Huh...
It's snowing. How unusual. As it's been sunny and bloody cold for days, the stuff might actually stay around instead of its usual 'whoops, landed in wet warm England, sorry, gents!' vanishing act.
Am eying some ads in ConceptArt.org. Not sure if my stuff is up to scratch. Been long enough since I was last creative that I worry my edge is dulled. One step at a time, I s'pose.
Oh, and laid the groundwork tonight for a Naruto-based RPG. Players will be Rain and her friends Pixie and his brother Matt. It's been a loooooong time since I last gamed, much less GMed, so yikes all around. I worry that my players have a highly unrealistic expectation of my GMing abilities.
I'd originally planned to run it in GURPs. I mean, I've got the books, and there's decent software for character creation for it... but...Not sure. I think I may build up a scratch system using Gurps as a base. This is partly due to the fact that a generic genin shinobi costs 300pts just to cover basic skills. Yes, yes, cinematic martial arts stuff costs, but c'mon.
So I'm basing it more off the stats charts that the Naruto Official Data books use, with eight key points:
- Ninjutsu (Physical Mental skills).
- Taijutsu (Physical skills).
- Genjutsu (Mental skills)
- Intellegence.(Int.)
- Strength (Str.)
- Speed (Agl.)
- Stamina (End.)
- Seals (Not entirely sure what to do with this one... they're the hand gestures required to use most jutsu, Ninja techniques.)
Now, going through the book, it seems any given character can have a minimum of 0 in any attribute and a maximum of 6. Only seriously high end characters (The Kage, or village leader, and some of the tokubetsu jounin, the genius top ranking ninja) can squeak above that. On average, the new Ninja academy graduates, the lowest ranking ninja called genin, have about 12-18pts to to distribute towards the attributes. Sasuke and Naruto, for example, are fairly balanced in their expenditure, whilst Rock Lee (bless him) has a 5 in taijutsu and speed, 3 in strength and stamina, 1.5 in Int and oddly Seals. Nothing, nada, zip in the two attributes that require mental skills. Chuunin... Well, Iruka is the only chuunin, middle-ranking ninja, they give data on, but it looks like it's probably mid-20s to 30s in points. Jounin, the top ranking ninja, are 40-50, with tokubetsu jounin like Kakashi, the elite of the elite, in the 50-60 range. The Hokage seems to have most of the attributes maxed out.
...and I've just noticed the time. Ack. Right, will think on this and write up more in the following days. Thoughts?