Elements

[Kappa]

Yeah; fire and lightning pairing can be problematic, but its been done in many different situations that incorporate 'elemental' powers

[Kappa]

As long as Earth is on there, I'm a happy camper. Original intent was successful :p

[Ashe]

But this isn't a Naruto RPG.

I don't see where I implied anything of the sort. I just don't see where a similar usage of that style of Martial Arts is out of the question for this RPG at this point. Keeping in mind that this isn't 100% a DBZ RPG at this point either.

[Ander]

When you move outside the realms of the DBZ universe, as we have done, your logic and reasoning has to come from somewhere. It usually becomes the next closest thing within the DBZ genre, which happens to be Naruto. Naruto took a more concrete, scientific look at the principles of fighting and technique than DBZ did. Many of what makes sense in Naruto also makes sense in DBZ from the theory point of view.

[Super Buu]

I think ice and water should be regarded as separate. Ice, to me, isn't really about the matter as it is the state - in other words, it's about making stuff cold. You could always just call it 'frost'.

[Alexander Trafford]

So, if it's perfectly fine to deconstruct things like rocks with psychokinesis, if one were powerful enough they could supercharge and, consequently, detonate a very large rock... like a planet? just hypothetical.

[Kaden]

No. I'm not even going to say it's hypothetically possible.

To deconstruct something like a boulder or, I dunno, a tree, would definitely take a Custom Tech.

[Kappa]

Heh, I haven't seen too much of Naruto; because I didn't like it in my limited issues of Shonen Jump, so I figured I wouldn't like the anime...

...and I'm often frowned upon in some circles for not being a fan.

I guess alot of things shoot close to Dragonball, as Toriyama drew from multiple cultures in his works; Japanese, Chinese, and Western. Naruto I admit must be one of the closer ones, alongside Street Fighter.

But I think I was of the mind that there was a Chubbs Naruto RPG in the works; so would it not be deleterious to the Dragonball RPG to incorporate heavy Naruto elements?

Its a moot point anyhow, as I've already agreed with you.

[Kaden]

"In the works" is putting it very nicely.

[Kappa]

Oh, I see. Ahah.

[Sage]

I don't really grate on anything except what Tim already mentioned:

Lighting =! Fire.

They're not even a little bit similar. Lightning occasionally starts fires but so does gasoline. =/

I'm also inclined to keep ice separate from water, if for no other reason than balancing issues. Frozen and liquid water are two entirely different states and can therefore be manipulated in far more diverse ways than fire could - at least from what I can tell.

[Sigfried Hunin]

I think depending on how the powers are used, water and ice as a combined power could either be just right or overpowered. Then again, simply changing the density of the water is the practical difference between sand and stone.

Lightning is charged electrons. Fire is plasma exuded from super hot gas as a material catalyzes. Maybe I'm being too scientific, but I don't think they go together at all. Electricity=/= Heat

MY question is when you take Elemental Ki: Water or Earth, can you spontaneously generate water and/or earth? If NOT, what differs them from telekinesis? You can obviously conjure up wind, but really, you could get away with calling that telekinesis too (if a very specific form of it).

[Kappa]

Lmao, so I was vastly wrong on the lightning thing. c_c accepted.

[Vad]

MY question is when you take Elemental Ki: Water or Earth, can you spontaneously generate water and/or earth? If NOT, what differs them from telekinesis? You can obviously conjure up wind, but really, you could get away with calling that telekinesis too (if a very specific form of it).

If what holds true for my metal binding, holds true here then you would need a custom tech to be able to generate your element out of your body. I needed a custom tech to generate metal from Vad's body. Not saying it isn't logical to make mine a custom. I'm just offering some answers for the bold text.

If the logic is the same. You would only be able to manipulate water/earth/lightning etc. Until you purchased the custom tech, you wouldn't be able to "generate" it.

But then when talking about Earth, generating it does not hold ground for me. It seems a little illogical for that to be the case. Maybe this whole logic path I'm talking about is wrong for these abilities. We'll see.

One could also argue that by controlling Earth you could control metal. Iron is on the periodic table of elements and Iron Ore occurs naturally in the crust. Thus one could say, "I control all metal that has trace amounts of Iron Ore in it." Rendering Metal Binding useless.

Unless your willing to restrict Earth binding's creativeness, my opinion would be not to use it.

As to Gozen's statement about Lightning and Fire: I have a question.

Isn't heat/friction the rapid movement of the atoms in an object? General statement being, when something is cold the atoms are moving slowly. When that same object is hot or warm, the atoms are moving faster than they were.

Thus couldn't you charge electrons with your fire to shoot lightning?

IE: Avatar the last air bender. Prince Zuko could shoot lightning. They did a whole episode about how lightning benders were legendary.

[Sigfried Hunin]

Yeah, as far as I understand it, heat the the EXCITATION of molecules. This means the molecules themselves are moving. When certain substances become hot enough, the chemicals bonds between them break, creating gases, and because these gasses are so excited, they put of the energy we see as light. However, electricity is ONLY the movement of electrons. This can be due to ionic transfer or having FREE electrons. You're not speeding up the movement of the electrons, they're just changing their valence from a purely negative charge (IE: a single electron has a negative charge) to a more balanced charge by joining another molecule. Heat is COMPLETE molecules that are moving at a high speed.
The reason lightning moves from the clouds if a static charge. It's literally static shock on a massive level, the electrons trying to find the closest conducting material to diffuse to.

