Fixing Naruto worldbuilding

The only problem I found was the DBZ power level bullshit by the end of the first series otherwise I apprecited the fact that combat, no matter how fantastic, still required a great deal of strategy and complexity.

Sasuke vs Danzo was one of my favorite fights because literally he defeats Danzo's god mode jitsu by just casting a simple genjutsu on him to make him believe he had a few more minutes left on his god mode.

I like this angle too. Training starts better younger, and in the show the adults TRY to only assign the kids to missions they would be realistically be able to handle (Escorting an old man on a routine travel route, performing a massive field exam to graduate to the next level, NOT chasing after a notorious ninja criminal), but shit always goes wrong (The old man lied, he's being hunted by high tier assassins, a neighboring nation is using the field exam as a cover for their invasion, the kids chase the criminal anyways).

So that part is less a problem with the setting and more a fact of it being a shonen anime.

but then they wont be having badass fights. either they will be made too strong to make the fights interesting and it will lead to power creep or they dont have powers and its just watching retarded children get into slap fights

I kinda stopped reading during the team 7 arc, in where they turned Shikamaru into Sasuke, allowed him to fulfill his revenge, got into SSJ3 bullcrap with only 3 days of reading and playing shogi making him able to outspeed Kakashi and have infinite chakra.

Oh but kids died, lots of them, in the Ninja War 1 flasback you saw who Hashirama and Tobirama were 2 out of like 5 brothers, 3 of them died young as fuck in the war. Madara had 7 brothers, 5 died in that war too. It was brutal.

I don't think you can describe teenagers who've been trained in combat from a young age and have minor supernatural powers dueling to the death as a slapfight. It wouldn't be as flashy or impressive as the original but it still has plenty of potential to be entertaining.

>not watching retarded children get into slap fights

Honestly, even the Chuunin Exams were a mess. Could you honestly see someone like Iruka surviving the Chuunin Exams?

Make the Chunin Exam be just as 3rd hokage said: ninjalympics, complete with cultural posturing, that might lead to a promotion, and people get promoted all the time outside of it

oh yeah i forgot about the tobirama flashbacks. that was done well

They said in the manga that every exam was different, maybe his year was piece of cake

Iruka? Sure yeah. He didn't have any super special powers that were unique to him, which mean he just was that good at traditional ninja things. After all, the mission was to steal something and survive, not have awesome anime fights.

Shikamaru and company survived that part of the exam by going low profile as fuck. I can see Iruka doing the same. Also is not like Sakura was good back then and she survived it too, it all depends on your team. Maybe Irukas had strong dudes like Ebisu and Asuma for example

>Ebisu
>strong

Did we read the same series?

>Not sure how to fix eyebullshit.

Take the Mangekyo out and make the Rinnegan something for gods or spirits rather than humans.

LESS
FUCKING
PARALLELS

I like the parallels.

nothing good came after that. The only fun thing was the copy pasta about how Powerfull Uchiha Madara was. And I'm not talking about. Ok I better stop now.

If we believe what Kakashi says

My fix is:
Ninja get promoted normally after a number years of service and good record etc.
Fuck those are military ranks, why someone outside a country have ANY right to say how to assign ranks inside a military.

So ninjas have a normal carrier grows but if youngsters want to show off and if the want to make Ad for clients they have the Chunin exams.

More focus on the fact the villages are secret and exist parallel to a more "normal" Japanese modern fantasy world.

Immortal duo was so good, probably the only true evil dudes in the manga

We expand on the snakes, the slugs and the other villages and Kekkei genkai

Also number of Ninjas is inconsistent.

I would say FIre country has a 20 milions population. They have an elite military kinda like USA. USA have 300 milions population with 1 milion active personal.

So we have Fire country

20 M civilians

50 K Genins

5 K chunins

500 Jonins

Do those number seem reasonable?

Orochimaru stays.
Also, Orochimaru still gets away with it.

Only if he isn't all buddy buddy with the leaf and is constantly being hunted down

>believing anything Kakashi says

Besides if I recall he just said he was a good teacher.

Seems reasonable, but aren't they supposed to keep the number of their forces a secret because, you know, ninja?

I played a Naruto game once, my char was an Akimichi who summoned sandwiches and his weapon of choice was a bigass kitchen knife.

Whatever happens, sage mode stays in. That, and it's no longer taught by animals.

