A Chemistry Suggestion

Good morning folks, I’m here to give an opinion and a suggestion for a change to Chemistry. A skill that is exceptionally powerful when you really dive down into it. The aspect in particular I’ll be talking about will be the use of poisons and in particular.

Specifically the following.

Look Poisons:

In particular I refer to the ‘Permanent stat reduction’ aspect of them. Personally I think this is insanely powerful. Especially given the increase in experience requirements to reach A and S rank in a particular stat. It is actually that part in particular that I have issues with and not necessarily the stat reduction that lasts an extremely long time.

To that end I have a solution that I believe retains the strength of such poisons on that level. Without making it quite so cripplingly strong to a build. Rather than make it so that someone has to retrain the damaged stat why not take a page out of the restricted guidelines, specifically, the Eight Inner Gates, and make it so that a ‘-’ is recovered every few days (Gates uses 1 - per 4 days but the numbers here don’t matter too much I think). Medical personnel can obviously remove the poison from the system via a tech designed to remove poisons of such high rank, or at least reduce the recovery time.

To that end you’d end up with a note in the Chemistry Guidelines under poisons saying something akin to.

• Permanent stat reductions last the rest of the topic the afflicted individual is in and afterwards 1 ‘-’ is recovered every ‘x’ days. A shinobi with Ijutsu using a jutsu that removes poisons with power equal to or greater than the rank of poison can remove said poison immediately whereas otherwise a shinobi with Ijutsu with an intelligence stat at least 1 rank below the rank of the poison can reduce the recovery rate by ‘x’ days per -.
  

'x' being a placeholder for whatever number staff decides.

This keeps the spirit of the power of permanent stat reduction poisons without making them so powerful as to suddenly cost someone up to 300 posts of experience. With all of that said, I welcome critique of the suggestion <3. Thank you for your time.

Hey, just wanted to weigh in. I really like the idea of allowing people to heal up the permanent damage to stats over a course of time/posts/etc. I don't actually think that the permanent damage is that overboard in strength, but I do think that a healing period to recover/repair them would be very cool and could have some cool character development stuff instead of just exp grind back.

Val, were you thinking like OCC days to recover or having some kind of post requirement attached to it? I, personally, like the idea of something active going into the recovery, like at the end of each thread you get a + back or something like that, and healing and such can increase those returns. You'd have to play for awhile with the debilitation but could slowly recuperate instead of after acquiring X exp you bam are back to full.

The basic idea I'd had for recovery was to utilize a similar system to how the drawbacks on Gates is recovered. Which you can see below.

'Once the damage takes effect, it will impair the user's stats until recovery takes place. Recovery happens over the course of real time days, that is, days passing in the real world and not in the game world. For every 4 days that pass, a single - is removed from all affected stats. This means it takes 4 days to fully recover from opening the First Gate, but 28 days to fully recover from the Seventh Gate. This time can be halved for as long as the character is receiving medical attention; this means first being treated by a Player Character with the Ijutsu Skill and then avoiding combat -entering combat will end the bonus and the character will need to be treated again to resume it.'

That's just a base line idea though as the body will naturally work to fight off any poison so it makes sense that a gradual recovery over time is possible while someone with actual medical expertise can help the recovery, facilitating the bodies ability to recover from the effects of such a vicious poison.

Obviously the numbers could and probably should be changed. The thought was just to base the recovery system itself around that one.

So it seems like this isn't so much about Chemistry, but rather about Poison?

Given how many venoms/poisons there are in the world that do very similar things to the body-- we have whole classifications and categories for what they all do-- what about developing a "Skill Tree" for Poison/Chem? It seems like we're trying to reinvent the wheel, when Biology has all the information we need. For instance, for each grade of poison, you pick X-number of effects your poison can have. The more complex the poison, the greater the number of effects it can have.

1. For starters: These classifications tell us what venoms can and cannot do, within the realm of natural biology. This puts hard limits on them, but they do have individual potencies depending on the critter using them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venom
- Myotoxins
- Neurotoxins
- Cytotoxins
- hemotoxins
- Necrotoxins (Which do not involve raising the dead)

2. Then we can narrow down individual traits for each one, and create "Status Effects" for poisons; this limits what poisons can and cannot do, and controls Chemistry a bit. We can also derive examples of "status effects" from real world poisons, for a list.

For example:
- "Heavy Bleed/Hemorrhage" An effect of poison preventing coagulation of the blood. Until medical attention can be administered, Heavy Bleed causes a a "-" debuff to Strength and Stamina, doubling to a "--" on turn 5, and finally a full 1 tier de-buff on Turn 7, accelerating by a full 1 Tier per turn by Turn 9, until death or medical intervention (This is a crazy spit-ball suggestion of a status effect, do NOT take it literally)

So I'm thinking here we'd have:

D-Grade Poisons: Select 1 Effects
C-Grade Poisons: Select 2 Effects
B-Grade Poisons: Select 2 Effects, with 1 Custom Effect <- Encourages 1 SP investment into Chem for those using Kugutsu.

A-Grade Poisons: Select 3 Effects, with 1 Custom Effect
S-Grade Poisons: Select 4 Effects, with 1 Custom Effects
X-Grade Poisons: Select 2 Effects, with 3 Custom Effects

Status Effects can be: (And I'm just listing whatever comes to mind here-- We could even use DND/RPG mechanics here too!)

- Mild Loss of Coordination [Insert description here]
- Chakra depletion
- Vision reduction
- Distort sense of time
- Reduce senses
- Enhance senses/Exaggerate to debilitating level -- Touch, Smell, Sight, Taste, Balance, Hearing
- Blood loss / Anti-coagulation, or hemotoxic effects
- Skin irritants
- Eye irritants
- Respiratory damage
- Hair loss!
- Indigestion! Nausea!
- Increase/decrease strength
- Effect balance
- Thirst
- Simulate super spicy things! Capsaicin!

Custom Effects: This is where the "Man made" poisons we all know come into play that have unique effects that would be engineered by someone with handling chemicals and venoms. Players can register a custom effect for a poison that requires additional skill (Ex. Kugutsu requiring a 1 SP Chem investment).

3. We can then register poisons like such:

[Custom Name for Poison]
Rank/Grade: C
Selected Effects:
- Status Effect 1
- Status Effect 2
Custom Description of Poison:
- Custom description here

If we have enough status effects available, this creates a large number of combinations that we can pull from, and that players can mish-mash together for their own unique combinations. However it produces a secondary effect of limiting what poisons can and cannot do, which makes for easier modding. It also makes it easier for players to produce poisons by removing the abundance of choice, and provides us with clear options to choose from. If Players want to have more custom effects they need to invest in Chemistry from other Skills (Ex. Kugutsu or Ijutsu), this controls the availability of custom effects and makes the Chem skill a bit more valuable.

Tl;Dr: The framework for organizing poisons already exists IRL.
Step 1. Take poison categories
Step 2. Create pre-made status effects that are pre-approved for easy modding.
Step 3. Apply number of status effects per poison, with options to make Custom status effects. Custom effects are the only part that need to be examined.
Step 4. App poisons.

I don't think changes to the poison system are necessary. Its pretty difficult to land poisons to begin with as most people have numerous ways of avoiding it regardless of whether its use subtly or in outright combat. The damage it does to stats is severe but I think that's part and parcel with it being so hard to connect against.