[LP CYOA] 傳

Going with the neigong we already have significantly boosted endurance, and it's only going to get better as our neigong improves. There's no way that a single endurance point is going to be the difference between us blowing out our neigong and never blowing out with it. With the strength bonus, we at least still have boosted fighting capacity even if our neigong were to be shot, while that's not the case if we upgrade endurance.

Unless you can guarantee that this one endurance boost will be sure to prevent us from blowing out our neigong, I can't responsibly vote for it.

 

There is the case to be made that it'll be harder to raise stats at higher levels, and so you get more out of that five month time sink if you train a high level stat.

But yeah I still think it's high time that we started cultivating a stronger END base, given the higher level fights we're sure to be thrown into in the future. I'm sick of spending half the LP injured or incapacitated.

 

Kipeci, why are you so adamant on that +1 STR?
My whole deal is that I hate spending five fucking mo ths on a stat boost instead of martial arts, but the way treave explained it, natural END is a pretty valuable thing to go with it because:
Natural END increases our recovery rate from injuries.
Natural END is there when our neiggong isn't.
Our own neiggong will not protect us from itself.
Natural END makes us last longer in bed.

 

If we're looking to add more people to the harem, END is a must, yeah.

 

There's no way that a single endurance point is going to be the difference between punching your way through Xsaora Vairya and never hurting him at all. See, I can play that game too, and it's just as bad of an argument on my end.

No, an extra END point won't prevent us from blowing out our neigong ever again because it's not like we are a human tank like Master Zhang, but it will certainly make our body far more resilient, and our recovery quicker if we do suffer from an internal injury again. It's important to keep in mind that these internal injuries are beyond even Cao'er's skills to handle; she took care of our physical injuries with the help of the golden fox leaves, but due to our unique condition, we couldn't get those internal injuries fixed and we had to wait for that on our own.

It was only until our run-in with Yang Xue that our neigong returned to us. I just see our inner strength as such a tremendously important asset, and I'd prefer to have it for more than one fight a month. We've blown out our inner strength three times over the past six months, that is a lot.

 

Elfberserker's unarmed package is strikingly similar to my own, except a few more things in it for a few more months. I'm voting for it.

 

The only thing I have left from my plans at the start of our journey with Jing is ensuring that Jing's unarmed skill is as great as possible. If nothing else from this update, I want to improve that unarmed skill AND boost the cap so that we don't miss any future opportunities. We're not going to vote for the +1 Agility because Jing is definitely fast enough already, so I can only appeal to the fact that Jing while using his neigong boost and everything he had was not able to put more than a few scratches on the guardian of metal and against similar foes and Guo Fu was similarly ineffective with even his strongest techniques, showing that some more strength is needed to put those guys in their place. I can say that actually being able to beat Jing's enemies faces in faster would reduce the chance that they're able to give in a shot, being strong naturally is there when the neigong isn't as well, and that treave hasn't said anything about the endurance from the neigong not applying so I see no argument there.

 

Yep, there's definitely no chance that that endurance point would have made any difference in how hard he punched. Anyway, it's actually two strength points and the additional unarmed stat going by my package, so I'm rather convinced that the aggregate effect leaves a much better dent. Just the one point wouldn't make that big of a difference, but with everything else, certainly.

Where was it said that endurance makes recovery faster? I don't recall treave ever confirming that. We got the neigong back due to either toad business or qi sapping, not by enduring waterfalls. If the one endurance point isn't going to stop us from blowing out the neigong, then why not take steps to be stronger both when we're using it and when it's gone?

And we will have it, we've only lost it when we choose the stupidest, most extreme possible options that don't actually correspond with Jing's strengths. We've fought a number of high-tier foes without blowing up the neigong, I'm pretty sure we can keep up the current streak so long as we don't do something retarded like fighting a whole army.

 

Here's the thing, though, wd will never physically match guys like Bro Fu, Master Zhang and Rob Halford in physical combat: yeah, we can get 11 STR, but those guys have ungodly END and defensive abilities that will let them take that punch and keep fighting, so it really feels like we'd be chasing our own tail. Jing's thing is that he's good both physically and mentally, strong and cunning, even if he's not a genius, and that cunning is what bridges the gap between him and higher level opponents. Again, our use of spidersilk is what gave us enough breathing room to actually land a hit on Rob Halford, without them we'd have been toast. Also, we did fantastic against him, the dude is on Lord Zhang's level, our survival is a fucking miracle.

The +END will fortify us enough that using our qi doesn't fuck us up too much and that's enough as far as physical stats go (+2 STR, +2 AGI, +3 END), the rest is where our skills and techniques come in.

treave, can Yorikawa or Yorimitsu arrange a hawt ninja girl wife for us? Or a Japanese princess?
Also, please answer this once and for all:

 

We're the Codex. We're going to choose the stupidest, most extreme possible options anyway.

