonin wasn't going to follow her through what was waiting out there without getting mangled. All she had to do was run. And he knew, knew, that she wouldn't. Not when the dead body of her teacher, her mentor, her idol, her forbidden love, was literally hitting the floor at her feet.
Keiko screamed and the universe screamed with her. Chakra lightning exploded from the walls, rippling across her skin and connecting her to everything and everyone. She danced up those strands of lightning like the goddess of death, sliding effortlessly around Joutarou's desperate handstrikes and carving him up as she went.
The first kunai stabbed between the radius and ulna of her victim's left arm, providing a lever that shifted his balance a little more, causing his next strike to come up short. The second kunai went into his bicep at an angle, giving her an anchor to pull him forward as she dropped her entire weight straight down, massive chakra adhesion letting her move faster and pull harder than a girl her size should have been able to.
He tumbled forward, limbs flailing, his cry of surprise cut off as the point of a pink shuriken went in through his mouth and out through the top of his head, ripping most of his skull off in the process. Almost before the stroke was complete she was thrown backwards by the first of a series of massive seizures, feet and hands and head beating a staccato tattoo on the floor.
The world went dark around Hazou as bloodloss carried him off into unconsciousness and death. His final thought: Why was the shuriken pink?!
You have died. There are no saved games. Start over: Y/N?
Time to create a new protagonist; character creation rules are the same as before. You have an extra week to vote, as the GMs will need the time to figure out where we go from here.
Voting ends on Wednesday, August 17, 2016, at 12pm London time. Also, this entire update never happened; I was just feeling bored at the idea of writing another scouting update. The actual update will be out later—maybe today, probably tomorrow.
[x] Shikaku hears about Kagome's conspiracy theories
[x] Shikaku and Kagome meet in a Hyuuga-proofed room to warn each other about important hazards, Mari watches with increasing incredulity
[x] New Mechanics Preview - Get the thread talking about parts of the mechanics you're pretty firm on.
Kagome fidgeted silently up in his tree as the infiltration team started their final equipment check. He hadn't managed to convince Hazou to carry more of their explosive tag stock in his loadout, and there still hadn't been time to remake safety belts for everyone. For the millionth time he wondered if he should make a set of explosive rings for the whole team. After all, they'd been working well for Akane. She'd taken to training with them with her usual enthusiasm - that girl's gusto always brought a smile to his face, metaphorically if not literally. Wouldn't do to smile literally, where any stinker watching you could figure out what you cared about and use it against you. Then they'd use it as leverage to keep you locked in a stinking hole of a sealing workshop with no proper safety measures against having your eyeballs eaten out by semi-sentient acid slimes while you begged for death. But yeah, making explosive rings for everyone. Would that make his gift to Akane mean less? Would they take it as an insult to their fighting prowess? He'd never been good at this team relations stuff.
Hazou and the girls leapt off towards the inn. Kagome gave Noburi a thumbs up and gestured for the boy to head to intercept point B. Nobby was a good kid too, if not quite so good as Akane. Maybe a little full of himself. Kagome had to admit it wasn't totally unwarranted, given his bloodline and silver tongue. They were all good kids, he thought, if all kinda weird and not nearly worried enough about being killed horribly by hunter-nin looking for information the team didn't have and couldn't give up no matter how many kunai were driven under their fingernails -
Aaaaaaand a deep breath in. Aaaaaaand a deep breath out. We are calm. In. Calm, like a vast, mirrored lake. Out. Smooth, not even a ripple. In. Reflecting a million silent stars. Out. He could almost hear Mari's voice from when she had insisted on taking him through several breathing exercises he hadn't bothered practicing in decades, insisting that he needed them to keep his mind from wandering and to forestall any further shortening of his life due to stress. "Can't have you giving yourself a heart attack. All those stinking ninja stinkers would just love that, wouldn't they?" she had asked him, winking. She was right, of course - can't give the stinkers what they want. And so he focused on his breath, until the images of more creative uses for shuriken faded from the front of his mind and he was left with the stillness of the night around his chosen ambush point.
