PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Naruto homebrew help



Joshuam303
2018-03-08, 02:49 PM
Hi ! not sure if this is the right bit but here I go

Essentially, I have been wanting to do a naruto tabletop for ages (have a really good story), but none of the systems I have seen seem to capture the feel I want so I decided to try homebrew it but there's some stuff that I need help with so thought I'd ask here

So I'll put what I've thought of so far and hopefully someone can help (I've copied bit's and pieces from different systems)

1) the players will choose a elemental release at level one (character creation) from one of the basic 5 , they will get bonuses to using jutsu's of that element against it's weakness but will be more vulnerable to it's weakness (so someone with a fire release will do more damage to a wind release user , but will take more damage from a water release user) then at 11th, 16, 21 and so on , maybe make it so they can say if they have fire and water they could use the next release gained for scorch or something

2) characters will be able to choose a village they come from and what clan of said village, and access their techniques later , however they'll get less skill points from levelling and at the start and releases will be locked to that clans

so say someone chooses the uchiha's , they can only get fire, lightning and earth, and at the start won't have access to many of the uchiha techniques till a bit later on (say level 3 for first tomoe or something) where as a normal player could get skills faster but they wouldn't be as powerful till later as well (like shadow clones)

3) here's the different stats I had planned

Strength - The overall strength of the character, how strong they are as a person. Used for checks such as attempting to lift a heavy object or say win a arm wrestling competition if needs be. Good stat for characters that want to be tough.

Dexterity - The Measure of their agility as well as balance and their skill with their hands. Used for checks such as attempting anything acrobatic or trying to hit with a ranged weapon. Good for more graceful characters.

Constitution - How tough a person is and how much stamina they have. Used for checks regarding how strong your body is like it resisting poison or druugs or harsh colds

Charisma - Charisma measures a character’s force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, leadership, and how attractive people find you, used for checks where you need to inspire or talk your way into/out of things

Intelligence - A measure of how intelligent your character is , how he reasons and thinks. Used for skill checks regarding quiz's ,thinking back to a time before or thinking of how to escape a situation

Willpower - How will full someone is, a measure of how strong your mind is and how much it can take. Used for checks regarding mental attacks or such

Perception - How perceptive someone is, how much he can notice in his surrounding area. Used for checks regarding noticing someone spying or noticing something in the distanced

4) Here's the skills I had in mind

Acrobatics - How athletic one is.. Used for rolls such as trying to backflip off a wall or squeeze through small spaces.

Athletics - How athletic one is. Used for rolls such as trying to get somewhere before someone else does (IE a bad guy) or trying to lift heavy stuff.

Deception - How deceitful a person is. Used for rolls such as trying to deceive a shopkeeper into believing you aren't going to steal from her later or a guard into believing you were summoned into the village already.

Intimidation - How intimidating a person is. Used for intimidating a guard to let you in or a kid to give you his dinner money.

Knowledge - How knowledgeable someone is. Used for anything regarding history, tactics, etc etc (I was thinking of putting these as separate skills or something instead of all together ? just not sure how

Animal Handling - How good with animals someone is. Used for say calming a dog or cat or boar, can also be used to encourage any pets you have.

Medical - How good you are at anything medical related but not medical jutsu's. Used for say applying healing herbs or such. (not sure if I should remove this since there's healing jutsu's , this was more mean't for stuff other than it like bandaging wounds and such)

Persuasion - How persuasive one can be. Used for checks such as trying to persuade someone to drop their weapons , or a shop keeper to lower their prices.

Stealth - How stealthy one is , how hidden you can keep yourself and do stuff without being noticed. Used for checks such as sneaking up on people or such or trying to steal stuff. (should I add sleight of hand as another skill?)

Chakra Control - How well one can control their chakra. Used for stuff such as wall climbing, water walking and healing jutsu's.

I did originally have ninjutsu , genjutsu and taijutsu in here, and was gonna have them add so say like you were using taijutsu , you'd do say 1d20 + str + tai = roll for that, if it beats their AC then you hit and then roll the attack , say it's leaf hurricane, it could be like 3d6 then bam!

Ninjutsu would've been 1d20 + int + ninju for roll, then this time if this beats their ac it hits

Genjustu would've been 1d20 + wil + gen for roll then put it against will power

I read a d20 naruto thing (didn't like most hence me not using it) but one bit said 1d20 + character level could be "chakra resistance" so the 2 later ones would be under chakra resistance.

