So, when the uncap system was originally introduced, it was a three-month free trial lasting up through the end of March. Now, after April Fools is over and we're not panicking about a stressful update, I'm ready to give my retrospective:
When the uncap system was announced, I was interested and tentatively optimistic. I agree with the motives for its inception, and as we saw with the wordcount penalties it's eminently possible to adjust the behaviour of the hivemind by changing the context of our decisions. This new system seemed poised to deliver that same benefit for our adventuring rates.
Unfortunately, the more I saw of the system, in discussions and in action, the more my optimism wore off. It comes with awkward edge cases, unpleasant side-effects, and isn't even all that good at what it's intended to do. Here following are the concerns I have with the current system:
1) Efficacy: The main thrust of the system is that, by forcing us to go out and do things to uncap our skills, we'll go out and have cool adventures on our own accord. The critical flaw, though, is that we are not always raising stats conducive to cool adventures. It would be one thing if we were pushing our Taijutsu or something else in our combat suite, but instead we're pushing Resolve and Sealing and we'll get around to Taijutsu... uh... eventually. The system doesn't not work, we're right now seeing incentive to go do a meaningful research project and uncap our Sealing, but as already mentioned Taijutsu is lying abandoned in a corner. Overall the uncap system is not very good at achieving its desired effects.
2) Edge cases: The premise of uncapping works out pretty well for our main stats. There's always another sealing project to do and another horrific monster to punch (sometimes in that order, in rapid succession), but there aren't many opportunities to use situational or low-level skills like Living Roots or Stealth. We may not have any intention of pursuing those stats right now, but the prospect of pursuing them does not sound simple or intuitive. If we wanted to level Cracking, we'd have to find a meaningful Cracking challenge for someone with level 4 Cracking, and then again at level 9, 14, and 19 before we can even begin to go up against anyone's Trapmaking for real. Finding these meaningful Cracking challenges would be... even if we knew where to look, it would feel horribly petty, wouldn't it? We'd be pursuing uncaps for the sake of uncaps, contriving a 'meaningful challenge' for skills we're not good at so that one day we might have an actually meaningful use for them. It's the awkwardness of fetch quests, just waiting to happen.
3) Side-effects: If a given uncap only affects the next division of five levels, the highest you can possibly move in one training plan is 9 levels. Bar any further elaborations or adjustments, all of which would increase the complexity of the uncap system, 'leapfrogging' stats across ABs becomes impossible. This implication was ratified by the QMs after some discussion of the topic with the hivemind. It's a reasonable decision, given the nature of uncaps, but it's still a bad aftertaste. Options for respeccing are already very limited, and leapfrogging was one of the critical tools for it in many of our build plans. Removing leapfrogging doesn't destroy respeccing, but it makes it much harder and makes many builds that much more calcified, which I find moderately dispreferrable.
Overall, the uncap system is not a failed system. The edge cases can theoretically be patched up as we run into them, and the loss of leapfrogging can just be the necessary price for the system to function. It doesn't stir us to action in quite the way it was supposed to, but we'll need to level Taijutsu eventually so it's not like it won't do anything. It's just... a lot of downsides, is all.
But a piece of advice I've seen from here is that while it's good to point out problems you see, it's better to also help solve them. So I was thinking about alternatives to the uncap system, and I think I have something:
Stagnancy, a mechanic which strongly encourages regular use of your main skills, whatever they happen to be.
The narrative side of it goes as such: A ninja who neglects their specializations, the skills which they forged in trials by fire, will naturally find themselves losing that 'edge', that something that kept them in top form. It takes more and more effort to simply avoid falling behind, cutting into the rest of their training time.
Mechanically, if a character goes an extended period of time without properly exercising the core skills of their build, they may receive a persistent 10% penalty to their XP rate, increasing in severity the longer the skills remain unused up to a 100% loss of all incoming XP. The penalty is removed/reduced when they go and use those skills in a meaningful way, until the next time they become so lax.
For someone like Hazou, his build is a mixture of Taijutsu-spec and Sealing-spec, so he is expected to engage in both those activities semi-regularly. If he goes a long time without doing any Sealing, he may begin to take an XP penalty until he does a proper sealing project. If he goes a long time without engaging in real combat, he may begin to take an XP penalty until he punches something in the face.
The exact duration 'a long time' represents is up to QM discretion, as is what roles a ninja's expected to stay active in. Given the trustworthiness of the QMs, I anticipate rigid and specific benchmarks would provide no meaningful advantage while bogging the whole thing down in nitty gritty. If y'all say Kei's gone too long without killing something with an exploding kunai, that's good enough for me.
For convenience's sake, it would be nice to have a short grace period before the penalty is properly applied. For example, at the end of an update the QM may state something like "Hazou thinks his Taijutsu is getting rusty. He wants to find some way to get some real practice in, before he starts slipping." and then we have a few updates to seek out a combat challenge to prevent the penalty from being applied in the first place. As with uncaps, NPCs can seek to avoid stagnancy penalties when possible, though if no opportunities are available they may still suffer one.
I believe this mechanic will do a better job of spurring us to do cool and interesting things than the uncap system, with fewer edge cases or side-effects. Firstly, stagnancy always pushes us to exercise what we're good at, meaning the challenges we seek out will always be level-appropriate and a good fit for our builds. Hazou will avoid stagnancy by doing sealing research and punching things, not by getting way out of his depth in social combat or doing Baby's First Lockpicking. Mari, by contrast, will avoid stagnancy by dancing social circles around people and weaving elaborate genjutsu rather than sneaking around unseen. This avoids the awkward edge cases of low-level or situational stats and should do a far better job of, frankly, getting Hazou off his butt and out there punching something.
Secondly, while it is true that stagnancy means we can level skills without actively using them, this is only up to a point: you can only level a stat so much before it becomes a focus of your build and you'll be expected to exercise it on the regular. Thus we allow characters to 'dabble' with as many skills as they like while organically ensuring the growth of our character is accompanied by appropriate feats: Hazou's social stats are not those of a career politician's, at least not yet, but if we choose to seriously push stats like Deceit and Presence so he can 1v1 people in the council room we'll soon find ourselves obligated to out-social people in the council room (or other similar activities), which to me sounds like a wonderful bonding of mechanics and narrative.
Overall, I expect the stagnancy system to be less bookkeeping than uncaps, less awkward than uncaps, and better than uncaps at changing the incentives of the hivemind in the direction of cool adventures that utilize the full potential of our characters. I imagine there are a variety of places where the system can be fine-tuned, but even as it is right now I strongly prefer it to the existing uncap system. What do you think?
