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For starters, the game is distributed as a Free PDF. The book is a mind-numbing 1085 pages long. Nor is this one deceptive, it's all crunch and you need most of it to play. Oh you don’t need to read every last jutsu but knowing them will help you build you character, and strangely enough there‘s only a handful of alternate systems. You can expect to do a lot of extra reading up to figure out how this game works even if you’re already knowledgeable about D20, there’s a lot tacked on and massive amounts of crunch to be had. The author, Frankto, regularly updates the game with new mechanics, patches, and rules fixes. For this reason my review can really only be for the game as it is in this moment, it may change significantly at any time. For obvious reasons, this review is also going to be extremely long in order to cover all this material.
The game has a very active forum where the Author is frequently available to answer questions. I spent some time examining them and concluded that he has a massive hatred for min-maxers and munchkins of any kind. I recommend the community for anybody who wants to play the game, they have many games running and a lot of useful advice for the new player.
The game has very limited artwork, a color cover showing three ninja and a handful of small lineart sketches, mainly in the character creation section where each basic class has it’s own design. There is a table of contents but it does not include page numbers, and so will not be of a great deal of use to the average searcher.
Introduction
The introduction covers the Narutoverse, or at least the author’s vision of Naruto, which is a world full of ordinary people like you and me rather than trained killing machines who's eyeballs shoot black fire. Me, I’m not as keen to call the ninjas “typical humans” when you’ve got people who can see through walls, walk up trees, have shark teeth, and have apparently inbred to produce weird pupils that grant Real Ultimate Power. Take this review with a grain of salt, I clearly have some disagreement with the author over the basic concept of the game so. . . yeah.After that we get a fore gleam of the future chapters with a brief blurb telling us what each chapter’s about. The chapter finishes off with a list of what you’ll need to play, which is pretty much what you need to play any D20 game.
Chapter 1: Basic Game Mechanics
This chapter describes most of the game’s terminology, and basic D20 terminology as well. Naruto D20 assumes the players don’t have the original D20 corebooks, and so goes over what actions are, what types of bonuses stack and which don’t, and so forth. After the initial terminology it covers the main mechanic tacked onto the D20 Modern core, the Chakra system. It’s fairly complex, all characters gain chakra equal to their con modifier +1 each level, doubled at level 1. You'll notice that's extremely small, PCs at the beginning only have a few points and it's extremely easy to run out, even at high levels since a powerful Jutsu can cost close to 100 points of chakra. You also have a chakra reserve that grants +2 chakra per level, but you need a special skill to extract that chakra. Then there are several dozen fiddly bits tacked on to this ranging from chakra elemental nature to chakra affinity.Then comes the learn system. Unlike traditional games where you gain spells or powers by level, in Naruto D20 you learn new Jutsu by making a learn check during your downtime. The main control the GM has over the players learning every jutsu in the book is limiting how much training time they have available. The learn check is basically a level check except that there’s several dozen fiddly bits from bonuses from certain skills to bonuses from attributes to bonuses that interact with the fiddly bits in the chakra section. There's an entire section just about which fiddly bits stack and which don't.
The chapter finishes off with a so-called Character Creation section which really just covers a few more terms as the game hasn’t remotely covered enough information to try to build a character yet.
Chapter 2: Nonhuman Heroes
This chapter is fairly short and covers exactly what it says on the title. In fine D20 tradition, all the races are garbage compared to standard humans, and anything remotely cool or interested in loaded down with enough ECL penalties to completely gimp using them. None of my players touched the nonhuman races.Oddly enough there’s also a huge number of templates and bloodlines, but they’re in a much later chapter than races. My sense of organization is vaguely offended. Then again the organization in this book can get so strange that by getting offended now, I'm pretty much ensuring that I'll spontaneously combust before this review is over.
Chapter 3: Basic Classes
The Basic Classes are ripped straight from D20 Modern with the usual six heroes ranging from Strong to Dedicated. The only changes are some skills and feats swapped around to reflect that your characters are all ninjas, and carry kunai and swords instead of machine guns. Strangely the firearm feats are still present, possibly to help character building should a GM decide to run a game in the modern day. The physical classes have received a small boost in the form of armor feats, with the tough hero getting the entire tree and the other two getting light and medium proficiency. The Fast hero is still as broken as ever, really even more as we’ll see although the game does suggest making Evasion slightly harder to get. There’s also a handful of new Jutsu focus talent trees for some of the classes that are fairly weak and unimpressive. Actually, on further examination, they are completely and utterly worthless for any purpose. Due to recent changes to the rulebook, you will never actually need to roll your ninjutsu or genjutsu skill, so getting +1 to Ninjutsu checks is possibly the worst use of a talent imaginable.
