Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Can I sign up?

I don't have the time to look through everything yet since I need to get to work, but later I definitely will.

 

I'm sort of confused about the rules with chakra attributes. Is the idea that we buy some water chakra points, and then we have 1337 water ninjutsu 5|<111Z, and so when we say "I want to make a dragon out of water and ride on its back," you're like "okay, that sounds like a water ninjutsu task with difficulty 5, I'll roll one thousand three hundred and thirty seven dice from you, and 5 opposition dice, and the difference between these two rolls will indicate how good your water dragon is." And is our water chakra skill the only thing that contributes, or do we get a bonus if we have good chakra control?

Similarly, is there any bonus to kicking and punching people if we're really strong, or is that screened off by our taijutsu number?

Or do chakra attributes function like the base stats? So if we wanted to ride around on a big water dragon, you'd be like "That sounds like an application of the Control Water technique. Since you currently have hella water attributes, your maximum possible Control Water skill is very high, but as you have yet to actually put any skill points into Control Water, you cannot make a sweet water dragon today."

 

Here's some voting options to get you all started. And sure thing @Rooster you're all welcome, just toss in a vote and you're part of the quest.

Be careful relying on OOC knowledge, because we've done a lot of backstory work on this and the specific event you're relying on might never have happened. We've generally kept the broad strokes the same, but be warned that it's AU from this point onwards. We have also tried to make the high level players more competent in their planning.

Also, be warned that the world of Naruto is a death world, and we intend to treat it as such. Your creativity and clever thinking may just make the difference.

What type of Ninja are you? We'll fill in the stats for generic types but if you want something specific you'll have to write in.
[ ] Heavy Taijutsu, all close range combat all the time.
[ ] Weapon Specialist, you fill people with metal until they stop moving.
[ ] Ninjutsu Specialist, you're throwing fire from behind the meatshields. Your elemental affinity is:
-[ ] Fire
-[ ] Earth
-[ ] Wind
-[ ] Water
-[ ] Lightning
[ ] Write in

What Hidden Village are you from? This will decide which major faction will attempt to hunt you down like dishonourable dogs, as well as influencing how certain other villages will see you. Choosing write in is subject to GM approval. For example, Sound Village doesn't waste good experimental subjects on suicide missions when they could be dissected.
[ ] Rock
[ ] Mist
[ ] Cloud
[ ] Write in

Whose territory are you hiding out in? You might have to abandon it if you are discovered, but this will affect who discovers you and how long it takes them.
[ ] Leaf
[ ] Rock
[ ] Mist
[ ] Cloud
[ ] Hot Springs
[ ] Waterfall
[ ] Grass
[ ] Write in

You've made a refuge in the wilderness, what is it like?
[ ] Clearing in the woods
[ ] A cave
[ ] Tents with a rough palisade
[ ] Write in

 

This. Chakra attributes limit the maximum amount of skill points that can be put into elemental techniques.

Attributes determine how good the character could be. Skills tell us how good the character is. This is true for all attributes.

 

I'm not certain about specifics, but general ideas/recommendations:

Bloodlines have always been a defining characteristic of the Narutoverse. Therefore, we should aim for at least one, if not possibly two of those. Possibles ideas:

• Targeted induced amnesia (ie you forget who I am) - Genjutsu?
• The ability to not breathe
• Chakra-vision, similar to Byakugen (balance option: you are also blind and deaf)
• Neurotic - as a result of hearing many different and conflicting voices in your head, you are naturally proficient at breaking Genjutsu and resisting any other forms of compulsion

 

[X] Ninjutsu Specialist, you're throwing fire from behind the meatshields. Your elemental affinity is:
-[X] Wind
[X] Cloud
[X] Waterfall
[X] Clearing in the woods

Wind is best because wherever we go, it'll be there and easy to use/manipulate. ... Unless we attempt to live underwater or in the vacuum of space.

 

[x]plan global
[x] She is a Genjutsu (illusions) specialist with an affinity to use kunai and poisons. Knows how to make storage scrolls.
fleeing from
[x] Mist
in the coast of land of fire patrolled by the
[x] Leaf
our camp consists of
[x] Tents with a rough palisade and sentries on the trees. A concealing mist jutsu is constantly being refreshed by chunin to help camouflage it.