5) the basic premise (without spoiling the massive plot which to come) was that it's based after naruto became hokage and it's in a seprate timeline from boruto, so all the main cast will be there but none of the boruto stuff will have happened (haven't actually seen boruto) and the players are part of a new 4 man squad and are essentially owned by all the villages , (but operate in the leaf village) and I was thinking of like sending them on a couple of easy missions first to get them used to it , then give them options (since the teams get to pick quests in naruto) out of a couple of diiffernt options and diffculty, so if they say chose a A rank quest, the XP and rewards would be higher but It'd make it harder , or B wouldn't be as hard but wouldn't have as good loot either, then after that I was gonna have it that the team was summoned and sent somewhere by the joint hokage council after a hokage was assassinated then after doing some more story stuff and them finding the culprit they'd be put on hold again doing quests until more main stuff came up , I do have a good idea for the story main wise, but I like the idea of them choosing missions like you see in naruto too but I ain't sure if it would be boring? to give a hint to the proper story it'd be something like DC with alternative dimensions

6) Races

I was gonna do it like each village is it's own "race" so too speak, the mist village is very assassin heavy so was gonna give them more dex and stuff, was gonna give the thunder village much more toughness since they always seem to be bulk, then have iron village a dex and strength mix (since their samurai) leaf would've been more average since they seem to be like that

7) I was gonna do HP of off con and chakra of off willpower or int (not sure yet) so chakra would be like mana in MMO's , so jutsu's would cost mana and such, and when you go to 50% chakra you'd be fatigued, then 25% majorly fatigued , 0% and your basically a sloth, and the more you expend the more you have to rest after

EDIT 1

8) some games have feats how would I work this in ?

also this start might make it feel too goody-goody regarding alignment ?

Cespenar
2018-03-09, 07:33 AM
Check out the Naruto d20 system. I've had some pretty good games run by some terrific GMs, and the system does its job pretty well.

Satinavian
2018-03-09, 08:16 AM
I once considered how to do something like that.

Actually D20 does seem like a good fit. I would replace all the classes and have one class that provides Ninjutsu and one elemental release, a class that provides Taijutsu and one class that provides Genjutsu. The Taijutsu and Ninjutsu class would have variants for different combat styles/different releases. I would also introduce some non-ninja classes mainly for non-ninja NPCs but actually powerfull enough to be an interesting multiclass option.

Then i would use Gestalt rules and allow.taking several variants of the classses. This way the typical ninja (one release/one Taijutsu-school) would work, but all the special cases would be possible. A no Ninjutsu/no-Genjutsu character like a whole tradition of green clad guys? Sure. Someone like Kurenei specialized in Genjutsu but withexisting Nin- and Taijutsu ? Sure. Double element releases ? Sure, just take two releases (you could even start with one and learn the other later) Kekkei Genkais ? Sure. Make it feats requiring certain releases.

Now the difficult part is nail all the powers down and make progressions for it. And decide what scales with character level, what with release level/genjutsu level and how you balance all of that.

And yes, there is the question of how to model endurance with chakra, finesse with chakra and burst power with chakra as characters with thesame experience sure have different strengths and weaknesses. You could use skills but most ninjas would always put max ranks in all of them so that is not viable. You could link them to attributes, but that has other unwelcome consequences. Maybe a special resource ? Or bonus feats ?

inexorabletruth
2018-03-09, 08:23 AM
BELIEVE IT when the forum says Naruto d20 (http://narutod20.com/downloads/) is the way to go.

I tried to do a similar thing, but set in D&D 3.5, and it wooorked, but that was only because I made it work. It would've been more natural to use a system that was designed for Naruto Shonen shenanigans than some franken-brewed hodgepodge on another system.

And that's pretty much all the data(bayo!) I have on the subject.