Chapter 4: Starting Occupations
The starting occupations are. . . mildly annoying to me. The occupations cover what you might expect, to be sure, but the game sort-of assumes that every player will likely start as an academy student, and the occupations have very little variety. There is, for instance, no occupation to match dilettante or heir and get a decent wealth score to begin, in fact the best wealth bonus available is +2. Further, there is no occupation that’s available to all players grants treat injury as a class skill, so all medics are pretty much forced to be dedicated heroes.* Most of the special clans and bloodlines are represented by a specific occupations such as “Hyuuga Clan” or “Aburame Clan” which makes getting an off-stereotype character much harder. There are a number of extra fiddly bits, as many occupations grant special powers available nowhere else, for instance Ninja Technician can get bonuses on learn checks to learn forbidden and secret techniques more easily.*There is a bloodline treated as an occupation that does grant treat injury but it’s only available to players from one specific village, and classed as “optional” even then because the clan is original work, and the clan is further village specific, hence hard to work into a game set in, say, Konoha or Suna.
Chapter 5: Skills
The skills section generally over covers new skills, and changes to old skills. There’s quite a lot of information but, unfortunately, skills is an area that starts breaking down, at least in the games I tested this on. All your jutsu run on an appropriate skill such as Ninjutsu or Chakra control, and there are no less than five of these skills. You are going to absolutely need these skills if you’re playing a ninja (and obviously you are), although it's possible to survive on only two or three skills if you choose to play, say, Rock Lee and give up access to almost all Jutsu. Since most of your techniques provoke attacks of opportunity like a spell you also have to invest heavily in Concentration. But. . . the basic classes do not come with any extra skill points so every build feels like it’s skills are stretched thin. In comparison to a standard D20 game I found almost no flavor skills, and nobody had the points to sink into stuff like profession or craft except the smart hero. The strong hero and the tough hero have it the worst, as they’ll likely have to put every single skill point into these ninja skills just to function at all and, without a significant intelligence score, will probably still not be able to cover the basics. As it is, none of our players were able to play a well-rounded ninja with scores in every skill. Compounding the problem, many of the basic classes do not come with these ninja skills as class skills so you’ll have to draw on your occupation’s bonus skills just to cover the basics, making characters with any other skill combinations even harder to produce.There are some nice crafting skills that only smart heroes can afford to take and some really interesting drugs, poisons, and seals that the PCs won’t be able to afford to make because occupations give so little wealth. On the flip side the purchase DCs for raw materials are significantly lower than for a finished product so if you’re willing to steal time away from learning Jutsu you can actually build some decent wealth crafting stuff, a feature I'd like to see in more games.
Just in case you were worried they were missing, there’s a ton of fiddly bits. Almost all the skills have special conditions where they change value and the paperwork of tracking them is a hassle. Sleight of hand grants a bonus to any perform check on a jutsu, but only if the jutsu uses hand seals. Bluff grants a bonus to Genjutsu but only if they have the compulsion keyword. The list goes on of tiny bonuses to keep track of on minor issues to the point where I found I had to write five lines per skill just to track how many different ways the skill could be used, all with different bonus values.
Chapter 6: Feats
There are a large number of new feats in the game. Many of them are useful, a few less so. There’s a number of additional feats for two-weapon fighting but they give small bonuses and aren’t enough to salvage the weak and broken tree that’s a legacy of DnD. There’s a decent assortment of “improved x” feats to gain better special abilities, and plenty of feats are based on prestige and advanced classes. There’s also a number of “Metachakra” feats similar to DnD’s Metamagic feats, but the game designer wisely kept Quicken Technique out of reach, burying it deeply in a prestige class rather than making it available to everybody.One thing that did stand out to me was the large number of feats available as first level feats only. Several my players latched onto the “Skilled” feat early on to get more skill points. If you want a bloodline you’ll also need to spend a first level feat. There’s several other general feats, all competing for your limited first-level slots. Also there’s quite a few fiddly bits but since feats are typically made of fiddly bits I have no real reason to complain about them, I just wanted to keep to my pattern here.