Kagome thought the other ninja would have reached the window they were targeting by now. Akane would be pulling out her pack of tools and getting it open no problem, the clever girl. Everyone slips in, looks around for places to hide cyphered information or traps or seals, and hops back out. Easy as pulling apart a leg of chicken you'd let boil too long because you were quintuple-checking the placement of the explosive seals at your team's bug-out point.
Speaking of which, he silently dropped from his vantage point and sextuple-checked the placement of the explosive seals at his team's bug-out point, nodding to himself as he mentally noted each one. Nothing appeared to have disturbed them since he checked earlier that evening. Shame about the chicken, though.
As he returned to his lookout position, he ran through what should be happening now. Kei would be analyzing everything with that amazing bloodline of hers, with Hazou giving input on good locations for seal traps and Mari and Akane discussing where they might put regular traps. Keiko would say something profoundly observant and Hazou would get the same look (the exact same look) he always did when she pointed out a hole in one of his plans or pulled a surprise play in Diplomancy. Mari would ruffle Hazous's hair and Akane would giggle and then they would come back be safe and everything would be just peachy.
He kept waiting, starting to fidget again. For them to be taking this long, something had to have gone wrong. They were in trouble, or hurt, or dead, or - no, he reminded himself, breathe. Maybe it wasn't even bad - maybe they'd found a hole in the security of the next suite over and had decided to snatch the info while they had the chance. Even if it was bad, he had to trust them. Trust Mari to get them through it. Trust clever little Keiko to figure a way out. Trust Hazou to do whatever he had to to keep his friends safe. They all needed him here, to blow the shit out of whatever stinkers were coming after them. What if they ran through here and got caught because he was off galavanting through the woods and wasn't around to set off the more dangerous traps?? That was no good. He stayed put.
Another long minute crept by. Kagome tasted blood and realized he'd bitten into his lip. Nothing good could have taken this long, he thought. But they weren't doomed for sure yet. Maybe they'd needed to follow their backup escape route towards Noburi, and now everyone was running from a crazy sword-wielding jounin and they'd meet up with him at one of their rendezvous points later. But he hadn't heard any explosions from that direction…
Deciding that waiting another second would be too agonizing, he leapt over to prime the bundle of explosive tags across the clearing in case the team came through while he was gone and then continued leaping towards the resort. His blood chilled as he saw the open window, and the scorch marks and dust on the walls inside.
Throwing caution almost entirely to the wind, Kagome shunshined up to the window and leapt through it. In an instant he took in the sword through Mari's face, the sea of blood around Hazou and his severed arm, the enemy's brains decorating one wall, Keiko on the ground unconscious, bound, and foaming at the mouth, and two others picking over another body. As one of them turned to look at him he saw it was Akane, slashed ear to ear.
Oh, wait, those weren't people, just two bloodstains on the opposite wall. Silly Kagome, seeing things again. He absently shook a scrap of paper from one of his hands. Meticulously, mechanically, he took out several storage scrolls, removed all the seals present, and placed the bodies of his friends inside them, put them away, and picked up Keiko's still breathing form.
---------------------------------
Noburi was worried. Scratch that, he was petrified, jumping at every sound that the woodland night produced. They should have been back a long time ago, but his job was just to wait, should he go to them, what if they were dead becuase he had done nothing, what if they needed him while he was gone and died because he did do something…
A sudden noise stood out from the ambiance of wind and trees and nocturnal animals. A figure stepped into the clearing to his right, deftly stepping around all the trapped areas. It sure looked like Kagome, but he was alone. Noburi almost blew the whole area up but stopped when he saw Keiko's limp form.
"Hale and hearty", Kagome said, sounding anything but, and laid the unconsious girl on the ground. Noburi dashed out of cover upon hearing the passphrase and immediately began pumping medical chakra into Keiko.
