The herb are a mix of home-grown for the most common and foraged for the more challenging. He does show you how to identify what he needs, and tries to help you learn the names of each as part of your training.
Your skill in diagnosis and treatment is improving markedly; your other skills not so fast, but still improving.
Autumn has definitely arrived, as the tinge in the leaves spreads down the slopes into the valley and the heights are heading toward brilliant colors.
--M. J. Young
Magnus
Member
I'm here.
...
Let's continue.
In my spare time I ask the old man if he has heard about anyone using ki to heal or do other thing. What he has heard about Onmyodo (Japanese style magic) and the Onmyoji (court magicians).
I'm trying to find out if he has heard about anybody using something that looks like magic.
He laughs at your ideas about magical or ki healings, or about any magic at all. It is all trickery, he says, like the thief who cuts your coin string and quietly catches your money in his sleeve.
The weather stays fairly mild, although the color is sweeping across the valley by now and it is not only the nights that are a bit chill. The firewood stockpile is growing as the old man gathers more and stacks it alongside the hut. He also patches the walls with clay-like mud from the stream from which you get your water.
Your martial arts training is paying off; you've definitely improved.
I had been tracking training with the bo stick and the tonfa, but I note that neither of those weapons appears on your equipment list. I see that a bo stick is easily obtained, but I'm not certain of the tonfa, and so I thought I'd better ask whether you were or were not practicing these skills with the others.
--M. J. Young
Magnus
Member
As you said, a bo stick is easy to find, so I will train with it.
For the tonfa, I would have to find a tree with two limbs that are at right angles to the trunk and carve them into the correct shape.
if I did that, I practice with the tonfas I made,
Otherwise I ignore them.
It took me a moment to figure out why you needed to find one tree with to limbs at right angles to the trunk, given that the weapon looks like this, but then it struck me that you need to make two; but then, you probably can do that by finding two similar trees. Or have I misunderstood?
It's certainly within the realm of possibility that you might find such trees, assuming you look; and you could then carve them into the desired shape, assuming you have the tool and the skill. I see a listing for a Bowie knife which could be used for whittling/carving; I don't see a skill listed for use of it, but that could be an oversight.
Should I start rolling dice for your chance to find such trees, and if so what skill ability level do you think you have with the knife?
--M. J. Young
Sorry. Within several miles of the hut there's mostly old timber, saplings regrowing from a fire, and stands of bamboo--no trees which present with the kind of branch structure you're seeking. Nothing like that is in the firewood, either.
Any other ideas on that count?
--M. J. Young
The trees are now bare at your elevation, and you've had a few flurries. Your host has brought in the rest of his herbs and vegetables, dried as much as he can, and built a substantial pile of firewood. You can see color in the valley below, but most of the fields and rice paddies are starting to appear barren as well. Wagon trains have been moving through the pass, with armed soldier escorts. The herbalist ignores these, and they pay him no attention.
You show marked improvement in your diagnostic skills, despite the fact that patients are coming less frequently.
--M. J. Young
You've had mild weather; the herbalist comments on it. There have been a few flurries and some light rains, but in the main it's remained autumnal, not wintry, even in your mountain pass. The wagon trains have stopped; apparently the harvest is in for the present.
You continue working on everything, showing improvement in your Japanese and your Medical Treatment skills.
--M. J. Young
Snow settles into the pass; traffic ceases. You could trudge through, or ride a horse, but a wagon would not make it. Patients stop coming, and there's not really any way to hunt for medicine, but the herbalist continues your instruction in caring for the medicines and the patients, and in the language.
Running in the snow is prohibitive, as it is over a foot deep in most places, over two in some; the best you can manage is a loop around the house, which helps tamp down the snow near the woodpile. Still, you manage to maintain your exercise program. Although you're using more firewood, the herbalist says that thus far the winter is mild and if it holds you will have more than enough to reach spring.
You continue your training as well. The days are short, but there is less to do. Mostly meals are rice with dried herbs. You melt snow for water more often than drawing it from the stream, but it is sufficient.
--M. J. Young
The snow deepens as winter closes the pass. Your running is much more difficult, and your feet are always soaked and chilled when you return. The herbalist goes outside only for firewood and water, and is concerned that you are going to make yourself sick from the cold and wet.
You continue improving your medical treatment, partly in treating your own chills.
Your back kick, power front kick, and roundhouse kick have improved as much as they are going to under your present training program; you'll have to find ways to train them more strenuously if you expect the practice to do more than maintain your current level of ability in them.
--M. J. Young
By "gainful physical exercise", does that include your martial arts practice as well?
Your host has very little that is not in use for something; the only heavy cloths he has are the blankets that are keeping you (plural) warm at night.
--M. J. Young
Snow continues to keep the pass closed, but it does not prevent you from getting outside to bring in water and firewood. The winter is passing.