Chapter 7: Equipment
The equipment section is large and fairly complete. There’s a section for your scrolls and books, containers, weapons, armor, tools, etc. Poisons prove to be just as useless as in other D20 games, anybody weak enough not to beat the poison’s low Save DCs and HP damage are more easily dealt with via stabbing, and they’re prohibitively expensive. The armor section is somewhat small and the armors are mostly painfully limiting, very few players are going to want anything but light armor.I would like to see a few images in this section, the weapons can be a little esoteric and not everybody is going to be up on their Japanese weaponry. My group couldn’t figure out what a kanabo was supposed to be and we finally decided it was some sort of enhanced staff on the grounds that one of us remembered that Donatello's staff weapon was plain bo, but a quick picture would have saved us the extra debating time at character creation. There’s a number of exotic weapons that nobody will ever use because, in fine D20 tradition, the special weapons that take extra feats to use are all weaker than normal weapons.
Strangely enough the usual fiddly bits are missing from the weapons section, you’ll find a dearth of weapons that can be used to trip, or to disarm, or have reach. A lot of tactical options have been excised this way. Archers get somewhat hosed, the good bows specifically only fire once a round regardless of your BAB or bonus feats making archery builds. . . problematic.
Chapter 8: Ninja Ranks
I’m not quite sure why this warrants it’s own chapter. It’s about half a page long and covers what Genin, Jounin, etc. mean. This could have been stuffed in the first chapter glossary and been done with. There’s a rare image in this section showing a ninja’s progress through the ranks as he becomes more powerful, from Genin all the way to Kage. I am unable to complain about fiddly bits this time around.
Chapter 9: Advanced and Prestige Classes
The list of Advanced classes is lengthy and generally covers most of what players want (Although, again, Archery characters get hosed, there’s only one class with any affinity at all for the bow). This section has some rare pictures, several of the classes have an image with them although not all of them.Several of the classes are DnD base classes with the serial numbers filed off, the Soul Edge is just the Soul Knife and the Sacred Fist is the Monk slightly modified for prestige class status. Others are wholly original. In general I found that most of the concepts I could think of could be fit into one of the classes, there are relatively few holes left in the coverage. There are a few oddities, sneak attack is shoehorned into a huge number of classes (even the medic has it) and certain concepts, most notably healers and puppet users, can only be built using their prestige class, the abilities and techniques simply can’t be found anywhere else. I’m trying to think of a way to shoehorn in the phrase fiddly bits here but, as with feats, it’s kind of assumed for these parts.
Chapter 10: Techniques
Hoo mama is this chapter long. Over half the 1000-page document is contained in this chapter alone. It begins with a very lengthy explanation of techniques and all the mechanical fiddly bits involved. I’ve seen entire RPGs significantly shorter than this explanation section and I’m not entirely sure I have the whole thing straight even now. I’ll spare you trying to summarize the system, save that jutsus have both a class of E-S, and a rank which represents what level you can learn it at, there are different checks to learn with piles of fiddly bits affecting the learn check, and if you've taken 1 rank per level of the jutsu's appropriate skill you will never, ever, have to roll your skill so pumping it up is pointless.The chapter then goes into the techniques, hundreds of them. The techniques are organized in alphabetical order, with a stat block listing the various mechanical traits followed by a blurb of text. The list is immense although it’s actually condensed a lot from how it vast it used to be, for instance there used to be separate techniques are every level for each element, which have now been condensed into “Elemental Beatdown X.” The techniques cover almost everything ever seen in Naruto, along with the Hiten Mitsurugi and Dual Kodachi Cross styles from Rurouni Kenshin, most of the energy blasts from Dragonball Z, and the Shinmei Ryu style from Love Hina/Negima. I presume I haven’t found all the easter eggs hidden in this section.
One thing that did jump out, both to me and the players after about a minutes worth of looking, is that virtually all the Ninjutsu’s have a reflex save for half damage. If you just calculated that this makes the already overpowered Fast Hero with evasion/improved evasion into a god, you came to the same conclusion we did. And she is. Genjutsu generally have a will-save negates, and there’s a handful of fort saves here and there, but relatively few in the sea of thousands of reflex saves.
One issue that cropped up for me in this area was, well, the techniques tend to be really wimpy. This is a game about Naruto, with super powered ninjas everywhere fighting with bugs living in their bodies and teleportation and breathing fire. But you won’t get to play with that kind of power, everything is scaled down tremendously to where you feel like one of the civilian kids. As an example, given the limits players have for their Kage Bunshin, Naruto would have had to be oh, around level 300 or so in the first episode to pull off what he did. Also players are not allowed to use the Kage Bunshin in training they way he does routinely, that’s a Naruto-Only power that’s too powerful for PCs. Meanwhile Sharingan users still get to gain techniques instantly by seeing them, that's apparently not overpowered.
