Radvic's Analysis of why the Rules will never be perfect and what to do about that
To start with, let's establish the goal: we want a quest where things work regularly in a world consistent with that which has been shown up to this point. There are two primary reasons we're switching mechanics. First, the old system gathered a lot of bloat which made computing interactions increasingly more difficult. Second, the old system had undesirable effects the QMs did not predict happening.
Here, I'm going to discuss the second concern (I believe the first concern can be solved via automation). Effectively, the bugs in the system came to light because the system was not significantly playtested, and because players wanted to optimize heavily. Players had strong incentives for players to learn the ins and outs of the rules, and to build around those rules to make Hazou and his team strong. As a result, the players wound up understanding the rules better than the QMs. As evidence for this claim: the QMs were surprised that both Akane and Hazou could consistently roll above 50, the QMs were surprised that Noburi could one-shot significant combatants, the QMs were surprised by the effectiveness of Roki, the QMs underestimated the power of a single strong combatant (prior to multiple combatant rules), the QMs underestimated the benefit of min-maxing skills with the skill tree in Fated to Die, and the QMs underestimated the XP cost of getting a 5th element. There are probably other examples, but I feel like six is sufficient for this argument. Ultimately, the players have both a stronger incentive (since they are likely more attached to Hazou and friends) and more brain-power (since there's a lot more of them, some of whom are freakishly obsessive and write detailed write-ups coughicanstopanytimeiwanttocough) to find edge-cases in rules and exploit them.
All this to say: if there are bugs in the system, the players are highly motivated to find and exploit them if possible. I think there are three general solutions to this problem: 1) have a system without bugs that results in a world as the QMs intend it, 2) have a constantly refined system which revises itself as players find exploits, or 3) make it impossible for players to find mechanical exploits (even if they exist in the system).
Option 1
Regarding having a system without bugs that results in a world as the QMs intend it - I contest this is not possible given the scope of development available to Marked for Death in any reasonable period of time. It has now been two and a half months since we decided to revise mechanics. At the moment, I believe there are massive mismatches in how the QMs describe the world being and how the mechanics indicate the world would look. As examples, I would point to skill min-maxing benefits, Genjutsu, benefits of believing in yourself, certainty of victory given experience difference, relative strength of combat skills (taijutsu > weapons >> jutsu), and the cost of social skills (given the many required social skills for effective use). In addition to those concerns regarding the system as it stands are the litany of rules which have not yet been imported over. As examples of these, I point to the many, many seals we have, ways seals work when not used as they were intended (e.g. skywalker bonus), jutsu and justu exploitation, styles like Gentle fist, and all the pangolin jutsu. So, we are a fair ways off from having rules which are balanced significantly.
To estimate how long it would take us to reach balanced rules, we can look at a traditional tabletop game development. I believe these tend to consist of professional teams and public playtesting, and normally takes at least a year of development. Even after this, there are often broken parts of the rules which result in unbalanced classes. An argument can be made that "since we're basing the rules off FATE, there will be less work needed to balance it" however, I think that argument is bogus. If we were literally just taking the FATE rules and not porting over portions of the Augev rules, this would be true. However, we are not. We've effectively removed major components of the FATE balance system by 1) having skills be XP based, 2) removing the skill tree, 3) messing with the lethality, 4) adding chakra boosting, 5) allowing custom skill with mechanical bonuses, and 6) adding things like "Ninja Hands." These edits make sense from the perspective of "make the world look more like how the QMs intended it to be," but effecitvely remove the vast majority of the playtesting benefits we get from switching to FATE. For the sake of math however, I'll allow that this effectively reduces the difficulty in producing a balanced system to the difficulty of releasing an expansion for a ruleset. So, to effectively build and balance this to a level equivalent to that of, say, D&D 3.5 extended rule books, we'll assume it takes a third as long. My understanding of tabletop game development is that this takes somewhere on the order of magintude of at least 3 people working fulltime on the project for at least a year. In terms of person-hours this would be something like:
3 people * 40 hours / (week * person) * 50 weeks = 6000 hours.
