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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Oneiros said:
What you are describing are called bureaucrats. They don't have any actual authority over ninjas
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Who said any civilians did have authority over ninja? I sure didn't. It's clear only the Tower gets to order them around.

You said the civilians didn't have any authority at all, which really should have made no sense to you if you'd stopped to think about it. That's the statement I took issue with.

Now, could the Daimyo use a bureaucratic system instead of vassal nobility to maintain order and collect taxes? It's possible to do such a thing, but barring the golden eras of certain dynasties in Imperial China I can't think of any examples on Earth that don't occur until much later. Feudal rulers relied heavily on lesser nobility to manage countries for a few reasons. I can get into them if you're actually interested.

The short version is that they didn't have educational systems capable of producing bureaucrats to hire, and there were powerful entrenched nobility with rights to manage their own lands that even the ruler couldn't easily challenge without a mass rebellion. Rulers relied on lesser nobility to administer lands because no one else could and couldn't institute central administration even if he wanted to and had people capable of doing the work because the lesser nobility would replace the ruler if he tried.

The system gradually changed by inches over centuries to become more and more centralized in Europe. That central administration is much of what gave post-medieval Europe such a huge edge over other parts of the world, actually. Japan for instance - which is the closest analog for the elemental nations - didn't really change away from the hierarchical feudal model until it was forced to from the outside.

Even in Imperial China the bureaucrats tended to become nobility in all but name unless the Emperor was unusually effective about clamping down on their attempts to consolidate power for themselves. That sort of thing getting out of hand is how dynasties tended to fall.
 
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TaliesinSkye said:
That's actually enough information to make a ballpark estimate of the total population including the rural and therefore the percentage of the population that are ninja, which is interesting.
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300,000 people in Fire overall.
30,000 in Leaf
Another 30,000 total in the other three 'major' cities
1500 ninja

TaliesinSkye said:
Any idea how much? That'll mess with economic models a lot. Things like the number of farmers needed to maintain one specialist are really important to building a picture of medieval life in an area.
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HDK, but you could find it out with enough effort

Oneiros said:
The Daimyo is just a glorified tax collector. They have no actual authority. There are no landholding nobility

Like I'm sorry but the world you think MFD is is just so wrong from what is shown by the text and by QMs post
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TaliesinSkye said:
Or does he, perhaps, have an extensive system of lesser nobility with lots of people working for them that do all of that work? People who exercise authority to get it all done?
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Oneiros said:
What you are describing are called bureaucrats. They don't have any actual authority over ninjas
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If I can step in for a moment, I think you guys are talking past each other, and it feels to me like most of the disagreement is based on definitions. You're both right in different ways.

Yes, there is a Daimyo and there is a nobility.

Yes, at bottom they are all just glorified tax collectors for the ninja.

Yes, they do have some authority within their own spheres, but it's thin and very limited. There are a couple foundations to it; first, they have money that they can use to pay ninja to do stuff...except most ninja (i.e. any clan member and any jōnin) are richer than most nobles.[1]​ Second, they have direct authority over the peasants who work their land, and over the courtiers / bureaucrats who help manage everything. This means that most nobles are experienced leaders with a certain force of personality. People, including ninja, tend to listen to people like that. It's not magic, just basic human psychology.

Hazō has no way of knowing exactly what the rules are between ninja and nobles -- whether or not either has the right to give each other orders. Something to look into.

[1] Clanless genin and chūnin get completely screwed -- their only acceptable source of income is missions and they pay 80% taxes on those after a minimal subsistence allowance. Hence why there's such incentive to move up the ranks and become a jōnin, and why anyone who fails at that without a good reason might be considered a skinwaste.​
 
eaglejarl said:
300,000 people in Fire overall.
30,000 in Leaf
Another 30,000 total in the other three 'major' cities
1500 ninja


HDK, but you could find it out with enough effort




If I can step in for a moment, I think you guys are talking past each other, and it feels to me like most of the disagreement is based on definitions. You're both right in different ways.

Yes, there is a Daimyo and there is a nobility.

Yes, at bottom they are all just glorified tax collectors for the ninja.

Yes, they do have some authority within their own spheres, but it's thin and very limited. There are a couple foundations to it; first, they have money that they can use to pay ninja to do stuff...except most ninja (i.e. any clan member and any jōnin) are richer than most nobles.[1]​ Second, they have direct authority over the peasants who work their land, and over the courtiers / bureaucrats who help manage everything. This means that most nobles are experienced leaders with a certain force of personality. People, including ninja, tend to listen to people like that. It's not magic, just basic human psychology.

Hazō has no way of knowing exactly what the rules are between ninja and nobles -- whether or not either has the right to give each other orders. Something to look into.