Attack powers like the basic fire breath jutsu will do pitiful 2d4 damage*, and if you want to bump it up you have to spend a pile more of your extremely tiny pool of chakra for every die, it doesn't auto-scale like, say, a Wizard's Fireball in DnD. And since you only get a couple of points of chakra per level, you can easily chakra exhaust yourself in a round or two, trying to do less damage than a melee build will do with a punch**. And the punch doesn't provoke an AoO, and it doesn't cost you chakra. While high level techniques do have higher damage, by that point people also have huge stacks of HP that will laugh off the 2d6 damage you've graduated to by about 5th level. Indeed from the game play, the utterbroken build is to go with melee all the way and only use your chakra to power up the Speed and Strength of your character, which is brutally powerful and extremely cost-effective in comparison to hitting an enemy with a Rasengan or inflicting a minor penalty with a genjutsu. The damage and effects are just too weak for any attack option to be viable, particularly with everybody desperate to grab evasion to nerf those options even more.
*Reflex save for half, of course.
**No save allowed, of course.
Chapter 11: Bloodlines and Templates
A picture! This illustration shows a bit about bloodlines. Unsurprisingly, every single one of them in the image is a funny shaped eyeball but this is Naruto, so I can't really complain. The actual meat of the chapter does include more than just funny eyeball bloodlines, fortunately. Bloodlines are built using the Unearthed Arcana bloodline templates from DnD. Essentially you pay a feat to get the bloodline at level 1, then each level afterwards you get a bonus ability from your bloodline. Every few levels, you get a blank level of LA to represent how powerful you're getting compared to normal characters, with the amount of LA variable depending on how powerful the bloodline is. Most of the Bloodlines in the show and comics are present here. Byakugan, Sharingan, and the Aburame ability to breed insects inside yourself all make a decent presentation and seem mostly somewhat balanced. Several other things, such as having an animal companion, are also treated as bloodlines. A few techniques that aren't specifically called out as bloodlines in the show, such as Sai's ability to bring his drawings to life as summons, are also tossed in here as being too powerful to be regular techniques. Each bloodline comes with several bloodline specific feats, and often jutsu because we obviously haven't had enough of those in the last 600 pages. There are also a number of original bloodlines added in as options for people who want the power without being a clone of one of the characters in the show. Naturally most of these bonuses are tiny +1s in specific situations because the game hasn't accrued nearly enough fiddly bits yet. All the templates with cool enough abilities that you'll want it for your character also come with so much LA you won't want it anymore. Especially since every character is treated like a DnD full caster, so any LA at all is brutal to your chances of survival.After the bloodlines proper the chapter continues with templates and some racial modifications. Here's where you'll find the recipe to turn your character into the bearer of a tailed beast (Jinchuuriki), along with Jinkchuuriki specific feats and jutsus. Most of the weirder body modifications characters in Naruto have formed can be seen in this area, such as Orochimaru's snake form, the cursed seals, and Kakuzu's body made entirely of black threads and stolen hearts. While the Immortal subtype makes a showing, it's NPC only and I can't blame the writer for something that broken. There's an odd template called “Nin Animal” which appears to have no purpose, it's for producing ninja pets but you are specifically forbidden from taking the template and applying it to your ninja pet, and summons don't get the template either. Nor are there any places to buy nin animals in the equipment section I'm not sure there's any situation left in the rules where Nin Animal would actually apply.
Finally we get (why not?) more prestige classes specifically for bloodline users. Amusingly, the Sharingan users have to settle for a class called the Battle Mime. I'd laugh if I didn't remember how powerful Gogo was in Final Fantasy 6, so I'll just mutter quietly to myself in the corner about fiddly bits.