Joshuam303
2018-03-09, 11:31 AM
I've seen the naruto d20 one but I don't like the class system, and it gives me a sore head trying to read it there's 1000+ pages :( to me , I only know of a couple of people limited to classes, most I see in naruto can do everything , ninjutsu, taijutsu, only genjutsu users seem to be in limited numbers

Faily
2018-03-09, 08:36 PM
I've seen the naruto d20 one but I don't like the class system, and it gives me a sore head trying to read it there's 1000+ pages :( to me , I only know of a couple of people limited to classes, most I see in naruto can do everything , ninjutsu, taijutsu, only genjutsu users seem to be in limited numbers

Well, multiclassing is a totally acceptable thing, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. And a lot Naruto characters are "specialised" in one way or another: Itachi is badass Genjutsu-specialist and Kurenai is also specialised in Genjutsu, Gai and Rock Lee are taijutsu-experts. And then you have people like Jiraiya who don't use Genjutsu at all (and the same goes for Naruto and Nagato).

Joshuam303
2018-03-09, 10:07 PM
I was more just looking for help with my system than moving to another :(

Satinavian
2018-03-10, 04:15 AM
Ok, how do you want to model different specializations ?

I hope, not via skill rankings. As obviously every ninja will always put max skill pints in the ninja skills (even to the exclusion of all other skills) and you still get very similar characters.

Via attributes ? I already don't like your way of linking attributes to Taijutsu, Ninjutsu and Gensutsu. That people specializing in Taijutsu are all strength based brute force types and people relying on Ninjutsu are particularly smart does not necessarily fit the source. Just look at Sakura who is more the intellectual type but outside of using superior chakra control for selfbuffing nearly exclusively relies on Taijutsu in fights. Or look at all the numerous Ninjutsu-based one trick ponies, most of whom are not particularly smart.
It is worst with Genjutsu. Willpower based, really ? Even ignoring that in typical shonen fashion the protagonist is probably the most typical example of success through sheer willpower, people like Kurenei surely don't impress primarily through will. Those deception based powers would best work on Charisma, maybe on Int, but not on Will.


I am also sceptical about village races. This would alone through mechanic fink fighting styles and Tai-/Nin-/Genjutsu specialisations to villages. That does not fit the source at all as all villages uses all ninja skills equally. Release types have different proportions in different villages. That and family based powers. I would skip races completely.

inexorabletruth
2018-03-11, 09:48 AM
You want to Homebrew an entire system? :smalleek:

Okay. *Cracks knuckles, and limbers up* Let's do this.

It looks like you're going to go with a d20 system chassis. Your skills look like they're taken mostly from DnD 5E. There's a solid start.

As for races, I'd use kekkai genkai instead of villages. You've got plenty of lore to work with there, and that way, it could still make sense why all of your players could be from the same villages. Give vanilla humans an inherent specialization bonus to their class or elemental domain to make them tempting enough to play.

Make your classes: Ninjustsu, Genjutsu, Taijutsu, and Irio Ninjutsu (since medical ninjas fight very differently from ninjutsu or taijutsu fighters).

But make each class choose a starting elemental domain (unless they select a kekkai genkai template, at which point their elemental domains are already included), with the ability to take a new domain every X levels (we'll say 5 for now, making it so even epic level elemental users can only use 4). Limit your elemental domain like spell levels, so that a fire ninja may be able to do wind spells at level 5, but only basic ones. By level 10, they are killer with fire, pretty good with wind, and a novice with lightning.

Your skills seem solid, although some may or may not be redundant depending on how you play. I would change the effect of a Medicine roll to Medicine Craft, so that things like Romaji Hyorogan can be crafted. Also, you can use this roll for sketchy dark medicine like what Kabuto and Orochimaru did.

As for Feats, just make them common techniques. Everyone starts with the E ranks feats (http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Special:SearchByProperty/Jutsu_rank/E), and gain feats every three levels from there. You'll have to decide how many feats they gain every three levels, but I would limit the access to letter ranking, and probably taper off the options once they get past level 10. Also, a kekkai genkai should be able to substitute a standard feat for a racial feat.

*huff, huff.... wipes sweat off brow*
And now we have the bare bones basis for a system template. Thoughts?

Martin Greywolf
2018-03-11, 03:40 PM
I made a Naruto homebrew myself and am in a middle of a campaign right now, it runs on FATE Core and the extra rules are about two to three pages long.

First real world advice, you'll need to decide on a lot of things. Naruto has one of the worst continuities out there, with plot, timeline and power levels.