Your diagnostic skills and language skills continue showing improvement.
--M. J. Young
The snow comes down hard over the next month; when you can get to the woodpile, you bring in extra wood, which is now being dried and stored in the cramped hut. The roof is sagging under the weight of the heavy snows, but the herbalist is confident that it will hold.
You improve in your treatment skills.
--M. J. Young
You're snowed in for a couple weeks, but it starts to melt, crocuses begin to appear through the white, and then for a couple days the road is a streambed from the melt from higher up and the world turns brown with patches of white here and there and bits of green starting to flourish on branches and on the ground. It's pretty muddy in most places, but you manage. Rains come every few days, washing away the snow and increasing the water flow. The stream is muddy, and you have to draw water long enough in advance of the need to let it settle for a few hours to get the silt out of it, and then ladle it off carefully so as not to stir it afresh.
Your diagnostic and linguistic abilities continue to improve.
--M. J. Young
That's a good shot at it, but the problem there is that I can only allow one "doubling" that has no play effect. That is, let's assume you're working on the kick about three and a half hours a week, when you combine all your sessions. Now you want to double the speed of the kicks, which means you'll do them faster but still within the three and a half hours, and you want to double the number, which means you'll do more but still within the three and a half hours; and at some level I'm thinking that the only way you can do twice as many kicks in the same time is by doing them twice as fast, so you've really only doubled one thing. Still, even if you were to say that you were going to do twice as many in that time and wear ankle weights, I wouldn't have a tangible effect on the character.
The easiest and most obvious thing to double is the practice time. Given that there is skill overlap (you practice the style and the kicks as part of the same session, and thus you practice longer than you would for any one skill but not as long as you would for all the skills individually) you wouldn't have to add the base time (sixty hours in one hundred days) for each kick, but a reasonable increase based on the amount of overlap--in this case, since they're all kicks, I could see an increase of about half the time for each, a total of ninety hours over one hundred days for the three kicks.
Of course, we've not really defined how much time you have put into practice for the martial arts. Let me do a bit of open math here to get something of an understanding of how much you're practicing. Here are the skills, with their current skill ability levels, and the number of hours over one hundred days you would be expected to spend working on them to benefit; then we'll find a formula to total them and break them down to your weekly practice:
To double the time spent on these three kicks, you would have to add almost an hour a day to this. I'll also note that your load will increase again when other skills reach that maximum amateur line (1@10), including the work you're doing in Japanese and herbalism.
Thoughts?
--M. J. Young
Magnus
Member
I would probably double the time spent on those kicks and try to do the kicks twice as fast.
Let's see how much time I'm spending on training
4.7 martial arts practice
~1 extra kicking practice
1.25 strength and stamina training
1.25 herbalism and Japanese training
0.25 focused Japanese training
____________________________________
8.45 Hours Total
That's an acceptable amount. I think we can add the extra time for professional herbalism and Japanese easily.
What else would constitute a significant doubling?
The only other thing that I could think of would be to spend resources to build something to aid with training
That's an excellent question.
Speaking generally, the first thing that comes to mind is the consumption of expendable resources which have to be replaced. If you're going to go through twice as many bullets or arrows, or break twice as many boards, those are acceptable.
In some cases, ramping up the difficulty is a good choice--doing the tightrope practice blindfolded. (That doesn't work for martial arts, though, because fighting blind is a martial arts skill and if you're not fighting an opponent the blindfold isn't that restrictive.)
In some cases, embracing risk can be part of it. If you're practicing rock climbing, I would take free climbing as harder than using pitons and lines, provided there's a roll for whether you fall and suffer injury (and for how severe the injury might be--we have a bod botch injury table that's useful for everything from "amazingly unhurt" to "completely demolished yourself to zygote").
Similarly, success at the use of another skill could be a way of increasing the difficulty of practice, if they're reasonably correlated: I have to practice as if in a weightless environment, so unless I have a weightless environment available, I have to levitate. (If you do have a weightless environment available, or conversely one in which you can increase gravity, that might work as a limitation given that you can only practice there.)
The point is that there has to be some impact on what else your character can do based on the fact that he's doing this. I could see giving "doubled" (or perhaps under the right circumstances "tripled") status for practicing martial arts while balanced on a pedestal or jungle gym, provided it means you have to be "home" to practice and thus are limited in your travels elsewhere.
See, if you say simply "I'm going to strap weights to my arms and legs and do twice as many kicks in the same amount of time," I can see that this would be a double doubled training program, but really it hasn't changed anything substantial unless I penalize you somewhere for it (like, this is so exhausting that you have to reduce other physical activity to maintain it).
So you're going to add an extra hour of kicking practice and try to do the kicks twice as fast, with the result that you are doing four times as many kicks during each practice session. Does that sound right to you?