"Kagome, what happened? Why are you here? Where is everyone??" Noburi asked, wincing as his voice cracked.
Silently, the older man placed three storage scrolls on the ground. Noburi froze, trying desperately to process but finding his mind completely unwilling to cooperate.
"Do what you can for her." Noburi looked up at Kagome. "I'm gonna grab what we have here and at point A and blow this place to smithereens." The feral look from when he first joined the group had returned to his blue eyes which had until minutes ago seemed to be getting softer and softer.
"Kagome-sensei..." Noburi began hesitantly, "most people in the resort are civilians. They're not responsible for this."
Kagome blinked. "Huh, yeah, I guess you're right. No armageddon initiative, then. Different mission. We run. Hide. Stay safe. Kill every stinker who thinks it's a good idea to come after us. Survive and get stron enough to kill every stinking piece of shit stinker who thinks it's a great idea to teach kids to fight and kill each other."
Noburi gulped and nodded, pushing his attention and chakra back towards Keiko, and Kagome turned to pick up the tags in the area.
-----------------------------
He wouldn't cry on the outside, Kagome promised himself for the thousandth time as he carried the huge bundle of explosives towards the fort. Wouldn't do to cry where any stinker watching you could figure out what you cared about and use it against you.
Here is the set of mechanics we're most sure abuot. We would love to read all of your thoughts / comments / world-breaking exploits here in the thread. We're working hard to come to consensus on the rest of the mechanics and will show them to you guys as they settle down into more finalized forms.
Have at it!
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Here is the set of mechanics we're most sure abuot. We would love to read all of your thoughts / comments / world-breaking exploits here in the thread. We're working hard to come to consensus on the rest of the mechanics and will show them to you guys as they settle down into more finalized forms.
Have at it!
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1. No Stunts? Even keeping them away from supernatural stuff, they seem like a really convenient way to make characters conditionally good at stuff. A defensive Taijutsu master could get a Stunt that gives a bonus only on defensive rolls. Another character could have a Stunt with a bonus to detecting lies. Etc. Etc. Do you just view them as too complex?
2. I really like the High Concept/Trouble Aspect pairing that Dresden Files has and I think you should explicitly bring in. It gives you a super-quick way to make NPCs by defining their two most important aspects. "Okay, what is this guy's deal at its core? Now what is his biggest weakness/problem? Done!"
3. Not so sure about allowing Consequences to only soak 2 stress. That seems awfully little... I know you want combat to be "lethal", but coming out of fights with long-lasting injuries but not dying seems pretty true to how the PC and his companions have rolled in the game so far.
4. Is there a point to splitting up Calligraphy and Sealing if Calligraphy is only useful for Sealing? Might as well make sealing cost x3.
5. Not sure about the Resources skill... is that how you are sure you want to handle purchases?
It's a minor quibble, but why not just have "Melee" and "Ranged" on the skill list if they're separate skills?
Also, I suggest rolling Might into Athletics or Endurance. It's awfully niche otherwise (especially without Stunts to allow you to do weird stuff off of it).
I suspect the bit about "-3 dice" under Supplemental Actions means -3 to your pool, not -3 Fudge Dice?
In the example section, Hazou beating Alice 36 to 31 is described as 5 shifts, when the section before that says shifts come at a 1/3 (rounded up) of final advantage - I'm guessing it's a typo, and should be 2 shifts?
I'm somewhat concerned that the scaling Aspects system will produce odd results at mid-to-high levels between roughly equal opponents - the difference between spending a FP vs not becomes the difference between a glancing blow and a one-hit-kill, and at the high end the difference between spending a FP on an Aspect vs just spending it for a bonus approaches the same issue (depending on how many boxes you end up with for physical stress, this might become a little less scary, but still leaves FP really, really strong).
