EDIT EDIT: The 'impact your team has had' section of this post should be treated as my interpretations as opposed to Word of God. IT IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR QUOTING in questions to the QMs if said questions would cause us difficulty or effort, nor in support of argumentation that might require us to think or to change any other ruling or statement.
@faflec I am absolutely thinking of you here.
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail
I am concerned that the time taken to travel to and from the BotG may be wrong. Unless you guys changed the scaling on the
map linked in the second post, it seems like folks could have gotten to Nagi Island a lot faster than they did. The EN is
very small. Could I ask for the math behind that?
If you measure the distance from Mist to approximately the 'I' in 'Nagi
Island', remembering that you need to islandhop instead of running in a straight line, you'll find that's it's approximately 200 miles, which is about 10 hours of ninja running time.
We actually did the math very carefully, several times.
@OliWhail made a chart out of the map with the routes of everyone involved, marked out in standard-sized segments to make it easy to measure. The travel times are really not in dispute, the only things that were subjective was how much time people would need for organization and rest.
But how would this quest have remained intact if there was a *whoosh* and [solving disagreements with violence] had been shifted away like Henge, flying machines, and village names?
It might not have. If that had happened then we would have written the most epic wrapup we could and then decided on our next project.
I'll be sticking around. Unfamiliar with the voting/proposal system that actually runs this thing but I'll poke around the beginning again and I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Welcome! Nice to have you.
Voting is simple. People make plans and you vote for them like so:
[x] The Plan Name
You can vote for as many as you like and your vote is counted for each one.
After reading the update, i just think that the "rational" genre makes for a great story and a bad RPG. We realistically had fuckall with all the super important things that happened and I just feel that I'd rather play a game where GM's cheat to make the story more about us, or just read a story that's written to be a story, not a game. Just reading about dozens of cool characters dying before we interacted with them is realistic, but super disappointing. And now for 50 pages of playing careful politics.
I get why you're feeling that way, but let me try to change your mind.
Your team got into a fight in Hot Springs. As a result, Mist de facto took over the country, giving them a foothold on the western continent and a stranglehold on trade coming out of the Land of Lightning.
Hazō had the idea for skywalkers, Kagome created them.
You sold them to Leaf in exchange for being accepted into the city, not just as Leaf ninja, but
as a brand new clan under the second most important ninja in the city. That is huge. I'd need to check the worldbuilding, but I'm pretty confident that no missing-nin has
ever come in from the cold before, so you just set a precedent that:
- Missing-nin can become citizens again
- New clans can be formed by a collection of people who are not blood relatives
It cannot be overstated what a big deal these two things are.
1. Until now, a person was stuck in whatever Village they were born in, because no one else would take them. Now, if you're a skilled ninja and you don't like your village, you can leave. Someone else will accept you. Kage suddenly have an incentive to create a society that their ninja enjoy living in.
2. Until now, if you were clanless you were basically screwed. You were locked out of the advantages of the clan system (unless someone deigned to adopt you, but that was uncommon) and there was nothing you could do about it, because you almost certainly didn't have enough ninja in your family to be worthy of the name 'clan'. Now people know that it's possible to get together with unrelated friends and form a clan, and if you have something of enough value to offer you can actually get that clan recognized.
Moving on...
Because they bought skywalkers from you, Leaf felt confident enough in their combat superiority that they decided to bait a trap for Yagura (the head of Mist). Yagura took it, and all of Mist's best ninja got killed. This gave Akatsuki the chance to grab the 3-Tails, which had been one of the few jinchūriki they had no easy way to get hold of, since Yagura rarely left his city. They also got the 9-Tails as a bonus, which was nice.
The death of all their best ninja left Mist in a very precarious position on the international stage and with no clear successor for the Kage's hat. They almost had a civil war and ended up choosing Ren, a decidedly not S-rank ninja who was more of a diplomat than a fighter. They chose her because they thought they could control her. It turned out that her diplomacy skills ended up getting Mist some amazing trade deals that are likely to leave the city richer than before she took the hat.
Fast forward a bit. You captured Goda, the Yakuza banker. Leaf extracted some useful information from him that gave hints about where Akatsuki was and what they had been doing.
At the first part of the Chūnin Exams you pointed Team Bloodrage out to Jiraiya, who likely would not have had cause to interact with them otherwise. He captured them and extracted the location of their handler, who was higher up in Akatsuki's organization. Noburi and Kakashi captured the handler, who had information pointing towards Akatsuki's base. Jiraiya couldn't move on it because after Hiruzen's death and Naruto's capture he didn't have the firepower to take Akatsuki head-on.
At the Chūnin Exams tournament, Hazō stopped Zabuza from blowing the whistle on the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, the knowledge of which could easily have sparked a war.
Everyone then went off and fought the Battle of the Gods, in which a large plurality of the senior ninja in the Elemental Nations died. There are now only a handful of S-rank ninja alive, and most of them are Akatsuki. This reduction in combat power meant that Ami was able to bring forth the conspiracy she'd been working on for years: Uniting the young clanless ninja in the city into a force powerful enough to cause real change in the culture of Mist.
So, now where do things stand? In terms of real-world history, the MfD historical period is similar to that of feudalism. What killed feudalism? The Black Death. The Black Death wiped out something like 50% of the people in Europe. Suddenly there was a labor shortage and therefore serfs had both economic value and bargaining power. There was also a need for technology to help make up for the reduced number of people -- traditional inefficient methods of weaving, farming, etc weren't sustainable anymore, so you saw rapid improvement in looms, tooling, etc. You're seeing something very similar here. The large majority of the world's best ninja just got wiped out. Remember that precedent you set about how missing-nin can be repatriated? With so many ninja wiped out in the BotG, at least some Villages are going to be actively looking for missing-nin to recruit.
All of this because of you and Team Uplift. And that was when you were a random genin running around following orders. Now you're a Clan Head with no Kage to get in your way.
Let the world tremble.
EDIT:
Our resident wet blanket One of my co-QMs has pointed out that there are definitely provisos on some of the above. For example, while adopting missing-nin is now thinkable, starting a war over bloodline theft is also still thinkable. Suffice to say that the world is never simple, and it is neither as rosy as I portray nor as gloomy as
he someone else might portray.