Naruto's lore was great for as long as the writer bothered to give decent explanations (with diagrams!) of how shit worked.
Roughly around the time of the reality warping eye jutsu bullshit, he completely gave up on that and a lot of the other shit he came up with since basically ran on Dr Who tier handwave garbage ideas that you'll have found five things wrong with by the time you get to the fridge for a snack.

I genuinely blame workload. He's clearly able to do it right, and he did for a good long while. Mangaka are worked to death and invariably hit a wall at some point, where their stress level just crushes their creativity.

So I suggest simply ignoring anything added after that point. Or possibly earlier, if I'm missing something else equally stupid.

The phases of the exam were testing some really important things, but the most complex things were all front-loaded
>stage 3
Can you hold your own in a fight? Do you know when you can't, and what to do?
>stage 2
Can you retrieve vital documents? Can you work with a team? Can you be trusted to not open the box labeled "do not open til Christmas?" Can you be strategic about stopping others from reaching their goals to make your chances of success higher? (Pro strat: amass as many scrolls as you can, head to the tower, get the pair you need, burn the rest. That many teams are now incapable of passing)
>stage 1
Can you retrieve specific info without getting caught? Did you do your homework beforehand so you don't have to waste time or risk failure trying to get it? Can you use your abilities discreetly, adapting them to a situation's unique needs? Do you have the guts to make the hard decision to move forward despite risk? Or are you basic bitch who plays it safe?

wily bastard "that was just a doombot" orochimaru is best

The chuunin exams that Naruto et. al. were in was a special case. There was an abnormal amount of high-potential (future legendary-level) ninja at that exam, with excellent combat ability. Plus, you might've forgotten that the Sand village kids were intentionally trolling the exam that year, and they caused a lot of the actual death that happened.

It was just an unusually brutal exam. Presumably normal exams have a few geniuses who sprint ahead, not a whole bunch of psychotic geniuses hell-bent on fucking with everyone else as much as humanly possible, instead of just fucking passing the exam.

What? Why? That seems like a step backwards in cool loreness. Animals teaching you shit is awesome.

This thread prove while Veeky Forums can make setting more """realistic""" to western fiction perspective, Veeky Forums can't make a setting more fun.

Which defeats the whole point.

And they even made a point of the fact that you could lose the combat round and still graduate. They wanted to see HOW you fought, not how badass you were.

I think it less proves that and more that Naruto as a setting wasn't all that bad. The setting itself was pretty rad.

I think everybody is focusing on the parts that were good to much (which were good for a reason) and not focusing on the parts that were bad and need fixing. Sadly, I didn't watch the bad parts for obvious reasons so I don't know what's entirely wrong with them to fix them.

To be fair what went wrong was power creep and poor understanding of scale. That was about it really. There was a lot of potential, it just got misused in the name of shonen plot escalation.

Well, then let's do something interesting and remove the powerscale and even the playing field while keeping a general similarity to the original plot.

>20 milions population
This isn't all that reasonable. I'd say maybe a quarter of that, tops.

What I wish was that there was more focus on tactics and use of tools. It came down to "I use a giant explosion" and it could have been so much more.

Well, then let's pick a giant explosion specifically of one event and try to change it to being tactics oriented.

The only problem I had was that they turned Naruto himself into a eugenicists wet dream prophesied chosen one instead of a guy who had to bust his ass to get on everyone elses level
I didn't even really mind the huge power jump toward the end of the series since that goes hand in hand with shonen in general

Just kill most of the high end jutsu that come up later in the series and that would do the job honestly. A fireball is fine, a little lightning on the hand isn't a problem. Being for all intents and purposes a human nuke is no good.

This is my absolute biggest issue with Naruto as a series.

I feel like Sarutobi vs. Orochimaru should be indicative of all fights between the tippy top tier of ninjas. Notice how it did NOT resemble Dragonball, in the sense that there were no megaton punches or giant energy beams/balls. Also, the powerlevel, while huge, was not massive like Dragonball.

Just keep everyone as low-level ninja.

None of this "summoning fuck huge kaiju" shit or city leveling jutsu.

Also, keep it in the past, away from the modern century.

Give samurai something decent they should really be stronger than ninja on average

I concur.
Anything better than grand fireball, early-series illusion techniques, basic sharingan or byakugan eye techniques, early chidori/rasengan, and so on, should come with significant trade-offs.

