Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
He didn't have the chance to talk to us there. Skywalkers were "okay so these guys are going to CONTINUE putting out WMDs..."
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
- Location
- Pacific standard
Hey on that note, if I did a walkthrough for making nitroglycerin from animal fat, put it in a plan and got the plan to win the vote would you let us have mundane explosives? Pretty please?
I love the mental image of putting it in a macerator then all proudly showing off our invention to Asuma who's like "... k you made an explosive seal. Good job?" While kagome freaks the hell out
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Word count 278
[X] Action plan: Bombs and Bijuus
[X] Action plan: Bombs and Bijuus
- Discuss options with clan + Nara
- Make sure Kagome has no problems discussing his abilities
- 1: Drop explosives from above, attached to rocks or clones to taste
- Pros: Nearly guaranteed to work. Very fast results, little recon needed. KISS.
- Cons: Guarantees that people know someonedidn't want that bridge there. It's obvious who. Still, no evidence.
- 2: Aburame-bug bound delivery of explosive munitions (pre-filled implosion seals that they can bite through to boom it.)
- Pros: Nearly guaranteed to work; perhaps better results than above. Significantly less likely to be obvious Konoha was involved, especially in combination with plan snippets. Can transition into the above if bug delivery is spotted.
- Cons: Requires more trust. Requires sacrifice of bug.
- 3: Personal delivery of explosive munitions/personal excavation of rock
- Pros: Very effective at making sure there's not going to be a bridge there at any point in the future. Can use Earth Clones.
- Cons: Easy to spot by sensory techniques, higher risk to personnel than other plans.
- Snippets
- Drive chakra beasts into the ravine.
- Use technique or seal to create earthquakes either light or heavy, to stop sensory techniques or destroy the bridge.
- All plans done at night.
- Team Suggestion:
- Akane, Kagome, Stealth Spec Aburame (in addition to Snake and Hawk
- Requisitions:
- Flash seal
- Earthquake seal/technique
- Chakra Beast corpses/locations to plant at site
- Telescope
- Approach Asuma about acquiring summoning scrolls for Leaf.
- Start by discussing decoding Jiraiya's spy network and the opportunites Leaf gains from better intelligence, like finding Summoning Scrolls. Are there regions he'd like us to focus on?
- Do the Monkeys have any actionable information?
- Any word on the capybara scroll?
- Discuss with Kagome about the bijuu. What do Jiraiya's notes have on them? What about the Leaf experts?
- Also look into any notes Leaf has on the bijuu.
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- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
List of tasks, though the last time this was updated was from before the contest declaration.
- Hazou
- Generally reviewing and approving proposals
- the paperwork, it never fucking ends....
- Local Merchant Empire:
- Sawmills:
- Proposals, awaiting metaphorical groundbreaking. Low amount of revenue, cannot change prices for one year.
- Sawmills:
- Adoption:
- Interviewing Candidates:
- Haru: Haru has accepted.
- Noda: We got a "sure" response; not totally sure on what that means for us.
- Aya: She's outwardly grateful, but internally every interaction is hostile. Further interactions are likely to push her traumas badly, in a way that we can't necessarily predict.
- Pushing for higher ceiling:
- Initial Pitch to Asuma: Complete, but results are ???
- Interviewing Candidates:
- Civilian Leadership
- Census project:
- In-progress
- Managing food and other logistics:
- permanently in-progess.
- Ultimate Judge on land
- never ends
- unless...?
- never ends
- Census project:
- Housing
- House construction:
- 6 days ago:
- 4 residential units, housing 2 comfortably and 4 less so.
- Tent housing for everybody else.
- Present: unknown, but progress has happened TM.
- We now know that the Goketsu are living in granite quarters.
- 6 days ago:
- House construction:
- Educational Programs
- Goketsu University
- In progress, probably low on the priority list tbh
- Ebisu's
SixFive- In progress, very little information IC or OOC.
- Goketsu University
- Noburi's Chakra Sources
- Always a minor source of work.
- Goketsu Clinic
- Being organized.
- Merchant Council
- Mari's got em, processing what to do with them.
- Countering Out-based influences
- HALTED due to adverse reaction
- Skyslider Research Teams
- Plan in early brainstorming.
- Generally reviewing and approving proposals
- Noburi:
- Summoning Training:
- In-progress
- Goketsu Clinic:
- Unclear
- Secretary search and vetting:
- Assigned 6 days ago. Progress unclear.
- Isan - Preparation Phase
- "in-progress" eyebrow waggle
- Summoning Training:
- Akane:
- Adjudicating for Hazou and almost certainly being an unpaid secretary:
- Ongoing.
- Adjudicating for Hazou and almost certainly being an unpaid secretary:
- Mari:
- Acting in the Goketsu Clan's best interests:
- in-progress???
- Applying horrifying genjutsu in a safe environment:
- HALTED
- Acting in the Goketsu Clan's best interests:
- Kagome:
- Mass-producing strategically relevant seals from home.
- Decrypting Jiraiya's notes.
- Made a big breakthrough recently, and got some nice shit. Nice.
- May be interested in education.
- Keiko*:
May be available for some projects, but Nara are a demanding clan.- Consider her unavailable.
- Akane's Parents:
- Construction business possibly mentioned, unsure of where that went.
- Assigned to fix up the Naked Jaybird since January 6th, 52 days ago.
