Hakke: Enkaku Hōfuku Butai | Eight Trigrams: Distant Avenging Force | 八卦:遠隔報復部隊

[Princess]

Hakke: Enkaku Hōfuku Butai | Eight Trigrams: Distant Avenging Force | 八卦:遠隔報復部隊
Effect: While the Byakugan is active, attacks and techniques used by puppets the user controls are modified by ninjutsu and taijutsu at the normal ratios.
Description: Perhaps the greatest advantage a Hyuuga puppeteer holds over their peers, where a lesser master will summon and manipulate chakra strings with their fingers, weaving their jutsu together with their directions, the Hyuuga’s natural ability to exert chakra through their tenketsu allows the Hyuuga puppeteer unrivaled freedom and control of their puppet, managing naturally what others spend a lifetime to achieve. Each swift movement of the Hyuuga's body is mimicked down to a fraction of a second by their weapon, allowing the Hyuuga's natural proclivity for enhanced taijutsu to be reflected in the puppet's actions.
Cost: -2

Edited July 24, 2018 by Princess

[Princess]

LOGIC: Because it's an AS and maths doesn't really play into this part.

What is this? It's a means to get puppets while you have the Byakugan. Tony said he was 100% for people who owned two AS combining them, and Azure, clan curator and head, stated "That seems vastly cool. And am okay with." when I showed this to him, so the idea has tacit support. I'll go through what each of the three skills from this do, and we can go from there.

Full Body Marionette Artistry: This is the real building block of this advanced system, without it you'll have a real hard time getting much from it. While the AS is active, you are considered to be using Kugutsu no Jutsu and the Byakugan, fairly standard practice I assume for any union Advanced System. Then it follows fairly normal Kugutsu stipulations, with the exceptions that they must be humanoid puppets (purely an RP restriction) and you can never have more than 1 puppet active at a time (a real restriction!). This is at -1 because the journey to get here is -5sp, -4jp and a good thousand+ ryo, which I think a skill that enables you to utilise stuff you've already paid for shouldn't be too expensive.

Diffused Byakugan Vision: This is the bonus from the Byakugan being active, the core stat boosting element of the original bloodline. In my first look at this, I lowered the bonus it grants, but upon doing more research I realised that would just mean statistically speaking you're better off buying equipment up to the 15% cap from engineer and using the regular Byakugan, as you're loosing 500 stats. Instead, I'm electing to go a different route. As is now, you gain the full offensive bonuses of the Byakugan (Vision and Targeting) while using a puppet, but you lose the defensive skills. Given you're also paying 3SP more than standard, it seems good to me.

Focused Byakugan Targeting: Like with Diffused Byakugan Vision, this gains its additions directly by increasing the base skill from the Byakugan bloodline. This one, instead of granting the crit range to the user, only grants it when the puppet is used. This isn't really a downside, unless you are prevented from using the puppet for whatever reason, at which point the bonus is lost until the puppet returns to use. As with Diffused, it's costed the same as the base skill, so 4 effective ranks, -2 for the first rank, -1 for the subsequent 3.

I also changed this so that Vision and Targeting are each pegged to one of the two Byakugan skills this doesn't inherently benefit from. Meaning you can't just neglect half the Byakugan to use this on the cheap, to get this at full power you must fully invest in the Byakugan,

All in all, this should be a nifty blend of the two. You won't get the huge versatility of running several puppets at once and jumping between the stats of each, but you'll be able to have a significant bond with one or two particular ones that you can utilise your Byakugan to assist through battle, which also in turn protects the Hyuuga themselves. This is designed, unlike most union's I've heard theorised about, to be taken at the beginning, invested in fully, then to grow as the composite parts grow themselves. As your Byakugan improves, so too does your Diffused Byakugan. As your puppets grow stronger, so too do you while you summon them. Together, you should be able to keep up with a dedicated specialist in either area, though your SP resources will be stretched thin between all the resources you need.
 

Edited November 16, 2017 by Princess

[Kouta]

Byakugan, for reference.

This isn't really a blend of the two. You took the two strongest parts of Byakugan and kept them, and then you added puppets to it. The "defensive skills" you pruned are the most situational and weakest parts of the eye, but the skills you kept are simply always good. That makes this too strong.