 

Only thing you have left? Come on dude, that sounds melodramatic. We can still be a Master swordsman too before the Huashan Summit. Yes, we should take advantage of opportunities when they're presented, but I think you're way too invested in this idea when really, we're going to encounter some stumbles along the way. I mean, it took a year of travelling with Yao before we realized our full potential with Master Zhang.

The argument regarding what's bolded here is that the END boost provided by our neigong isn't really going to protect us from the effects of overexerting ourselves when tapping into Yuanshi Hundun. If you aren't inherently tough and resilient at all, you're far more likely to burn yourself out with the qi that we use. This stuff has been asked already.

You realize the difference between your proposal and mine would be that mine would max STR at 10 with the neigong and yours would max it out at STR 11. So really, the analogy fits perfectly. The "hey, it's only one point" argument is silly, when it obviously does matter. Otherwise we wouldn't be arguing.

First, because when we're not using our neigong we aren't half the fighter we normally are - that's maybe our best asset. Again, I never said we'd never blow out our neigong with END 6, just that it would happen far less and we would be able to cultivate our qi more liberally without worrying (as much) about hurting ourselves.

We also lost it for a few weeks when we fought Yunzi at the tournament. Oh, and also when we fought Xsaora Vairya. It's just that the recovery time was only a week or two on those occasions. If Bai Jiutian wanted to fight us at the end of the previous chapter, we would have been toast. A higher END would probably have allowed us to shrug off blowing ourselves out on those two occasions, though of course we'd still be out of commission from the Hundred Man Battle, which was totally awesome and not something to regret at all. Shame on you, what kind of a YOLOTIGER would we be otherwise?

And yeah, with the Douchebag Generation in control of the Eight Sects and their power consolidating, you bet your ass we're going to be fighting a lot of orthodox pugilists. It's going to be great. We shall spill rivers of blood and please Khorne Master Zhang greatly.

 

That's only a prophecy if you have us fulfill it by not bothering. Jing is the physically strongest character choice we could have gone with along with Ox Farmer, just because he's not huge doesn't mean that he can't throw them around if we put some effort into it. Since Jing is (or rather, can be) actually strong enough to overcome their defensive and endurance, why not get to that point?

We'd have been screwed if that fight lasted any longer, Jing broke the silk with his own attacks and barely scratched the guy with a full fledged assault of Jing's strongest attack and you're saying that we're already strong enough? The takeaway from that fight is that Jing needs to be on another level of strength entirely so that master level foes like him can actually be damaged. For all Jing's cunning, he wasn't able to apply enough force for victory.

Consider Murong Yandi. Great fighter, fantastic sword user and a pretty smart guy, it seems like. Yet he wasn't strong enough to actually do any harm to Guo Fu when his tricks didn't work out, so that for all his skill he could only be swept out of the ring.

Standard use of Jing's qi doesn't harm him, it's when he enters ridiculous situations like the hundred man match where he has to resort to doing crazy bullshit that things go wrong. Being able to fight on a master level will ensure that he doesn't have to resort to such tactics as much.

Also, Jing's techniques are perfectly strong and good as is; the problem with the Thunder Breaking Kick against the Guardian of Metal wasn't that the technique sucked, it was that Jing simply wasn't able to apply nearly as much force as its creator was.

 

Rob Halford is a master on Lord Zhang's tier. Anyone from our generation would have gotten fucked up by him. It's dumb to use him as a benchmark for ourselves, we just won't match him in two years of training.

 

Murong Yandi had a shitty wooden tournament sword. Yeah, Guo Fu is a beast, but I doubt he could sit there like that if Yandi was carrying a real sword.

These ridiculous situations seem to happen to us a lot. Like, very, very often.

 

Regarding the Young Tigers Tournament, it usually takes place in summer. We should be somewhere in winter before the time skip. Also, remember that it is age limited to under twenty only so a fair number of your previous opponents won't be participating, though they may appear to watch and hobnob.

 

If it is I don't care. From the start of the CYOA I've had this minmaxing thing that you may have noticed from the moment I compiled tables of characters who were the best and worst at various things. When it became clear that any doctor let alone the dog one was not going to win out, I flopped to Jing since he had a great number of skills available for us to be the best at. The best strength! The best unarmed combat! The best swords skill, the best saber skill! All great stuff, and I wanted Jing to be the best at them, in other words picking those skills whenever they showed up in the narrative as something we could boost and trying to pick any options that would lead to ease in training them. I've down this all along.

