I think there's a rules oversight on the choking side of things; while a creature can hold it's breath for a minimum of 30 seconds (if it has a negative con modifier, which hardly ever comes up), the next paragraph of that rule says: "When a creature runs out of breath or is choking, it can survive for a number of rounds equal to its Constitution modifier (minimum of 1 round)." (emphasis mine) So I'd say that there's a difference between holding your breath, and being actively strangled- the latter I'd probably rule as a second opposed athletics check during a grapple instead of dealing damage, which puts the creature down after Con Mod consecutive successes.

Yeah, but there's also plenty of magical martial arts right, like hamon? DnD wizards have a particular flavour of spellcasting (int based, using a spellbook and weird spell components) which doesn't really fit well with stands or nen, right? Like, performing magic through sheer martial prowess rather than study and arcane research feels like something that DnD doesn't have much support for.

That would be a good point if this was an argument, and not just me bellyaching. Also, the supernatural side of anime swordsmen tends to be "They studied the sword so much that they've got these expert abilities" rather than "they spent long enough in the library to unlock these techniques". To my understanding, I'm not a big anime person.

Grizzly? I thought the pun was koala-ty, but I guess I can't panda to all audiences- I bet you just don't like puns because of astrology, what's ur sine?

"Fiend pact warlock? No, you misheard- I took Pact of the Demon Core"

Huge fan of having a bell curve for most rolls, my main concern is that in combat the random initiative might make it kind of swingy; the initiative system is that if the hope die is higher the players go next, if the fear die is higher the enemies do, for about a 46% chance of enemies going next each turn. So that's about a 15% chance of players getting three turns in a row- if the game is balanced for quick combats (which seems likely given what we know) that could make a massive difference in how hard a combat is- and in the counter situation, where enemies get three turns in a row (about a 9% chance) an otherwise easy encounter could go very wrong. This is all speculation, of course, but the initiative system being fully random does worry me, since the action economy seems like it would be a major thing in this system

Fortunately, they're very strict on architectural safety- lots of building soupervisers