Finally, seconding @Briefvoice's confusion about Calligraphy being separate from Sealing - if all the skills were the same cost, it'd make sense, but it seems inelegant as-is if you're fine with just making Sealing very pricey by itself. I suppose we can use Iron Nerve to get around the Calligraphy prerequisite somewhat, so it does advantage us, but so would just having the Iron Nerve give a bonus on the Sealing check to create a Seal (especially since having high Calligraphy by itself is explicitly useless for creating Seals - being able to take it to make blanks for your Sealcrafter friends would justify it as a separate skill, but the rules document and the way the world's been shown both state that that doesn't work).
Here is the set of mechanics we're most sure abuot. We would love to read all of your thoughts / comments / world-breaking exploits here in the thread. We're working hard to come to consensus on the rest of the mechanics and will show them to you guys as they settle down into more finalized forms.
Have at it!
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Have to agree with @faflec this seems ridiculous to me when it comes to sealing. There can't be more than 1000 sealmasters in the world. They don't share research notes. So there should be tons of low lying fruit
Have to agree with @faflec this seems ridiculous to me when it comes to sealing. There can't be more than 1000 sealmasters in the world. They don't share research notes. So there should be tons of low lying fruit
This is a guess-with-implied-request-for-clarification (which seems like it should be a Nara handsign, now that I've typed it), but I think they mean "no longer available" from an in-world perspective (as in, if it's easy to do someone has already done it), not from a metagame perspective (as in, we used to let you get away with this, but now we'll be hardasses).
So, if we do something new and clever it might work, but we can't just design jutsu or seals that'll just win. Skywalkers, not reproducing Hirashin.
Either us players catch the hidden subtext or we don't and that should be all there is to it, IMO. In return, asking for clarifications for things Hazo should know shouldn't cost a valuable currency that adds flat ingame combat bonuses.
Examples:
Situation 1: Noburi is angry with us without outright saying so, yet with careful reading of the text you can spot the signs, such as giving one word replies at most or avoiding us. If we make a plan that relies on him being on friendly terms with us, that's our mistake.
Situation 2: We suggest to water walk over the sea in an update which Hazo tries to incorporate even though he knows that a teammate of 1-2 years cannot water walk (just a hypothetical scenario where water walking never came up with said character) so he gets laughed at even though he should have known better.
A) is fine the way it is but B) should be something QMs ideally tell you in advance won't work due to ingame knowledge or when we ask if Hazo would reasonably know if it is possible.
IIRC this is how things have been working anyway with some minor exceptions (like how we still don't know anything about Akane's teammates even though we presumably trained or made plans with them) and I think that worked out well.
1. No Stunts? Even keeping them away from supernatural stuff, they seem like a really convenient way to make characters conditionally good at stuff. A defensive Taijutsu master could get a Stunt that gives a bonus only on defensive rolls. Another character could have a Stunt with a bonus to detecting lies. Etc. Etc. Do you just view them as too complex?
I think it was mostly a spinoff from dumping Refresh.
As you know, in Dresden Files all characters have a Refresh stat, which varies based on the powerlevel you're playing. Refresh is used for two things:
At character creation you spend it to buy supernatural powers like 'use magic' and mortal stunts like 'ambidextrous'. (Very occasionally you earn more Refresh with which to buy more stuff, but it's mostly at creation.)
At the start of every session you get Fate Points equal to your Refresh stat. That means people who spend most of their Refresh on superpowers don't get very many Fate Points and are more vulnerable to being Compelled by people who do.
A 'Compel' is when someone says "hey, I am spending a Fate Point to make you do <X> because you have Aspect <Y>." For example, "I'm Compelling you to make you drink that wine because you have the Aspect 'Out of Control Drunk'" When you get Compelled you can pay a Fate Point in order to prevent the Compel or you can gain an FP and accept it. [This is a game-mechanical thing. You're not mind-controlling the person you're Compelling, you're causing them to choose one particular character-appropriate action instead of others.]