Lee's chuunin exam exploits and their severe consequences were an excellent example of how to do this kind of "elasticity" well.
It was so incredibly satisfying to see his decisions actually have real repercussions.

I don't think the raw power scale should go very far beyond that sort of stuff - instead, the best ninja should be the ones who come up with ways to supplement the power of their jutsu with other unique talents and abilities. The best ninja should be the fittest, quickest, most cunning, most innovative, and/or stealthy, underhanded, unpredictable, deceptive... etc. ones

And if you look for it in early Naruto, there was a lot of that happening. It was kind of a theme for a good long while, and then got left by the wayside later on as the series got less ninja-ey and more dragonballey.

This. This is why I said your best bet is to ignore everything after Chuunin Exams.
I'm not a fan of chidori or some of the other special techniques, either. I get that Naruto ninja are battle wizards, but it's still kind of ridiculous that a giant fan is seen as an acceptable weapon.

yeah. See that was the thing, was in the begining we had a few fights between elite ninja, the sarutobi orichimaru fight, or Kakashi v Zabuza, and they were good fights. Smaller scale, more thought out. Then we just got faster harder and bigger while loosing all the interesting nuance.

Well, animals can teach it to you but I can also totally see it being something someone could theoretically self teach. The first hokage seems to have been a self taught sage mode.

I actually feel that largely this is compatible with
Earlier on, even the "high power" fights were more about ninja deception/cunning speed-chess and less about throwing explodium at each other.
And that was honestly how the high-powered fights should've been throughout.

Modern Century stuff is what gives Naruto it's edge though. Without it its just normal boring ninja.

except modern century stuff is completely irrelevant, even in Boruto.

Sure, some of the sci-fi elements, like snakefag's cloning, are important, but even then they're mostly just a foot note, and powered/enabled by ninjutsu of some kind.

Tools. Tools should be a thing. Early on we saw traps, ninja wire, various weapons, exploding tags etc etc. That all fell off by the end, which I feel is a shame. Good tools and the ability to adapt them to the situation should the ninja make.

Self teaching stuff is incredibly hard. Are you familiar with the term standing on the shoulder of giants? Why teach yourself something if everybody has already done the hard work for you? You'd need to be a badass on the level of the first hokage in order to teach it to yourself anyways.

So a major problem with naruto is that at some point it stopped being "work hard enoygh and you'll be as good as everyone else no matter how bad your start is" and transitioned into " MUH EUGENICS, MUH ANCIENT PROPHECIES, MUH SPESSHUL EYES"
At what point did the theme shift?

Chuunin Arc.

Still, what's the problem? It's flavor for the setting. The weird technology/ninjitsu aesthetic of naruto is one of it's best if unexplored parts.

Naw, it was a bit after that really. I'd say shortly after he learned the rasengan, maybe even after the time skip. There was a bit of Uchiha wank even from the begining, but it didn't really go nuts until we started seeing Itachi.

I don't know about that. That's where Naruto proved that 'special eyes' could be beat with skill.

I'd argue that Chuunin Exams is when the theme started shifting from "using what you have in a smart way" to "this technique is POWERFUL". See: Chidori, Lee, giant summons, tailed beasts, etc.
It wasn't all at once, and it took a while to completely change, but that was where it started. Before that, the only thing we'd seen was a giant water dragon that took a lot of chakra.

Curb power levels. I'd say the scale is fine up until after Pain. Pain had the literal eyes of Ninja Jesus, he should be the max strength anyone should achieve in the setting. The Sharingan caps off at Amaterasu/Tsukiyomi/Kamui, no "controlling destiny". Susanoo should be its ultimate technique, and only the Stand version, not samurai mecha look.

It mainly just bothers me that it's always something associated with groups of animals. Too much shit is based on specific lineages, it takes away your ability to really make a character your own. Only Hyugas and Uchihas get special eyes, only specific families get specific releases, only people who train with specific groups of magical animals get specific sage modes. Shit like that bugs me.

That same flavor/aesthetic can be kept even if the game takes place four hundred years before the show.

and you avoid all the bullshit questions like: why aren't their ICBM's, satellites, jet aircraft, tanks, and modern fucking wars?

Because ninja have world ending powers?

Okay, fine. So how the fuck do they have cellphones, pocket computers, and shit? Genjutsu?

Load of crap.