 

Combat:
[X] Taijutsu, with close-range kunai. Heavy substitution use (flicker would be nicer) (can you substitute with kunai?) for unpredictability and speed. Stealth and Awareness.
(Emphasized Attributes: Dexterity, Strength, Stamina, Control, Wits, Capacity, Resolve)
(Emphasized Skills: Taijutsu, Weapons (if hand-to-hand weapon use is included in the skill, and not just throwing weapons), Awareness, Stealth, Substitution)
(Other Skills: Chakra Adhesion, Dispelling, Resisting Intimidation, Resisting Diplomacy, Tactical Movement)

From:
[X] Rock
[X] primary Earth affinity

Hiding out in:
[X] The Land of Iron, southern area, near Waterfall (assuming canon map)

in a:
[X] Cave

Gender:
[X] Female

Name: Charles Barkley

 

[X] Ninjutsu Specialist, you're throwing fire from behind the meatshields. Your elemental affinity is:
-[X] Wind
[X] Cloud
[X] Leaf
[X] A cave

 

[X] Heavy Taijutsu, all close range combat all the time.
[X] Rock
[X] Mist
[X] A cave

 

Combat:
[] Taijutsu, with close-range kunai. Heavy substitution use (flicker would be nicer) (can you substitute with kunai?) for unpredictability and speed. Stealth and Awareness.
(Emphasized Attributes: Dexterity, Strength, Stamina, Control, Wits, Capacity, Resolve)
(Emphasized Skills: Taijutsu, Weapons (if hand-to-hand weapon use is included in the skill, and not just throwing weapons), Awareness, Stealth, Substitution)
(Other Skills: Chakra Adhesion, Dispelling, Resisting Intimidation, Resisting Diplomacy, Tactical Movement)

From:
[] Rock
[] primary Earth affinity

Hiding out in:
[] The Land of Iron, southern area, near Waterfall (assuming canon map)

in a:
[] Cave

Edit: Potential Vote Change

 

You can't have two bloodlines, for three reasons.

• Nobody that valuable would ever be sent on a suicide mission.
• You'd be severely crippled, with only 17% of your attribute points left to spend on actual attributes.
• The rules say so.

Way too powerful. You'd be an unstoppable infiltrator/saboteur. Your village might keep you permanently out on missions if they didn't trust you, but they wouldn't deliberately sacrifice such a valuable asset.

Perfect. Unique, useful, but ultimately no more valuable to the village than a well-developed skill.

Either incredibly OP/valuable or utterly crippling. Also probably not fun to play in a written format.

A ninja with inner voices intense enough to break through genjutsu is going to have serious concentration problems and probably won't live long. If you're fine with that, you can have it. (though it's pretty weird for neurosis to be a Bloodline Limit)

 

Velorian already covered it but just to expand on Neurotic, if you want to spend 30 points to become insane then you are allowed to do that, but you're going to spend an awful lot of time talking to people who aren't there when you should be sneaking and dodging attacks that never existed. It would be a short life.

 

Bloodlines potentially useful for Taijutsu:

Steel Skeleton: You might have a distant Kaguya ancestor. A bastardized, low level variant of the Shikotsumyako that only allows you to harden your bones without manipulating them whatsoever. <- Not very useful for the village by itself, combat boost for "hard" style taijutsu, potentially thin bloodrelation to one of the bullshit divine clans. And hey, never having to deal with broken bones!

Poison Claw: Your clan has somehow gotten glands capable of producing a variety of poisons attached to their fingertips, just beneath their sharpened fingernails. <- Cheap access to poison, but nothing a dedicated specialist can't do at least as well.

Mindcloud Grasp: Bad Touch effect that makes people more and more dizzy the longer you hold skin contact, eventually knocking them out. <- Ninja can usually do that faster with other measures, but some synergy with a grappling focused style, might have growth potential with more chakra control?

 

I think instead of just voting for fun, we should look for interesting synergies to build characters around.

Tanjetsu plus medical plus electrical and we can use medical info to deliver targeted and efficient shocks in combat to critical locations.

Ranged weapons plus air is good targetting and defense, and a good reason to buy seals and eventually explosive tags.

Weapons plus lightning and we can do electrified ninja wirre.

Can we do cool things with weapons and earth?

In general, what is something that looks awkward to start and has growth potential? I will note that getting all stats to 2 eats half the points. If we want to pull off clever tricks, I expect we will want unusually high int too.