[1] Clanless genin and chūnin get completely screwed -- their only acceptable source of income is missions and they pay 80% taxes on those after a minimal subsistence allowance. Hence why there's such incentive to move up the ranks and become a jōnin, and why anyone who fails at that without a good reason might be considered a skinwaste.​
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Thanks.
 
Addendum:

TaliesinSkye said:
Is that figure profit, or gross? Remember that farming was astonishingly inefficient. Greater than 90% of what farmers produced was needed just to to sustain the farmers.
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Actually, according to our historical information, a Japanese farmer of roughly this era ate 1 koku of rice per year and his farm produced about 2.2 koku per year.
 
eaglejarl said:
Addendum:


Actually, according to our historical information, a Japanese farmer of roughly this era ate 1 koku of rice per year and his farm produced about 2.2 koku per year.
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Good to know. I mentioned earlier that most of my knowledge is very Europe focused. I knew paddy farming rice was more efficient than field agriculture thanks in part to getting rid of weeds but I didn't realize it was that much more efficient. Helps explain how the population densities in Asia got so high.

Edit: Wait, does your figure account for the farmer's family? I think it must, but it feels worth asking.

Well, maybe not must. If two adult farmers in a family could produce 4.4 koku, that's support for the adults and 2.2 others, to be allocated between taxes and children too young to work.

Just checked, it looks like a koku is a person's needs and not one family's. I guess excess available for tax will depend on average number of children? Although older children would add to production so the function gets complicated at that point.

Looks like there are records of the tax rates on rice crops being as high as 70%, but it's unclear how much of what the grew wasn't rice. It seems many farmers didn't eat the stuff because of the taxes, so they raised it as a cash crop and grow other crops for themselves.

I'm having a frustratingly hard time finding numbers for the farmer/nonfarming ratio of society. I did find a figure that put samurai at 10%, higher than what Europe could have supported, but nothing for the percentage of artisans and merchants.

I did find a number for the average family's landholding for crops being only 2.45 acres.


Important Idea -
Something the dive into agriculture brought up is that cropland was far less productive before they built huge aqueducts to make land suitable for paddy farming. If we used MEW to build aqueducts and irrigation works to land it would become worth far, far more. Doing it for cleared land to sell as farmland would be a great idea, as would offering it as a service for till and fill missions. It could make a huge difference in people's lives and the supportable population. Normally construction of the irrigation works was a massive project, the sort of thing that took many years.
 
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Velorien said:
"Kinda sorta?" Jiraiya wobbled his hand horizontally. "He's too young to be acknowledged as clan head, so for now he has a regent representing him at council meetings and the like. A civilian, if you'll believe it, the best they could scrape up from Itachi's leavings. Not a bad man, as civilians go, but he's clearly out of his depth being surrounded by some of the world's top ninja, so he mostly abstains."
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Context has changed since this: now, many clans have clan heads of the same age as Sasuke (we're in the same class as him, right?). Will Sasuke elect to remove his regent and become one of the group of young clan heads?
 
[x] Action Plan: We Totally Are the Good Guys, Don't You See?

In spite of his complaints, @eaglejarl writes great talky-meety updates, so let's go with that.
 
A reminder that medieval Japan is not the same as medieval era Elemental Nations.

The nobility here are not warlords, don't possess any troops worth a damn(if any), and are very unlikely to care about lands that are of negative economic value.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
Good to know. I mentioned earlier that most of my knowledge is very Europe focused. I knew paddy farming rice was more efficient than field agriculture thanks in part to getting rid of weeds but I didn't realize it was that much more efficient. Helps explain how the population densities in Asia got so high.

Edit: Wait, does your figure account for the farmer's family? I think it must, but it feels worth asking.

Well, maybe not must. If two adult farmers in a family could produce 4.4 koku, that's support for the adults and 2.2 others, to be allocated between taxes and children too young to work.

Just checked, it looks like a koku is a person's needs and not one family's. I guess excess available for tax will depend on average number of children? Although older children would add to production so the function gets complicated at that point.

Looks like there are records of the tax rates on rice crops being as high as 70%, but it's unclear how much of what the grew wasn't rice. It seems many farmers didn't eat the stuff because of the taxes, so they raised it as a cash crop and grow other crops for themselves.

I'm having a frustratingly hard time finding numbers for the farmer/nonfarming ratio of society. I did find a figure that put samurai at 10%, higher than what Europe could have supported, but nothing for the percentage of artisans and merchants.

I did find a number for the average family's landholding for crops being only 2.45 acres.


Important Idea -
Something the dive into agriculture brought up is that cropland was far less productive before they built huge aqueducts to make land suitable for paddy farming. If we used MEW to build aqueducts and irrigation works to land it would become worth far, far more. Doing it for cleared land to sell as farmland would be a great idea, as would offering it as a service for till and fill missions. It could make a huge difference in people's lives and the supportable population. Normally construction of the irrigation works was a massive project, the sort of thing that took many years.
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I'd really like to see your source for that 2.45 acres number, because:
1: That is a really small farm. That's a farm that fits in my backyard. (I live on an acreage.)