You know whats something that has potential but never got fleshed out?
Samurai

Shit like that makes sense to me personally. I'm a martial artist, have been since I was a kid. Been to Korea and Japan and China and studied there as well as here in the states. While this is not the case as much as it was in the past, schools have techniques they don't share. If you aren't a member of that school of martial art you don't learn their techniques. They are their secrets. The idea that there would be groups who keep their own secret techniques makes sense to me. The bloodlines are a bit odd I admit, maybe if they were just techniques kept by certain groups rather than something inhereted it might be better.

It seems like the background matte paintings are on a 20th century level of tech, but the cels are 500 years behind. Once when I plated a Naruto play-by-post, I made a character who was an electrician's son, and the GM said it was inappropriate. Fuck you, they have TVs and refrigerators and houses don't just wire themselves.

>takes away your ability to really make a character your own
Make a character in that family or make your own lineage.

What's the problem?
More importantly, what's a better alternative?

So, Third Eye Games Wu Yin the Ninja Crusade is the best, fixed Naruto I can imagine.

First edition has number bloat problems, but second edition fixes a lot of that.
Everybody gets a bit of martial arts, everybody gets a bit of jutsu, being a summoner can be wicked useful but isn't the end all.

It's good fun.

weabs are retards user.

never play with weaboos.

Fair enough I suppose. Largely I'd just rather if we left out the exacts of who teaches secret techniques like Sage Mode or what have you, just to leave the potential for players to choose there. If it's literally just snakes and toads, then that's kind of boring isn't it? What about a group of mystic lizards or rats or something?

>make your own lineage.

That's more what I mean. Obviously you would need a special family to have certain things, but the specifics of that special family should be up to the player and the GM's discretion rather than being super concrete within the setting.

Now, you could decry this as snowflake-y bullshit, but that's what Naruto is all about right? A bunch of teams of special snowflakes who each have their own super unique power that contributes in it's own way?

Run it in Burning Wheel.

Keep the power levels low and focus on the characters and the drama.

It makes the action all the sweeter.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eK0Ix8HnhOXmG8CWIS5T8ullJebCjQfb-zqLg62-6XA/edit#gid=1918102296

Actually, an interesting way to do this might be to have the players pick abilities first, then pick the origin of those abilities second. Specific abilities would require specific types of origins to acquire with some abilities having different origins with different costs.

To use sage mode as an example.

>(Sage Mode) Potential Origins: Taught by Magic Animals [Regular cost], Taught by Human Master [Higher Cost], Self Taught [Extreme fuckhuge cost]

I just always ignored the world outside of what we were shown. Besides, you know that technology isn't a skill tree that evolves in a narrow path right? The major warefare stuff is already far surpassed by ninjitsu that wasting time developing a technological equivalent when you could be perfecting ninjitsu is inefficient. But developing cellphones and TVs and cars for noncombat use for the masses who can't do ninjitsu would be incredibly useful.

Specifically, the last phase of the chuunin arc. The moment where Naruto is fighting Neji, trying to prove that Lee was right. The point was supposed to be, "Willpower, determination, and hard work will beat your special snowflake eye bullshit." But it ended up being, "I also have a snowflake power, nine tales powerup commenceth!"

The followup to the fight should have been Lee punching Naruto for failing him, for beating Neji the wrong way.

Well, there's always the First Hokage.

You underestimate how effective thirty million mooks with guns and grenades can be.

Even with ninjutsu, modern arms would have developed. It's a game of scale.

But just handwave all the tech bs as being ninjutsu. Setting runs off rule of cool anyways.

Ninja's were definitely not created by aliens from the moon.

More fighting as a team.

Holy shit, this.

...Is... Is that entire thing the name of the system?

I'd argue it was before that. The fight with Haku was nothing but constant asspulls.

Oh, I had just assumed making your own lineages would be par for the course.

-Legends literally being stuff that happened 50 years ago

Agreed, I hated that the village system was so young, not even a century old.

To get the kind of unity and cultural development seen, a nationstate would have to be at least a century old.

The Haku fight could have been done better, but was also an important fight plot wise. It was a good place for that particular ninetails asspull.

Would have been more meaningful if Sasuke remained dead, or was at least wounded seriously enough that he had to work with his team in a fight from then on.

The 1st edition was "Wu Yin: The Ninja Crusade"
2nd edition was "The Ninja Crusade"

I will admit that all of that was a bit of a run on sentence.

I'll check it out, but I don't like the idea of a pure martial arts character not being viable. Rock Lee exists for a reason.