Elemental affinities and skills

Your first problem here is that a fire user isn't more vulnerable to water user. I mean, how? Not only that, using a fire technique on a wind user isn't more effective either, otherwise Sasuke would torch Naruto's face off every time. If both grab a sword and stab each other just like that, how does element come into it? It's the techniques themselves that have this weakness, and that is hard to model in a system with passive defence like d20 - FATE is pretty good at it.

Clans, villages and techniques

What you have in point 2 is more fit for a MMO than a TTRPG. First of all, what village you choose will vastly influence a campaign, and it should be a part of campaign creation, not character creation.

Next, elemental affinities. Don't split them by country or family - first of all, we have a plenty of examples of people with affinities going against their country, starting with Naruto's wind. As for families, even if affinities are genetic, you'd need to be massively inbred to not have any unusal ones slip through, and what's mor important, it's an arbitrary restriction of player choice. Players can be fish out of water, family affinities should belong to DM guidelines on NPC creation.

I mean, playing an Uchiha with water affinity and therefore shunned by the rest isn't such a bad idea.

Stats

Basic ones of whatever system you end up using, with possibly adding chakra as a stat, since we know it can be trained and is assigned at birth. I made chakra be a stress track given by your peak skill.

Skills

Alright, it gets tricky here.

Taijutsu and kenjutsu is, in d20, just BAB, and should stay as such. If using any other system, this is your fight skill, no need to re-invent the wheel.

If we ignore those two ang go by canon, there are following skills to think of:


Direct chakra manipulation - tree walking, water walking, not dying after massive falls etc
Ninjutsu - you need hand seals for these at first, shadow clones and the like are here
Elemental ninjutsu - this is clearly separate from normal techniques, someone can be really good at shadow clones and suck at fireblast spamming
Genjutsu
Secret techniques - something that anyone can learn in theory, but is a guarded secret, Ino-Shika-Cho clan techniques, Aburame bugs and so on fall here
Medical
Seals/Fuinjutsu - these can do anything (demon control, teleportation, chakra sealing, explosives, storage, sensory barriers, etc etc) and can be applied by touch alone, potentially the most dangerous, but probably hard to learn


Chakra can be divided into:


Fire
Water
Earth
Wind
Lightning
Yin
Yang
Nature


Your skill list should handle these somewhat elegantly and logically, but not go into too much detail. What I did was create Bound (has handseals), Unboud (doesn't have handseals), Genjutsu, Elemental and Seals skills. With retrospact, I'd probably collapse Bound and Unbound into Ninjutsu as such. Stuff like healing and other more specialized things is handled by stunts (think perks in d20).

The Naruto is alive problem

If your Naruto is still around, you'll not be able to have any larger conflict without a massive ass pull. Remember, extradimensional aliens have been repelled, Naruto himself is basically a teleporting god and so on. There will be no war or big conflict between the villages because Konoha has godlike supoersoldier as their military dictator (de facto).

Races

Don't bother. It doesn't need them. If anything, give out perks based on villages, like academy in mist prepares you more for assassination stuff etc. Calling it race when it isn't a race is pointlessly confusing.

HP and mana

First, go forth and read up on death spiral. It really doesn't fit in with Naruto like stories.

Secondly, mana systems in tabletop are a bad idea because they are pretty hard to track. Will you have an excel sheet open? Honeslty, you don't need to track every little thing, just let them spam normal jutsu all day long and impose some sort of easy to track limit on the big stuff. My character has a stunt/perk called boombringer barrier where he surrounds a guy in octagonal barrier and detonates the bombs he planted inside, and can use it once per scene for massive damage. It works fine.

Rhedyn
2018-03-16, 09:27 AM
I would give Savage Worlds and the Superpowers Companion a look and see how well you could stat up Naruto characters with it.

I say this because if I was running a Naruto campaign that is what I would use.

I also think looking at a very different but still pretty crunchy tactical system would give you some good ideas for your own home brew.

Seto
2018-03-16, 02:49 PM
I find that the in-universe ranking of techniques (Rasengan is rank A, your basic fireball is rank D or C) is a good measure of spent chakra and how techniques should do against one another (maybe adjust up or down one rank according to elemental matchups). How about each ninja has a limited number of techniques of each rank depending on their level, either from a list or custom-created according to base rules? Techniques could be ninjutsu, elemental, taijutsu, genjutsu, Kuchiyose (invocation) etc., what would matter is each technique's power level.