Piper would be a lot better at explaining it.

Also, everything is on the periodic table. Wind, water earth are all molecular, and can be found on the chart in different concentrations and mixtures.


I don't think a scientific/logical approach will solve this. The idea of elements is based off of centuries of attempts at understanding the world through alchemy, and it's not a logical science. We need to discuss this in a manner that directly addresses the RPG in my opinion.

[Alexander Trafford]

No. I'm not even going to say it's hypothetically possible.

To deconstruct something like a boulder or, I dunno, a tree, would definitely take a Custom Tech.

damn you...

and how would it even take a custom tech? you can lift a rock in the air, charge it and blow it to bits, thus deconstructing it into smaller pebbles while only using the bare bone basics of psychokinesis. that'd be similar to needing a custom technique to read ki with ki sense.

[Sigfried Hunin]

Well blowing something up and granulating it in a controlled manner are totally different lol

[Ashe]

Referring to the giant walls of text above, I think a majority of the explaination there is just anime physics. Given that the RPG's focus is an entire different direction, we don't feel the need to have to support fine detail alchemical equations.

Also, the entire thinking of "Well, anyone who controls earth is overpowered because they have metal too as that's an earth element" is wrong in context. That's returning back to the "Hey, if lightning strikes cause a fire then they are the same" argument. They control Earth. If through Earth they indirectly push around a metallic substance, then that's on them, but that's indirect and not fine control.

Also keep in mind the actual strengths of the characters. Just because a use is LOGICALLY possible through multiple extensions doesn't necessarily mean that we'll ever allow the characters to be considered powerful enough to break those boundaries that we've set.

Regarding Wind, although I agree with you, somewhat, again we fall back to anime physics. The same logic that has Iceman able to slide on an icy path in mid air when we all know that the thing would break at some point an drop his ass. I'm assuming its sorta a Storm style ability, and no, I don't really think it fits, but that doesn't mean others can't see how amazingly logical it is for them. I'm guessing the thought is, again, Temari from Naruto.

Gozen, your opinion about the difference between lightning and fire is very similar to my original opinion of the first three. Originally, it was fire, ice, and lightning. My concept was that those three gave you a specific type of control over the atoms that would allow you to attain certain effects (Using DBZ thought). If you wanted to do this away from your body (ie call lightning down from the sky onto someone), you would need telekinesis to go with it. Essentially, Cryokinesis allowed you to use your ki on a minute level in physical range to slow down the atoms around you, essentially lowering their heat to icy levels through reducing their movement. Pyrokinesis could cause massive friction of the atoms and make them move much more rapidly, increasing speed and causing heat. This extended to the ability to generate flames. Raikinesis (also called Electrokinesis) basically allowed one to do similar to Pyro by increasing the speed that atoms moved while also being able to shift the polarities around a bit to cause lightning to happen. This was done through weaving your personal ki into said atoms, not a direct control of the atoms themselves. You achieved your effect as a secondary, ala using a pulley to lift a rock.

People hated the limitation of not having full control over the specific element the moment they trained it, however, and hated that they had to go buy telekinesis in order to use it at range. They felt that it was superfluous, that they had already earned the ability to do it and that we were just artificially inflating the costs and slowing them down. People wanted to immediately turn their characters into the Human Torch and Iceman, so that idea was scrapped almost before even going live in favor of direct elemental control.

[Ashe]

damn you...

and how would it even take a custom tech? you can lift a rock in the air, charge it and blow it to bits, thus deconstructing it into smaller pebbles while only using the bare bone basics of psychokinesis. that'd be similar to needing a custom technique to read ki with ki sense.

You are talking the difference between breaking something down, and just breaking it.

We are saying that Psycho can do like Gambit and charge something up until it goes boom, but it can't - with precision - disintegrate something like a rock to turn it into a cloud of moving sand that's all evenly one grain per spec. The closest Pyro would get there would be a wave of different sized rock chunks, you simply wouldn't have the detailed control necessary to do the job you are trying to do. Through extension of logic, yeah, I'm sure that after enough effort and enough time, you could focus on separating each single bit more and more to create your effect, but its so inefficient to do so through Psycho's methods that the guy that just killed you would be on a boat somewhere weeks later with T-Pain.

[Ashe]

Generating your element: The logic I would personally use is that you have to be able to find bits of your element in your surroundings (even specs in the air). Many element controlling fantasy characters do so, citing that "its too dry here for me to use my ice powers" or something. Take Magneto in the second X-Men movie as an example, he wasn't able to get out until someone came in with a ton of Iron in their blood stream. He didn't just shit metal, he took it from his surroundings.

I can see a lot of scenes where someone creates some Earth ability by pulling grains of sand from the wind blowing around them (and similarly ice/water abilities from drawing moisture). I also could see someone using Earth to create seismic abilities in the ground, so even if they are standing in a metal room, they can pulse seismic energy into the floor (this is my thinking though, I'm not giving a judge ruling on if its allowed). Keep in mind that Gaara himself carried around a massive gourd on his back at all times that was filled with (and made from) sand, in order to provide him the material that he would need to use his ability when outside of the desert.