2: It severely disagrees with my own data.

3: It disagrees with my data in such a way as to indicate someone translated "cho" as "acre".

Samurai at 10% tallies with my own numbers, as does tax rates of up to 70% - 50% was standard - and food needing to be grown via other crops. Wheat was often grown in higher areas unsuitable for paddy farming, and gives you about half the yield of rice IIRC.

Census data is out there for late Sengoku-period. Keep looking.

Kiba said:
A reminder that medieval Japan is not the same as medieval era Elemental Nations.

The nobility here are not warlords, don't possess any troops worth a damn(if any), and are very unlikely to care about lands that are of negative economic value.
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The Hokage Is The Real Daimyo And The Clan Heads Are His Hatamoto

Ignore the mocking title the ninja gave their tax collectors.
 
Noumero said:
Oh, sweet.
  • The failure created a small creature, which managed to escape into Leaf. No-one knows where it went or what it can do, aside from the (very worrying) speculations based on what the failed seal was supposed to do. Leaf enters a state of small emergency.
  • The failure itself was nothing impressive — an ordinary explosion — and happened weeks ago, but the sealmaster who witnessed it started exhibiting irregular behaviour, opening a bizarre business and taking her research into a similarly bizarre direction. Yet all merchants to whom she spoke agree that it's a brilliant idea...
  • All wine glasses within Leaf walls exploded violently. Thankfully, it was nighttime.
  • A twenty-meter radius around the seal was plunged into abnormal, undispellable darkness. It seems to be just that, darkness: objects (including the sealmaster who caused the failure) are able to enter and exit it with no noticeable issues or unnatural changes...
  • A loud voice, loud enough that it's heard by a large fraction of the town, speaks a message:
    • A Leaf secret that was not meant to be known at large.
    • A secret that was not meant to be known, period.
    • A worrying message warning of impending doom. No-one has any reason to believe that it's accurate, and the sealmasters dismiss it easily; everyone else, on the other hand...
@MadScientist, @Vecht, @MMKII, @Lailoken, want to pitch in? @faflec, inventing interesting but nonlethal failures increases the odds that Kagome survives.
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I doubt that anybody is going to beat, "sealmaster lived another six months on a liquid diet after his gastrointestinal tract inverted."

To build off of it, how about the less-lethal version of everybody within the range of effect growing taste buds in their intestines?
 
Me: [*sits down to write*] Okay, let's roll for that sealing failure. I'm feeling generous, so I'll give them even odds on positive or negative...1-50 is negative, 51-100 is positive, the closer to the extreme the stronger the result.

Dice: 4

Me: Uh...
 
Voting is closed.
Adhoc vote count started by eaglejarl on Jun 29, 2019 at 11:25 AM, finished with 149223 posts and 23 votes.
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eaglejarl said:
Me: [*sits down to write*] Okay, let's roll for that sealing failure. I'm feeling generous, so I'll give them even odds on positive or negative...1-50 is negative, 51-100 is positive, the closer to the extreme the stronger the result.

Dice: 4

Me: Uh...
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RIP

At least it's not guaranteed to be Kagome doing the sealing failure, right? Right???
 
Cariyaga said:
RIP

At least it's not guaranteed to be Kagome doing the sealing failure, right? Right???
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Correct. This represents an aggregate roll for all seals made by all Leaf sealmasters since the Team first came to the village. The odds of the failure happening to either Kagome or Hazō are too small for meaningful consideration. It's not happening to them, although it will definitely affect them.
 
eaglejarl said:
Voting is closed.
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Phew, my plan lost. I was a bit worried that my plan wouldn't win, but thankfully it did.
Me: [*sits down to write*] Okay, let's roll for that sealing failure. I'm feeling generous, so I'll give them even odds on positive or negative...1-50 is negative, 51-100 is positive, the closer to the extreme the stronger the result.

Dice: 4

Me: Uh...
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Oh, yes. I'm looking forward to it!
 
eaglejarl said:
Correct. This represents an aggregate roll for all seals made by all Leaf sealmasters since the Team first came to the village. The odds of the failure happening to either Kagome or Hazō are too small for meaningful consideration. It's not happening to them, although it will definitely affect them.
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Just a curiosity, how does sealing failures are treated for other villages sealmasters? Simple curiosity, no particular clan in mind.
Like, just for example, the Kurosawa? Or the Kurosawa? Or the Mori, while visiting the Kurosawa? Or another random clan that is casually doing affairs with the Kurosawa? Asking for an Hazou.
 
Ah well, at least with Tsunade and Naruto there we have some hope left.




Do you think "rips Kuruma out of Naruto, killing N in the process and forcing Tsunade to die fighting K" would be a 4?
 
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