What do hedges have to do with this?
For the record, I have a writeup of Sage Mode burning a hole in my pocket. Can't wait for y'all to either learn it or see someone use it. Ditto for another major power up the nature of which I will not disclose but I note that it is within your grasp given appropriate effort
So we have we spent sufficient effort trying to figure out what the second one is? More importantly, have we road-mapped out the conversations to get us moving towards sage mode? Because blaming FOOM benefits on being a sage AND getting sage mode benefits sounds amazing. We know it exists, I think, so that should be enough to start conversations at least?
I pre-commit to any reasonably plan that has a sentence or two about investigating sage mode.
Incidentally, 3D sealcraft is my poor but best guess for the major power-up.
Noburi couldn't help but think about the last time the Gōketsu had traded with the Pangolin Clan and the geopolitical fallout thereof. Granted, he wasn't going to give them skytower seals. Probably not even seals at all. Metals, cloth (they had difficulty with weaving), maybe some exotic foods from the Human Path. What could go wrong?
Screaming in faflec as a function of meta-Kagome.
But really, if the Pangolin draw a hard line about trading, that just lose out of QoL and time-efficiency trades. Though I'm curious what Keiko had to trade for her summon assault allies.
Don't forget that XP is ultimately an abstraction though. If you have played basketball for 10,000 hours, having more hours in a day to keep practicing isn't nearly as useful as it is for a beginner. At some point, you WILL soft cap on your performance capabilities. You might occasionally find tips and tricks that give you slight edges occasionally, but your raw skill and ability doesn't go up forever. This isn't a literal RPG world, if you're at your best then getting a bunch of XP doesn't mean anything
This has been mostly talked through, but I think there's two big reasons why this kind of falls apart. One is breathe, and one is escalation.
So, let's say hypothetically up can't get a skill over 100. As long as there wasn't a total XP limit, you could still level up other skills. The versatility goes a long way. If you don't need to use more Chakra using your armor because your substitute is so good as well, you're just a bit better. Having Melee and thrown weapons instead of 1. Etc. This doesn't even get into a bunch of the soft stats. Being able to get a bunch of niche-useful skills to 60 eventually is super useful. Especially for projects that are locked without multiple high level pre-requisites. Imagine what we could do with TM 60, seal 80, and 5 different chakra natures? Total XP cap is the only big worry, and at that point we're presumably at LEAST as good as Hashirama or Hiruzen at their best. And have family in the same tier. That's enough to get things done.
The second is escalation. We want to fight Chakra golems. To be able to beat S-rankers. To beat S-rankers potentially without killing them. To make seals that push against the fabric of reality. To beat Mari in a social contest. There's a lot of goal that will challenge us. Kagome's XP total isn't high considering his age because he actively minimized his chance of risk and his chance of new experiences. Given how Hazou's life has been going the past couple years, I'm not terribly worried about that happening. If nothing else, as long as social combat gives XP, until our physical and social skills are high level we'll still have room to grow.
All this is the Watsonian explaination. Doylist, my guess is that as long as we make entertaining plans, the QMs still enjoy the story, and the player base is involved, we'll move forward. Policy is set by real humans, and either there's already a policy in place for when we hit a certain threshold, or there isn't. Either way, best we can do is just keep trying our best and act like we could be killed anytime, but plan for as if we're trying to become the new Sage of six Paths.