This is from the developer side, without considering the time for play testing (which is effectively what the playerbase has been doing for the past two months). I don't know exactly how much time the QMs have spent on the rules, but if we assume each of them has been putting 10 hours a week into the process, that puts us around:
3 people * 10 hours / (week * person) * 8 weeks = 240 hours.
So, even if we estimate that the changes the QMs are putting in are a third as difficult as the changes made by releasing an expansion to a tabletop game, that puts us at right around
240 hours / 2000 hours
in terms of progress, or 12% of the way to balanced rules. We can also estimate how long it'll take for us to reach a reasonably balanced set of rules as:
(2000 hours - 240 hours) / (10 hours / (week * person) * 3 persons) = 58.7 weeks.
So, my order of magnitude estimate for the amount of time that it would take for us to reach effectively balanced and non-broken rules is somewhere on the order of 1 year of additional development. Then that gets us to rules approximately as balanced as D&D 3.5 expansions, if QMs are putting in 10 hours a week just on mechanics, players are effectively playtesting as much as D&D did, and the fact we're modifying the rules instead of developing new ones both makes development only as difficult as an expansion, and has an additional 1/3rd term. Personally, I think a more realistic number is closer to 3-10 years because I don't think we are effectively gaining much in terms of "stopping edge cases" from the FATE basis. I also think that even if we reached a balanced set of rules, it would become so difficult to navigate, that it would violate the other concerns for why we would want to switch to a new rules set (ease of interpretation), and that the ruleset we are searching for does not actually exist (or, at the very least, will require significantly more than a year of effort to reach).
Option 2
Regarding having a constantly refined system which revises itself as players find exploits - I contest that this is possible, but not optimal. Ultimately, this is what we've been doing up until the quest ended. As we hit edge cases, either the characters are better/worse than the QMs expect (e.g. Akane & Hazou punching, Noburi with draining), or the edge cases are removed/accounted for (e.g. multiplie combatant dice, injury tracking, substitution nukes). This causes QMs headaches as they constantly need to either reshape the world as a result of unforeseen mechanical exploits or fix the rules to remove mechanical exploits. It also causes the playerbase headaches as they regularly see "optimal" strategies made significantly weaker, and feel that their optimization has resulted in nothing. Ultimately, I think this option is better than trying to make a world without bugs, because its possible.
Option 3
Regarding making it impossible for players to find mechanical exploits - I think this is a possibility which has not been fully explored. Effectively, if the players don't know the explicit mechanics, then they won't be optimizing for edge cases. This means we could use a system which has flaws in it, but bloat is unlikely to accumulate because players won't be pushing for it. Additionally, all the edge-cases where the mechanics imply something happens which goes against the QM narrative can be whisked away with rules changes behind the curtain. This would provide the QMs with more flexibility in how to interpret rules (e.g. if a 2 years of studying punching makes you better at combat than if you had spent 3 years studying combat magic), players would not have the mismatch between narrative and mechanics, and QMs would not need to optimize for edge cases they themselves did not bring up. This also makes more sense from a simulationist perspective, because Hazou doesn't know how many points of Roki he has, or that he gets ~3 XP per day, or any of the other specifics of the mechanics system. This effectively makes meta-gaming impossible, or, at the very least, requires pouring over the written narrative, rather than the mechanics provided. From a player perspective, this would focus attention on the story. From a QM perspective, they would lose out on players offering solutions to edge cases, but they would also lose out on players finding edge cases in the first place, reducing the amount of damage control necessary, and could easily fix new edge cases without the players ever picking up on it (and thus complaining about it). Ultimately, I think this is a good option worth considering. At the moment, I think it's the best of the three possibilities.
Conclusion
I like Marked for Death and would like it to continue. I believe that it will take at least a year of additional work (probably more) to reach non-broken mechanics. I think the two realistic ways forward from here aside from abandoning the quest (which, continuing to strive for optimal rules is effectively doing) are to either 1) run with rules with edge cases which are unexplored and constantly refine the rules, or 2) hide the rules from the players and run with adhoc solutions until the QMs fix things behind the scenes to prevent needing further edge case solutions. I'm happy and content with either of those solutions. I am not happy with continuing to waste our time striving for an impossible goal.
) brains.
