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I'm running a DnD 5e game with several friends of mine, and one of the things that I've heard from a few of my players, led by my partner, is that they'd really love to play an RPG game based on the universe of Naruto, a show they have a ton of nostalgia for. I did find a D20-based naruto RPG system that appears to be fan made, but I gak you not it is 1,100 pages long, and that dog won't hunt.

Most of my players will not be veteran RPG players, and the DnD 5e system is what they know. So my goal is to create a homebrewed system that works for Naruto's crazy, over-the-top, cinematic combat, that uses enough elements from 5e that my players will be familiar with most of the concepts.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TrLVEek3_6pxmMpV07ziiqiWe3UXfRgxFgvzOhXzjkc/edit?usp=sharing

This is where I'm at right now. I have a few goals in mind.

-Combat needs to take A WHILE, and needs to include a lot of roleplaying/interaction.

In the universe of Naruto, fights are often multi-episode affairs, with tons of mid-combat banter, flashbacks for the animators to re-use footage, monologues, analyzing enemies' abilities, explaining your own abilities, etc.

So my plan here is to try and bake that in to the core combat mechanic, using two concepts. First, the idea that attacking is generally more expensive than avoiding unless you've analyzed your opponent and you know their moves, and second, doing away with Hit Points in favor of characters having Chakra pools and Body Damage. I want a character who just uses their actions to charge up their chakra and launch attacks blindly to lose to an opponent that waits and uses Learn actions to shut down their opponent's techniques and defenses before attacking.

-Damage needs to be cinematic, as rarely do characters take more than 1 or 2 actual hits that connect before going down.

Hence, Body Damage. When you are successfully hit by another character, you take first a Light injury, then a Serious injury, and then you are down. For NPCs this will vary of course, but for most PCs that will be how damage will work.

Luckily, as long as you have Chakra and you are allowed to use it in your reaction, you can absolutely guarantee your defense will succeed - reactions with chakra add double your relevant stat modifier and you can spend extra points of Chakra to add +3 to the roll until you beat the attack.

I'm hoping at this point to be able to hand-craft my players' abilities for the most part, using the kind of sample techniques I've run through playtests with as a guideline for myself, rather than making my players choose from a big "spell list" and abide by that.

Right now, the issues I'm running into are:

1) Wisdom (which is used to recharge chakra) feels more important than Constitution (your initial chakra pool). But if I make the initial pool too big, it's too easy for a character to brute-force their way through a fight without using any Learn actions.

2) Constructing your character so that their "dump stat" is one of the three stats used to cast and react with chakra techniques (Str, Int and Cha) seems to have less of a downside than having Con, Dex, or especially Wis as your dump stat. I need a mechanic maybe baked into Learn that gives a disadvantage to making all your techniques cast from the same stat. There is a disadvantage on defense, because it's fairly easy to use Learn to shut down an enemy's ability to react to you using one particular stat, but currently if someone has, say, 4 techniques that work off of Int and you Learn one of them, you only get a bonus defending against that technique and they can attack you with one of the other 3.

3) I'm on the fence about making the various in-combat roles into skill rolls as opposed to core stat rolls. On one hand, that would integrate Skill Proficiencies more readily into combat, on the other any skill proficiency that isn't involved in combat will be far less valuable. I may heavily trim down the skill list from DnD5e and then make sure every skill has some use in combat.

You could make the Constitution modifier the amount of light injuries you can take before you take a serious injury - maximum is +5, so this character is an absolute tank, and if you have +1 or less, you can only take 1 hit, next hit is serious injury.

Couple that with charged attacks, pulled off properly, causing multiple hits and you should lend the constitution some weight!

 some bloke wrote:
You could make the Constitution modifier the amount of light injuries you can take before you take a serious injury - maximum is +5, so this character is an absolute tank, and if you have +1 or less, you can only take 1 hit, next hit is serious injury.

Couple that with charged attacks, pulled off properly, causing multiple hits and you should lend the constitution some weight!

Hmmm, that is an interesting idea. I want to keep combat damage as abstracted as possible, because in an anime show like that, it's pretty unusual for someone to actually take a hit on the chin and keep going, the attacks are so over-the-top deadly that usually when someone takes a solid hit the fight's basically over. Maybe every 2 points of con mod gets you 1 extra Light Injury slot.

But light injuries do reduce your effectiveness, so even if you did have 5 by the time you got down to serious injury you'd be taking Disadvantage on basically all your rolls, or have basically no techniques left.

I'll run through a couple of playtests with that, and maybe I'll also try a lesser version where having +3 CON gives you 1 extra injury and +5 gives you 2. I think the most potentially abusive character with that kind of stat spread would be +5 Con, next highest Dex, enhanced mundane weapon and all techniques are just maintained Dex attack boosts. So I'll run that against more balanced characters with 5 light injury slots, then 3 light injury slots and see if it feels like it has adequate counterplay.

the_scotsman wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
You could make the Constitution modifier the amount of light injuries you can take before you take a serious injury - maximum is +5, so this character is an absolute tank, and if you have +1 or less, you can only take 1 hit, next hit is serious injury.