 

Would this be the case if it's a Genjutsu-based ability (ie Dispellable), with restrictions such as one target at a time, and only lasts as long as you are focusing on them/the effect?

(That's fine if so, just verifying that what o was thinking of made sense)

The concept I was going for was the posters' votes here, even the non-winning ones, would be possibly represented and influencing factors, such as if one poster had a crackpot idea that she saw a weird pattern that actually matched what was happening, then the character would think/hear it.

As you said, not necessarily great, but it seemed thematic.

 

Earth seems to be a shoe in for Taijutsu. Earth armor, using the Underground Projection jutsu to close to melee range, control footwork by controlling the makeup of the battleground. That sort of stuff.

 

Steel Skeleton, Poison Claw and Mindcloud Grasp all seem reasonable, though Velorian or Eagle might countermand that later.

Just an ominous hint right here: we have made plans for what to do if your character dies, and they don't include ending the quest. So try to choose smartly the first time around.

 

Suggestion: Some kind of atypical vision, like tetrachromacy or protanopia. Genjutsu will be easy to spot because they will immediately make all the colours look like how a normal person would see them. Red/green colourblindness and green-focussed tetrachromacy would also allow us to instantly see through green camoflauge.

 

Since it looks like there's plenty of GM discretion to keep us from finding anything too overpowered to do, we should do whatever's fun. And fun, to me, means being a medieval japanese wizard. The rest of the post will be with this in mind, but it's also totally okay if we build a fighter or a all-rounder ninja instead.

I'm not sold on wind. Sure, it's omnipresent, but it's not like lightning users can't make lightning, or fire users make fire. I want an element with lots of creative wizarding possiblities. One other option is to eschew elemental techniques and use vanilla yin/yang techniques like most ninja (shadow manipulation, becoming bigger/stronger, turning into a dog, swapping minds with other people, animating objects, basically all of Genjutsu, the Rasengan, etc). In fact, the possibilities there are so diverse that I don't think it's worthwhile to invest deeply into the elements.

Thinking about elements in terms of what they can do that vanilla ninjutsu can't:
Earth: manipulation of earth, both large scale and for personal offense/defense. Sensing things through the earth?
Water: like Earth, but wetter. Better when fighting on a lake, worse when fighting on land.
Fire: burning things, potentially many things at once. Fire immunity?
Air: sound manipulation, guiding projectiles, cutting things slightly better. Flying?
Lightning: zapping things, getting in decisive hits even through defenses.

If we're doing a wizard, our decisive offensive attacks should be spells (compared to speccing Earth Armor and Earth Manipulation and then just punching people). If these spells are not neutral, like Shadow Imitation or Rasengan, then they need to be elemental. So maybe Lightning? Or maybe Earth supporting Genjutsu?

 

So little mechanics info... Are the basic three as powerful as in lighting up the dark or maybe we need high level in their individual skills?
I would prefer something with area of effect attacks since most defense in naruto is basically dodging...
And a focus on dodging for the same reason
The choice of village and location are sorta random as we cannot use OOC knowledge
A cave leaves no options for a secondary exit in case of attack (but of course it depends on the cave), and a palisade is not going to stop enemy ninja. I would prefer not to leave any sort of permanent trace of our passage, just in case of ninjas.

 

Okay, i have two general concepts i'd like to run by the thread:

Steel Skeleton plus heavy Taijutsu focus with an Earth affinity. Focus first on physical abilities, mental and chakra secondary, Social dumpstat. Focus on getting that Earth Armor Jutsu up. Straightforward tank, hopefully able to survive what the world can throw at him, with the ability to run away underground added to our repertoire shortly.

That Bloodline that keeps people from breathing as a Ninjutsu specialist with an Earth focus. Codename: Mole. Sitting underground all day everyday because breathing is for loosers. Needs to figure out how to sense things from beneath the earth, but after that he should be golden. Ninjas can't catch me because i am underground.

 

There's a genjutsu that puts people to sleep: Temple of Nirvana Technique

Apparently easy to resist (although that might just be because canon genjutsu are useless unless you have a sharingan), but might be useful against hordes of low level enemies. Could also serve as a very good opening move when ambushing enemy ninja.

We should look into similar insta-win techniques for other fighting styles if we don't plan to use genjutsu.