 

The big issue to me comes in that your reasoning for keeping Byakugan at full power was "because it would be a better option to just turn on byak and have 15% from engineer"....so naturally, the answer to that is to keep full powered byak, 15% from engineer, AND have puppets. You see the problem there? You are undervaluing puppets because they don't give you a stat bonus. So you think you should get them and give up nothing. Which is wrong.

 

You have to give something up in order get the intense flexibility puppets create. Puppets are the side-deck mechanic of NA. You can change puppets on the fly to respond to literally any threat. You could MAKE puppet parts with the same effects as the defensive skills you no longer get. Thats how flexible they are. I'd absolutely say you need to weaken your Byakugan. One of the trade-offs you get for turning on puppets is that the Byakugan gets weaker. Yes, that means you'll end up with less bonus stats. A ninja who uses a Puppet gets 0 bonus stats. A ninja who uses Byakugan gets 1440 bonus stats. So your combination should be right in the middle.

 

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As to making this cleaner, I'd simplify this. Instead of building your own psuedo byakugan, why not let the ninja fully take the Byakugan, so that if their puppets are destroyed they can just activate full Byakugan? I'd make it much much simpler.

- Full Body Marionette Artistry will lay out your rules. I would not make this "act as Kugutsu". I would just say "This character can activate the Byakugan and Kugutsu no Jutsu at the same time. Their combined upkeep becomes X% chakra per turn." Because just turning on your AS shouldn't cast the jutsu for you. You still need to do that.

Also, puppet rules say "by default, only one puppet" so your restriction here is kind of pointless, because any skill that modifies that would modify this too. Also, there's no benefit to having multiple puppets that having 1 puppet cannot solve in a slightly less efficient but still perfectly fine way. So its not really a restriction here, and I'd honestly cut the restriction altogether. You give up some of your byakugan to have puppets. So have puppets.

Then full body artistry can just lay out how your Byakugan responds. "When Kugutsu no Jutsu is active, the skill Byakugan Sight only grants .75x per rank to Accuracy and Evasion, and the character may not use "Byakugan Evasion" or "Byakugan Focus"." 

Then leave Byakugan Targeting completely alone. You get to still use it. In its entirety. You don't have to spend an outrageous number of extra SP, and divide ranks in half. The whole AS can be rolled into one skill at -5 SP and off you pop.

Edited February 4, 2018 by Kouta

[Princess]

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you have said. I kept the upkeep at 5% because you're paying 5% to activate this, 5% to then activate Byakugan and 5% for Kugutsu. So you're paying a total of 15% of your total chakra with 5% upkeep each turn starting from when you first activate either Byakugan or Kugutsu. This has no inherent upkeep and doesn't hurt advanced regen, so you can activate it turn 1, leave it for a while to regen and then use those stats to pop puppets/byakugan, but most puppeteers will want to have their puppets out sooner rather than later so without doing the hard maths on it I am uncertain how effective that would be as a strategy.

Also added in a note about humanoid puppets because I always bleed lore into mechanics and people hate me for it. I have a problem, my hiatus has not cured me. 

[wolfnin]

Can i get the link to Byakugan on here for reference please? 

[Princess]

The Byakugan

[Princess]

Ooookay puppet preview is up and this seems to gel pretty much fine with what it looks like they can do. So I'm bumping this up the ladder to remind people I am interested in it still. Yay. Kouta's suggested changes still mesh with my goal, the system overall allows you to retain some buffs while using puppets, and as we see now what they lose in raw stats puppets can make up for with nifty tricks, so I'm less concerned overall that you're at a net loss if you use this.

[Cellar Door]

The Kugutsu jutsu is still in the drafting room being worked on, but with the soft release, I feel pretty comfortable letting you know that it will not be an Advanced System. Rest easy knowing that you won't need to spend 5 SP to make your bloodline and your weapon work together.

[Princess]

Oh, if that's the case this can be scrapped. I just wanted a Hyuuga puppeteer, if that's something the changes will allow them I am 100% for it. WOO!