[Dungeon Fantasy] Non-East Asian inspirations for Martial Artists (and Ninja)

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

The Ninja template is an assassin template; if you wish to add exotic or supernatural traits to it, that's what it is. "Shadow powers" for instance may be a thing for some secret assassin organizations - not much from different from a Mages Guild teaching spells, or the Alchemists Guild teaching potions.

While the DF Ninja is a type of assassin, the DF Assassin is a completely different template. The Ninja is all about various esoteric abilities - they've got a fairly wide Weapon Master alongside Killing Strike (which boosts ST for one attack per weapon per encounter) to encourage using a variety of weapons (while an Assassin could easily favor a single make of weapon), Ninja Tools (a modified variant of Gizmo, without the cap of 3 instances) to encourage using various specialty items like climbing claws, grapnels, snorkels, etc, and access to (and required investment in) various esoteric skills, not to mention their ability to purchase things like One With Shadows (a Limited version of Obscure) or Shadow Walker (basically just Shadow Form).

Now, personally, I'm not a huge fan of some of the idiosyncrasies of the DF Ninja - in no small part because I'm not a fan of the esoteric skills (they just seem... off), although I also dislike the silliness of "Fast-Draw ninja-to, strike, drop it; Fast-Draw nunchaku, strike, drop it; Fast-Draw jutte, strike, drop it; etc." My own inclination would be to allow Weapon Master to be narrowed down even to a single weapon (while most ninja are trained with all manner of ninja weapons, having one who favors a particular type - like the Oniwabanshu from Rurouni Kenshin, each of whom often had a favored weapon (Aoshi's kodachi, Misao's kunai, Okina's tonfa, etc) - shouldn't be uncommon, with such characters likely having skill (and familiarity) with the other weapons, but on Weapon Master for their favorite, probably modify Killing Strike to simply be a once-per-encounter ability (representing a strike meant to be used for an assassination, without the "But I can just swap weapons!" workaround), and make the esoteric skills optional (and/or replace then with Advantages that do the same thing). But that's my own idea of what a Ninja template should look like; the DF authors had their own idea and went with it.