The first option to show that we passed over (not including things like obviously missing out on sword and saber stuff from going to Huashan since there are many less obvious opportunity costs than those that we'll probably never know) was strength, but that was fine. I rationalized that picking agility also boosted the scores for everything else. Then more recently came the sword thing, where we passed over it for fucking silk. Now some of the same people arguing that since we were a little behind our sword skill it was useless compared to unarmed mastery and deserved to be utterly ditched at the time are arguing to pass up the unarmed boost in favor of putting sword skill on the same level, I don't know why. Well, fine. I can focus on the one item that we have left, with sabers in retrospect being doomed the moment we didn't go to Huashan.

This is the only one of my goals left from back then, I'm not going to abandon it for a knickknack or trinket. It's one thing if it's an opportunity cost that we never see (though I try to avoid situations where those seem likely), but to knowingly pass up on improving the unarmed stat and the skills that lead to its improvement is an anathema to me, it's not like the training with Yao that was a set-up to us becoming a much more badass unarmed fighter.

Could you find a link for that stuff way back into the discuss? I don't recall treave ever saying that the endurance would do more than allow Jing to survive in peak fighting condition for ridiculous fights for longer so that he doesn't need to resort to insane qi blast bullshit that he has no way to properly use, thus disabling him.

Yes, and STR at 10 is one point up from when we faced the Guardian of Metal while STR at 11 is two. That's two points of difference, a very sizeable amount for overall performance, unlike the one point of endurance being contested bys us.

I don't worry about Jing hurting himself by cultivating neigong already. Why would we be harmed by that? But upping strength makes Jing a better fighter both with and without neigong in everything he does, better endurance doesn't improve performance for either-- it makes blowing out when using neigong less likely, but when it happens anyway he's 'half the fighter he normally is' with no other boost to compensate for it aside from a bit better durability for when the other guys smack him around.

He did want to fight us, we walked off. Having our neigong at that time would just have encouraged us to get into a fight we had no business being in, we'd have lost badly.

So let's actually get the bonus that allows us to get on BJ and the Sect Head's level rather than the one which has us try to outlast mounds of their goons.

 

I apologize if this has already been covered, but there are 28 pages of DISCUSS!, so:

What are our goals for the upcoming tournament? Seems like we have three options:

1.) Try to win.
2.) Try to beat the orthodox fighters.
3.) Ignore it.

One of the results of the Fire Cult debacle was that the three orthodox greats were either killed or incapacitated, leaving Zhang and Tulu Huodu as the greatest fighters likely to show up at the tournament. Are we going to try to beat our master? Seems like a long shot, but if that's our goal, our best shot is probably to leave a hefty amount of time to wander and find powerups that might surprise him.

If we're not interested in that, the man to beat will probably be Bai, which the packages that most of you have been discussing seem to be designed for. If that's the case, carry on.

No one seems interested in ignoring it, since that is apparently too XTREME UNORTHODOXXX for you unmanly conquered spearmen, so it's probably not worth discussing.

 

Being on a master level in a fight complete with master level capabilities is a pretty good start on the road to getting there, certainly better than not being there.

Yes? And what if our tricks happen to not work out expectedly, we run out of silk, lose the sword in a river again? That kind of shit happens all the time, the fists are always with you... or if you're in a bad enough situation where they aren't, well, it's not like you could use the other stuff, either.

And now we've increased endurance by a ton and have qi draining. Either way, I'd rather have Jing be a better fighter for those time than have him be better at absorbing punishment.

 

There were definitely women in the Minamoto camps. Those who've survived this long on Maniac Island (the Minamoto made it more livable eventually, but I imagine that took some time) would likely be pretty badass. And we're doing up to two bits of training with the Minamoto if we do the Reikan upgrade and the kenjutsu technique. Honoraburu samurai swordmaster woman?

Although technically samurai women used naginata...

 

Regarding this whole 'can't scratch Vairya' thing, refer to my comments about the fight against Guo Fu.

 

There are something like three open slots now. I imagine we're aiming to take one of them. We're probably not out to depose Zhang, but it's entirely possible he'd target us during the actual fight out of Zhang-brand love and respect (or just because he knows we make for a decent fight).

Personally I want to knock down Nie Wuxing at the summit, but I don't know about anyone else's goals.

 

This comment?

There's more than one way to crack a nut. And we chose the hardest and least efficient way.

As for the Huashan Summit, of course I want to win and we should go in there with the intention of beating everybody, our Master included. Part of the reason Master Zhang took us in as an apprentice is because he believed that we could end up being stronger than even him. Let's do him proud.

 

Kipeci, here you go. treave pretty much confirmed Esquilax's words three times over:

 

Fuck it. We can have both endurance and strength and still leave tons of time for Tibet ventures, but I have an exam in 20 minutes. I just ask for unarmed and strength boosts, I don't care beyond that, I want that skill cap boost so that we never miss a chance to upgrade unarmed. Not sure where the other two for the next level will come, but treave will make a fantastic story anyway. There's no point to me voting from now on if my goals are gone.

I'm sorry.

 

You mean this one?

Guys, I think we need the Yuhe Finger technique.