Chapter 12: Friends and Foes
This chapter has writeups of most of the Naruto characters as well as some generics to ease the strain on a GM having to make them all. The canons such as Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto himself each have several entries representing different points in their development. They are all stupidly powerful, and often given special fiddle bits and add-ons that are simply never available to PCs, such as Naruto being able to shorten training time from his Kage Bunshins (And specifically getting to use them even though he's too low level to do so, in some cases), or Kakashi taking the first-level-only bloodline feats after first level. Most of them have ungodly high stats requiring 36-40 point buys even with level-up points added in. Naruto's weakest writeup is level 11 so. . . yeah. They're also min-maxed as all hades, even "cute and otherwise useless" Sakura chose Charisma to be her dump stat and went for high wisdom to boost her saves up. Her main weakness is that she's one of about three ninjas not to have Evasion, even Akamaru the puppy chose to take that talent. Actually this is what I'd expect Naruto characters to look like, it's quite fitting with the show and manga power levels and the general feel of Naruto. It's just that after nearly a thousand pages of stuff that appears to be designed to cripple any PC and smash the slightest sign of Min-Maxing, it's jarring to see these uber-powerful character sheets. On the other hand it's not like superpowered canons are anything but purely traditional in the world of RPGs. Just in case they weren't too powerful already, this section contains (why am I not surprised?) more feats and jutsu, mostly character specific ones.
Chapter 13: Summoning
No, we're not done. Not by a long shot. This chapter is devoted to the summoning techniques and the blood pacts characters can learn. Here I find what I consider a cardinal sin of D20 gaming, the author has decoupled level and hit-dice, no longer can you count HD to find any relationship with the creature's skill points, level, attributes, or feats. Not only that, but feats have been put on a weird meta-level even relative to the non-HP level. Some summons get a feat every 4th level instead of 3rd. Some get other ranges. Some get no bonus feats at all. It makes creating a summon far more complicated that it needs to be, in my opinion, and goes against the core mechanic of the D20 system. It goes without saying that this results in an ungodly number of Fiddly Bits in trying to actually build your summon. I do not like this mechanic.Following the tradition, in this game at least, of putting them in almost every chapter, we get a pile of Summon-specific feats and summon-specific jutsu, although here it seems much more reasonable than putting PC-available feats in chapters not devoted to feats. There are a large number of summons listed, covering most of the animals a player might want to call forth (there's a few holes, the game does not support any of the weird animals Pain summoned). Unfortunately most of them aren't statted out in any detail, you're given a level 1 basic summon and told to build anything better on your own using the formula given, which, as mentioned, are so different from any other D20 system that you might as well be learning an entirely new game. Summons seem to be some of the most useful tools in the game, although they start out small and feeble, your character is also probably very feeble and having a small rabbit help flank and bite the enemy in the butt is a big help when you're getting beaten down by a housecat.
Finally there is a “list” of sample summons. List is in quotes because there's only one entry, Gamabunta the giant toad summon boss, who costs 90 chakra to summon. Summons are useful but painfully expensive to call up, even the overbuilt Naruto entry can't summon his chief toad without using the Kyuubi's chakra to exceed his own level 11 reserves.
Chapter 14: Quests and Events
This chapter usefully covers the mission system, and how much hiring a ninja for a mission costs. The system includes modifiers for missions that require more than 3 ninjas or take a longer time to complete than average. There are many helpful charts a lost GM can roll on to determine which jobs are available at which levels. Strangely, the D-Rank missions are rolled on a D% while the others are D20 charts. There's notes on how the players should gain wealth from their missions, an A-Rank super dangerous assassination mission will pay about as well as a Profession Check with a +3 modifier. I bet most of you didn't realize that in the world of Naruto, the guy running Irchiraku's Ramen cart makes significantly more money than Elite Jounin Kakashi does.Following this is a sample adventure, ushering in players who just graduated from the Ninja Academy. It seems fairly well written, doesn't rely too heavily on stock plots, and it has useful charts for random encounters and events that players might hit along the way. There are further, less fleshed out, adventure hooks for Jounin exams which I think are supposed to be Chuunin exams. This chapter comes with it's own appendix where, for no apparent reason, there are a number of sample characters not found in the Friends and Foes Sample Characters section. These are actually something I wouldn't be afraid to pit against my players, being built more according to the actual rules and without the extremely high stats and character-specific bonus abilities given out to other sample characters. There's a marked lack of Fiddly Bits here, which pleases me greatly.