We looked at that and decided that we didn't really like the idea of Compels. They're designed for a multi-person real-time interaction; the GM says to a player "hey, I'm willing to pay you to do this thing which is in-character but not optimal for you" or a player says "hey, I'm willing to pay in order to exert direct control over the narrative by dictating the actions of an NPC." Neither of those is appropriate for MfD and they were going to require a lot of judgement calls. Easier just to dump them, which meant that FP slightly less critical and therefore so was Refresh.
None of the supernatural powers were appropriate for this quest, so those were all going out the window. (There are no ninja with the power 'Knight of the Cross', for example.) These are what the vast majority of Refresh get spent on, so Refresh just became much less important.
Most of the mortal stunts are either unimpressive or not appropriate for this quest. There were some we could have used, but not a lot. Again, Refresh becomes less critical.
We got to this point and realized that there wasn't a lot for Refresh to do. The whole point of this rules change is to streamline things, so dropping Compels, Refresh, powers, and stunts all in one go made a lot of sense.
2. I really like the High Concept/Trouble Aspect pairing that Dresden Files has and I think you should explicitly bring in. It gives you a super-quick way to make NPCs by defining their two most important aspects. "Okay, what is this guy's deal at its core? Now what is his biggest weakness/problem? Done!"
Oh, that is definitely staying. We haven't written up the 'how to create characters' section, but we are definitely keeping the standard DF way of doing it.
3. Not so sure about allowing Consequences to only soak 2 stress. That seems awfully little... I know you want combat to be "lethal", but coming out of fights with long-lasting injuries but not dying seems pretty true to how the PC and his companions have rolled in the game so far.
The Dresden Files system is very low-lethality; actually killing someone takes a lot of effort. In order to kill someone you need to:
Completely fill their stress track (usually 4 boxes in a mid-powered game)
Deal another 20 stress to burn through their consequences (Mild=2, Moderate=4, Severe=6, Extreme=8)
Deal another point to run off their stress track.
To put this in perspective, imagine that you took an Average person (skill 1), gave him a revolver (Weapon:2), and told him to kill some couch potato (Endurance of 0, therefore 2 boxes on the stress track). Assuming he rolls average each time he will have to empty the gun into Mr CouchPotato, then reload, then fire two more shots.
Compare this to MfD where it's almost impossible to kill someone in anything other than 2 hits.
Having it broken out doesn't change the total cost at all and is more simulationist. Furthermore, it's only useless if the hivemind decides it is. Off the top of my head I could image things like "Use Calligraphy to write a really elegant card for someone in order to generate the Aspect 'I Am Cultured'."
In the example section, Hazou beating Alice 36 to 31 is described as 5 shifts, when the section before that says shifts come at a 1/3 (rounded up) of final advantage - I'm guessing it's a typo, and should be 2 shifts?
I'm somewhat concerned that the scaling Aspects system will produce odd results at mid-to-high levels between roughly equal opponents - the difference between spending a FP vs not becomes the difference between a glancing blow and a one-hit-kill, and at the high end the difference between spending a FP on an Aspect vs just spending it for a bonus approaches the same issue (depending on how many boxes you end up with for physical stress, this might become a little less scary, but still leaves FP really, really strong).
Well, a skill from 30-39 has an Aspect bonus of +8, which on average is 3 shifts. That might be high, but we can fiddle with the formula if needed. We'll want to game out some battles.
This is a guess-with-implied-request-for-clarification (which seems like it should be a Nara handsign, now that I've typed it), but I think they mean "no longer available" from an in-world perspective (as in, if it's easy to do someone has already done it), not from a metagame perspective (as in, we used to let you get away with this, but now we'll be hardasses).
So, if we do something new and clever it might work, but we can't just design jutsu or seals that'll just win. Skywalkers, not reproducing Hirashin.
I think it was mostly a spinoff from dumping Refresh.
(cut Refresh explanation)
Most of the mortal stunts are either unimpressive or not appropriate for this quest. There were some we could have used, but not a lot. Again, Refresh becomes less critical.