Couple that with charged attacks, pulled off properly, causing multiple hits and you should lend the constitution some weight!

Hmmm, that is an interesting idea. I want to keep combat damage as abstracted as possible, because in an anime show like that, it's pretty unusual for someone to actually take a hit on the chin and keep going, the attacks are so over-the-top deadly that usually when someone takes a solid hit the fight's basically over. Maybe every 2 points of con mod gets you 1 extra Light Injury slot.

But light injuries do reduce your effectiveness, so even if you did have 5 by the time you got down to serious injury you'd be taking Disadvantage on basically all your rolls, or have basically no techniques left.

I'll run through a couple of playtests with that, and maybe I'll also try a lesser version where having +3 CON gives you 1 extra injury and +5 gives you 2. I think the most potentially abusive character with that kind of stat spread would be +5 Con, next highest Dex, enhanced mundane weapon and all techniques are just maintained Dex attack boosts. So I'll run that against more balanced characters with 5 light injury slots, then 3 light injury slots and see if it feels like it has adequate counterplay.

I think the important thing is to make it worth trying to improve it. If you get no benefit until you get +3 con, then you won't sink points into +2 con, you may as well have +0 con and never try to add to it by leveling. Each +1 should have an appreciable effect, otherwise there's no benefit to going from +1 to +2.

I'm not familiar with Naruto (hence my basic suggestions regarding the mechanics) but I do wonder if you may be better using the standard D&D system but creating naruto classes which your players will have to use?
They could have exceptionally high damage output but very low health, but the options to learn incoming attacks to gain temporary hitpoints or higher AC from opponent attacks. You could make this one clasee (Naruto class) and then put sub-classes in to make players pick a playstyle. Then design every ability in that class with the other abilities in mind, so you can learn opponents attacks, gain massive defence against them, and all the other things which you want your naruto-and-dragons to play out with.

 some bloke wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
You could make the Constitution modifier the amount of light injuries you can take before you take a serious injury - maximum is +5, so this character is an absolute tank, and if you have +1 or less, you can only take 1 hit, next hit is serious injury.

Couple that with charged attacks, pulled off properly, causing multiple hits and you should lend the constitution some weight!

Hmmm, that is an interesting idea. I want to keep combat damage as abstracted as possible, because in an anime show like that, it's pretty unusual for someone to actually take a hit on the chin and keep going, the attacks are so over-the-top deadly that usually when someone takes a solid hit the fight's basically over. Maybe every 2 points of con mod gets you 1 extra Light Injury slot.

But light injuries do reduce your effectiveness, so even if you did have 5 by the time you got down to serious injury you'd be taking Disadvantage on basically all your rolls, or have basically no techniques left.

I'll run through a couple of playtests with that, and maybe I'll also try a lesser version where having +3 CON gives you 1 extra injury and +5 gives you 2. I think the most potentially abusive character with that kind of stat spread would be +5 Con, next highest Dex, enhanced mundane weapon and all techniques are just maintained Dex attack boosts. So I'll run that against more balanced characters with 5 light injury slots, then 3 light injury slots and see if it feels like it has adequate counterplay.

I think the important thing is to make it worth trying to improve it. If you get no benefit until you get +3 con, then you won't sink points into +2 con, you may as well have +0 con and never try to add to it by leveling. Each +1 should have an appreciable effect, otherwise there's no benefit to going from +1 to +2.

I'm not familiar with Naruto (hence my basic suggestions regarding the mechanics) but I do wonder if you may be better using the standard D&D system but creating naruto classes which your players will have to use?
They could have exceptionally high damage output but very low health, but the options to learn incoming attacks to gain temporary hitpoints or higher AC from opponent attacks. You could make this one clasee (Naruto class) and then put sub-classes in to make players pick a playstyle. Then design every ability in that class with the other abilities in mind, so you can learn opponents attacks, gain massive defence against them, and all the other things which you want your naruto-and-dragons to play out with.

Alright, well I think part of the problem is I've been running a lot of combats with level-1 characters since it runs faster. Running with level 2 and 3, Con giving you a bigger starting pool starts to really provide you with a strong advantage in the early rounds. I tried playing a mock combat with the extra wounds mechanic running a big con+dex tank against a balanced character and while it didn't seem imbalanced, it took wayyyyyyyyyyyyy too long - 23 rounds, the more balanced character did eventually win but my sweet spot to aim for has been between 4 and 6 rounds for a 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 combat or 9-11 rounds for a 1-on-1. Combats with more participants go faster usually because of characters getting focused down when they run out of chakra or take an unlucky injury.