Chapter 15: Naruto D20 Epics
Here we find a rehash of traditional DnD Epic rules. The game is quite thorough, covering everything from epic wealth to epic chakra pools. Strangely, the highest rating your chakra pool can actually reach is “Abysmal” which I suspect is an editing error with auto-replace. The basic and advanced classes make a re-appearance in their epic forms and there's a really nicely done section on making epic monsters to fight.Then comes an entirely new epic system called “Enlightenment” which. . . is practically a game unto itself. It goes without saying, the book explains, that no PCs are allowed to every have Enlightenment as it's too powerful, and in fact it transcends the CR and Level system entirely so there's no rules as to using Enlightenment. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what Enlightenment is for in that case, presumably it's to kill off your PCs in the event that those uppity players make something stronger than Konohamaru. I read over the list and. . . actually most of these are really wimpy powers. Especially given the hype the Enlightenment system is given earlier. The Potence power, for instance, gives you a benefit to strength that a strength oriented PC will be picking up somewhere around level 4, not the Epic world shaking wonder that it's purported to be. The Divine Proficiency power gives you +10 to one skill. Now granted, +10 to a skill isn't bad but you can get it from a judicious use of the basic talents available early on like Charm or Savant. Unless I'm misreading it, the Summoner power actually gives you a benefit that you cannot possibly use if you're at epic levels (Specifically you can summon a creature with 5 more levels than normal, but no summon can ever be higher than level 10, which you can summon at your pre-epic levels). Many of the powers are more limited than low to mid level talents available to base classes. And I'm not even talking about the good talents like evasion.
Actually this feels like the entire game in a nutshell, a game which promises phenomenal power as a mighty ninja, then hands you a fireball that might take out a housecat on a good roll, usable maybe twice a day unless you min-max for more chakra, and then warns the GM that you might be a munchkin for having it. Needless to say, just about all the Enlightment powers constitute handfuls of new fiddly bits.
Chapter 16: Ninja Tools
The Ninja Tools section is not, contrary to it's appearance, just a rehash of the equipment section, although frankly I feel they should be put into one chapter covering all your stuff instead of spreading it out. The chapter covers traps first. They're pretty much exactly like DnD's traps, except with key words replaced with more ninja-ey ones, like kunai instead of dagger.Next is “Artifacts” which is pretty much any item that has special powers in the show and comic, and a few interesting pieces like Konoha's Forbidden Scroll and an Eyepatch that seals your chakra away and maybe kills you. There's quite a few clever and interesting ideas in here, some canon and some original.
Next up is instructions for making puppets. This is quite useful if anybody in the group wants them and well detailed. Puppets come in two basic flavors, combat puppets have weapons and utility puppets have tools, most of which seem to be storage compartments to put things inside. There's a number of subsystems and special abilities to give your puppets listed out in detail, along with prices and availability for all the parts. One of my players immediately seized on these rules and proceeded to build a large puppet with space for the ninja inside, who piloted it like a Gundam. It's nice to see rules flexible enough to allow for concepts like that. There's detailed craft rules as well for those who want to make their puppets from scratch or need repair work, and even a section for making puppets out of people or animals.
Finally we come to Enhancement Seals. These cover a huge range of items players can make for themselves with the sealing skill, by applying seals to their clothing and weapons. There's a lot of good stuff here but, well, it's all so expensive, and occupations provide so little wealth, and the bonuses are often so fiddly and hard to get, that as written most of it will never be used by the players. For instance an elemental seal will save your life against a massive energy attack. . . but since it has to be activated as an attack action you'll have to somehow be precognitive enough to know in advance that your enemy is about to use his big elemental jutsu. It requires over 5000EXP and a DC44 wealth check to create. . . and it's only usable 1/day. Oh, and it takes a hefty bite out of your your precious chakra points to activate that 1 time. More than likely, any enemy who's IQ doesn't begin with a decimal point notices you activating your super anti-fire defense, kicks you in the face, and then burns you to death the next round when you can't use your armor's power anymore. For a mere DC22 Wealth and 770EXP you could have the featherweight property added to your armor, making it one size category lighter. This would be handy, if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't count for proficiency purposes, so it's basically a supremely expensive way to get mastercraft armor and slightly reduce the armor check penalty, which you could have gotten much more cheaply by increasing the armor's price slightly in the first place.