You can have Stunts without Refresh. You could just buy them with xp instead. I think they're a useful tool for gating things and granting abilities that not everyone trained in a skill should have, but that would logically key off that skill.
For instance, I notice you don't currently have a Medicine skill. Now you could go and add one... or you could say that you need a "Doctor" stunt that allows you to use Academics for medical knowledge. Many of the higher level uses of Academics would be gated behind stunts, because it's a pain to have twenty skills, but you don't want everyone with a high Academics to be good at everything. (General Academics probably applies to researching stuff quickly.)
Also, I think when you're doing Fighting Styles you're going to find that whatever you come up with makes more sense as a chain of stunts rather than a skill. You still use Taijutsu (or maybe Weapons) for the style, but appropriate Stunts give little 'tricks' that you can do with the skill that people without the fighting style/stunt can't duplicate. Probably not all in one, but tiered so that you can buy them in order as you master the style.
Actually, speaking of Hiraishin; does it exist in MfD, and made by the Fourth? If the prior is not true, did it exist with the Fourth leading a team of seal researchers? If none of the above are true, did the Hiraishin not exist?
This is a guess-with-implied-request-for-clarification (which seems like it should be a Nara handsign, now that I've typed it), but I think they mean "no longer available" from an in-world perspective
So this is probably obvious but I feel that it should still be said...there should be a stated upper limit to how much we can move within our zone or else @Radvic will try to have Hazou run infinitely within his zone, breaking space-time and therefore the universe.
So this is probably obvious but I feel that it should still be said...there should be a stated upper limit to how much we can move within our zone or else @Radvic will try to have Hazou run infinitely within his zone, breaking space-time and therefore the universe.
@eaglejarl Could you clarify how the Move rules work? From reading the rules it sounds like whoever goes first in a round of combat gets to move to any opponent they want, and the opponent can't do anything about it since they didn't go first?
@eaglejarl Could you clarify how the Move rules work? From reading the rules it sounds like whoever goes first in a round of combat gets to move to any opponent they want, and the opponent can't do anything about it since they didn't go first?
Pretty much, yes. As long as that opponent is in the same zone, anyway.
On the other hand, DF provides clean rules for meatshielding and suppression fire which the old system didn't have. You simply declare: "I'm covering Keiko, making sure no one can get to her without going through me", which mechanically means you're setting up a Block on anyone getting to Keiko. Or, "I'm using thrown weapons to keep anyone from getting out the door", meaning "I'm setting up a Block against anyone getting through the door."
This is a guess-with-implied-request-for-clarification (which seems like it should be a Nara handsign, now that I've typed it), but I think they mean "no longer available" from an in-world perspective (as in, if it's easy to do someone has already done it), not from a metagame perspective (as in, we used to let you get away with this, but now we'll be hardasses).
So, if we do something new and clever it might work, but we can't just design jutsu or seals that'll just win. Skywalkers, not reproducing Hirashin.
So this is probably obvious but I feel that it should still be said...there should be a stated upper limit to how much we can move within our zone or else @Radvic will try to have Hazou run infinitely within his zone, breaking space-time and therefore the universe.
In canon (not 100% sure how much got kept into MfD, though I have the impression it's mostly the same) it was a seal invented by the 4th Hokage (the one who died sealing the 9-tails) which allowed him to instantaneously teleport to any copy of it in existence, and then he did things like give a knife with one on it to each ninja in an army and teleport-spam to take out whole battalions by himself. Nobody since has managed to figure out how it works. It was enough to get him a flee-on-sight order from basically everyone, because with the all the flickering about he was functionally untouchable and could just pop around until he got into your blind spot, then kill you.
What he said. It's a legendary seal, and if Jiraya hasn't managed to figure it out yet (despite being the guy who taught the 4th and also very likely knowing more about the seal than anyone else alive) I doubt we have a chance.
Edit: I have been reminded that I should be fully pedantic, and say that the 2nd Hokage invented the base seal, but the 4th was the one who adapted and weaponized it into the modern, horrifying form.