--M. J. Young
The weather breaks and clears, and in less than a week you have gone from winter to spring. On warm days, of which there are quite a few, your host opens the cottage to the fresh air. Traffic through the pass resumes, and patients start arriving again. This means the diet improves, as they bring more than rice for his care. You also get more hands-on practice in the care of patients.
Your Japanese is improving. Your mentor says that he would like to see you increase the time you spend on this, and also to learn the letters. He does not have much paper, but you can use charred sticks from the fire to write on stones from the pass.
You also resume your physical workout, pushing harder now.
--M. J. Young
Over the next few weeks, there is plenty of sunshine and warm days. Your host frowns frequently at this.
As spring begins to move toward summer, he tells you that you have learned much as an apprentice herbalist, but if you wish to continue to advance as quickly as you have you will need to increase your effort, particularly in diagnosis. If you put in the extra time and effort, you will be as good a diagnostician as most young herbalists beginning their careers; your abilities in treatment will catch up to this soon, and that will also mean another increase in the workload. This is on top of the increased work you've been doing in Japanese.
--M. J. Young
Players usually speak of their characters in the first person, except when there is reason to make a distinction between player and character, which usually means out-of-character conversation; even then, it's not uncommon for the character to be first person with a qualifier, "in the game, I".
Summer has arrived, and the arrival of rain in the early days of this period seems to have reduced your host's worries. The valley below is greening nicely now.
You are finally comfortable conversing in the Japanese language, although there are still occasionally conversations where you have to ask for clarification, either because the person with whom you are speaking uses a word you don't know or because his accent is different enough that you don't follow it well. Your teacher is also having you do diagnostics without his direct involvement, and is starting to have you do treatments as well, as your burden of the practice is increased. This includes time spent foraging for the needed herbs and tending the garden, all part of the task. You also continue your rather taxing training program.
--M. J. Young
You are in essence working full time as an herbalist at this point, plus your heavy physical training and martial arts and the chores necessary to maintain life in the mountain pass. The summer has not been overbearing in the shade in the mountains, and the flow of patients has been satisfactory.
Your martial arts abilities are becoming sharper. You've also learned to use chopsticks without having to think about it.
--M. J. Young
You were always getting a bit of the written language in your training sessions, as your host was attempting to teach you not only to speak and understand but to read and write. You are more focused on that now, but the typical peasant in this world does not read nor write, so your abilities to write (and read) do lag behind your abilities to speak and understand. (In mechanical terms, I will rarely require you to roll for speech and comprehension, but will require rolls for reading and writing.)
As the summer heat increases, there is more traffic through the pass, and you often see travelers while you are exercising. These include the occasional merchant, cartloads of goods and most often rice under the guard of soldiers (what your host calls "bushi", sometimes with a "samurai" who apparently is also "bushi"), rarely travelers who don't fit either of these molds--and most of those are coming for medical help.
One afternoon a group of soldiers arrives, some on horseback. They come off the road toward the house.
--M. J. Young
Magnus
Member
...@$%#@&^!!! The bushi are here to get me.
And now, It's time for twenty questions!
How many bushi are there?
How many are on horseback?
What weapons are they carrying?
How heavily armored are they?
How far away are they?
How fast are they moving?
If it's going to take them a few minutes to get here, I go and tell the old man about the bushi and ask him for advice.
There are about twenty altogether, three of these on horseback.
All of them have swords, some also have bows and arrows.
Most wear a metal hat on top of their heads plus a woven bamboo corselet around their torso; the mounted ones wear a complex combination of woven bamboo with a full metal helmet. This is typical armor for a bushi party; the mounted ones will be samurai.
It is about fifty yards from the road to the hut, lightly wooded; they are closing at what for the horses is a comfortable walk, a bit of a brisk walk for the footmen.
--M. J. Young
"You may come with us peacefully, ninja, so you may have a fair hearing before your execution."
--M. J. Young
"You expect us to release a man guilty of harboring a ninja? I think you think too highly of the danger you pose to us, ninja, if you think you are in a position to bargain."
--M. J. Young
Magnus
Member
“It's true that I am no treat to twenty armed men, and in no position to bargain on that front.
No, my value is in what I can teach you and your men.
Would you like to be able to send in someone with nothing but peasants’ clothes,
have them gain the trust of a key ninja and when they are alone with the ninja,
they kill them with nothing but their body?
So, How about this deal? I grab my things from the old mans house,
go with you and teach this style to whoever you or your superiors’ want.
And you leave this old man to heal the sick in peace.”
If the bushi accept this deal, I need to talk to the old man in the hut.
The leader says, "I am not here to bargain, and I am not interested in learning your dishonorable peasant ninja ways. You will surrender, and so will the old man."
--M. J. Young
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