Chapter 17: Game Mastering
There's some useful advice to be had here. The game mastering chapter opens with a chart to convert wealth check DCs into Ryo values, for GMs who don't like the wealth mechanic. As expected, these rules seem designed to hose the players. For instance the pay for a fairly difficult combat mission is, in the example given, calculated to reward the player with 1200 Ryo. The game further notes that a Ryo is worth 10 cents. Yes, that's right, a difficult combat mission taking a week or more will earn the Ninja about a hundred bucks. Note than a single Exploding Tag is listed at 700-900 Ryo, so the pay for a difficult high level mission will not earn you enough to buy 2 exploding tags. Apparently ninjas grow poorer with every mission as they expend precious resources. Earlier I noted that Ichiraku's Ramen Stand makes more money than Kakashi. Based on this, the ramen stand can probably afford to buy and sell Kakashi out of their tip jar. As an added bonus, the equation used to calculate your pay for the mission is recursive, and includes how much money you had to start with in the calculation, so a rich ninja automatically gets more pay from the Hokage than a poor one for the same mission. Clearly the key to wealth in the ninjaverse is to be born one of the 1%, much like real life.The chapter continues with a real-play segment showing a typical combat. As is to be expected, the players are ludicrously outclassed and get creamed by the overpowered Jounin they're fighting despite rolling extremely well. Giving credit where it's due, the example does help you to understand how a combat round progresses. A second example combat covers Genjutsu, and helpfully gives examples to show the difference between Will Save Negates and Will Save Disbelief.
Next up is. . . a random Ninja Village creator. Um, okay. It's detailed and well done, and is clearly based on DnD's random city generating rules. It has some nice additions, such as rolling to determine how much damage the village has recently taken from ninja battles.
The chapter continues with a writeup on ninja law enforcement and Bounty Hunting. As players apparently won't do it much, bounty hunting pays much better than Ninja Missions do. While Kakashi only earns about a hundred bucks a mission, killing Kakashi and bringing in his body earns the bounty hunter. . . about 500 bucks. If I were Kakashi I'd be offended at having such a low price on my head. Heck, killing the Hokage is only a bit over 1000 dollars. There are a number of sample bounties along with notes on how bounties are written, licenses, and similar rules. There's basically an entire game to be had right here.
Finally there are movement rules, including how fast you can move when jumping from tree to tree, although it's called “Land Hopping” in game, and can't be used in combat. Apparently it's about nine miles an hour. There's a pile of fiddly bit modifiers for travel over roads vs. deserts, swamps or other terrains.
Next up comes an alternative experience system. This system is billed as level independent, which as far as I can tell just means you still collect EXP even when the monsters are way below your CR, so Kakashi can still level up by fighting rats, once he's so dirt poor from taking missions that he can't afford weaponry, I guess.
Ah, and Finally at page 1081 we're through the meat of the book. A character sheet follows, along with a second character sheet just for your Jutsu, and an appendix that will tell you how this game has changed since the last update the author did.
The Bottom Line:
I feel like there's a great game here trying to get out. It's much crunchier than a typical D20 game with vastly more fiddly bits than I've seen in any other system. Some people will probably like that and the game quite deserves my score of 5 for crunch. Just the fact that a single writer, working on his own, was able to churn out a 1000+ page work and keep updating it continually is deeply impressive. It appears to be designed with the powergamer in mind, in the sense that the author seems to expect that every player is going to be trying for Pun-Pun builds, and has expended an enormous amount of effort in gimping every option to keep that from happening.The Readability, I can't give it as high a score on. The chapters are spread out and things that logically belong together are widely separated and split up. About half the chapters have more feats or jutsu pushed into them, even though there are chapters designed to hold nothing but feats and jutsu. There are remarkably few spelling errors for such a large docment, but some jutsu have changed names in the updates and the links to those jutsu have not. For instance one Taijutsu stance has, as a prereq, a jutsu called Kiun Butsu. But there is no longer any Kiun Butsu in the game, apparently it's been renamed and I was unable to figure out what it's called now. It also lacks any sort of index, although being a searchable PDF helps a lot there it's still just not as easy to navigate and find that feat you're looking for as it should be.
Despite my incessant griping in this review, it's not a bad game even with the huge stack of flaws I've been harping on. It's just not a Naruto game. That should be apparent from the fact that even the weakest version of Naruto is level 11 and still has to get bonuses that the PCs aren't to build his character. Doing feats the main character accomplished in the first episode will require a level 300 build. There are tons of options but they all come in two flavors, so weak you won't even know you have them, and powerful but not allowed for your PC. If you come to this game thinking you will play Naruto, you'll be disappointed. Your first level character will not be Naruto. Your character will not even be Sakura. Your character will be about as powerful as Moegi starting out. If you really min-max and build as powerfully as you can, you might be able to build Akamaru the puppy. Perhaps Moegi D20 just doesn't have the same ring to the name.