- Atomu & Reo
- Doing [UNSPECIFIED] for us. Probably something similar to what Akane's doing.
- Unresolved:
- Isan - Expedition Phase
- Pre-requisites:
- Marriage/working it out between Noburi and Yuno
- Keiko's cooperation
- Pre-requisites:
- Floating Jutsu Exchange
- Could be executed, could be saved for later. Unknown as of this moment.
- "Shimura" "Estate"
- Tabled. Perceived low priority problem.
- Salt Empire
- Tabled due to lack of free time. May need to prepare for salt crunch soonish.
- Akatsuki Suggestion
- Keiko sent a messenger about 2 weeks ago (February 13th).
- International Merchant Empire
- Should've arrived almost a month ago. Whatever did happen to those guys?
- Tavern
- Hey remember that tavern we now own?
- Akane's parents were assigned to work on this.
- The Wild, Goketsu-owned, West
- Tabled until situation stabilizes, I believe.
- Isan - Expedition Phase
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While we're on the subject of ancient revelations, am I completely off the wall for believing that Keiko's disgraced ninjutsu expert turned cook who was sympathetic towards misfits was disgraced for being transgender due to his(?) mentions of having served with the previous summoner and the Sen update depicting a female pangolin ninjutsu expert with a similarly bombastic personality?
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Hey, if I republished a method of making penicillin with a medieval kitchen, could we have modern antibiotics? Pretty please?
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail
I think there's been an simulationist concern with Marked For Death that's been growing steadily worse for a while:
Why isn't anybody in Leaf talking to the Goketsu of their own initiative?
Put another way:
In the last ~50 updates, counting from Chapter 261: Responsibility to the latest chapter, we know of literally two people at the outermost talked to Goketsu without a Goketsu reaching out to them first. Those two people are, in order of appearance: Ami and Orochimaru.
This is profoundly weird, if you consider what Clan Goketsu is.
Clan Goketsu, the clan who has Jiraiya's legacy, and, supposedly, some fraction of his wealth. Clan Goketsu, who on the night that the market met Invisible Death, immediately and without question erected an overnight shelter to ensure that the civilians would not go cold or hungry. Clan Goketsu, who built multiple cabins and housed a significant fraction of KEI on both the former and new estate. Clan Goketsu, who has a shockingly open attitude towards civilians and clanless. Clan Goketsu, who possesses two sealmasters.
We have seen no offers to trade, no business offers, no invitations to chat, no requests for patronage, no attempts to try and get us to support a business, and know of only two (maybe three, if you count the MC Legate) people who sought out to get a message to the Clan Head without a Goketsu reaching out to them first.
If the idea of reaching out to a Clan Head is death, surely there are other ways to send a message via proxy; by now, a month or two later, the fact that Kenta and Yukari are direct Goketsu clan members should have spread to every member of their inner circle and more besides. They are the logical candidates to send a message, without any ties to clans who are close friends to Hazou, like, oh, say, the Akimichi or Yamanaka.
Even if we assume that somehow we're so menacing that no civilian could possibly want to work with us, what about the minor clans? Not just the "minor" voting clans, but the thirty to fifty clans with only a few members and who might want to improve their odds of survival by commissioning a seal, given that there are basically no other ways of converting wealth into military force?
In the two months since we've taken over after Jiraiya's death, we have seen none of these.
That's a problem, because it is either a mistake or Leaf as a whole is actively coordinating to shun us, starting with the people we consider to be friends.
I think there's been an simulationist concern with Marked For Death that's been growing steadily worse for a while:
Why isn't anybody in Leaf talking to the Goketsu of their own initiative?
Put another way:
In the last ~50 updates, counting from Chapter 261: Responsibility to the latest chapter, we know of literally two people at the outermost talked to Goketsu without a Goketsu reaching out to them first. Those two people are, in order of appearance: Ami and Orochimaru.
This is profoundly weird, if you consider what Clan Goketsu is.
Clan Goketsu, the clan who has Jiraiya's legacy, and, supposedly, some fraction of his wealth. Clan Goketsu, who on the night that the market met Invisible Death, immediately and without question erected an overnight shelter to ensure that the civilians would not go cold or hungry. Clan Goketsu, who built multiple cabins and housed a significant fraction of KEI on both the former and new estate. Clan Goketsu, who has a shockingly open attitude towards civilians and clanless. Clan Goketsu, who possesses two sealmasters.
We have seen no offers to trade, no business offers, no invitations to chat, no requests for patronage, no attempts to try and get us to support a business, and know of only two (maybe three, if you count the MC Legate) people who sought out to get a message to the Clan Head without a Goketsu reaching out to them first.
If the idea of reaching out to a Clan Head is death, surely there are other ways to send a message via proxy; by now, a month or two later, the fact that Kenta and Yukari are direct Goketsu clan members should have spread to every member of their inner circle and more besides. They are the logical candidates to send a message, without any ties to clans who are close friends to Hazou, like, oh, say, the Akimichi or Yamanaka.
Even if we assume that somehow we're so menacing that no civilian could possibly want to work with us, what about the minor clans? Not just the "minor" voting clans, but the thirty to fifty clans with only a few members and who might want to improve their odds of survival by commissioning a seal, given that there are basically no other ways of converting wealth into military force?
In the two months since we've taken over after Jiraiya's death, we have seen none of these.
That's a problem, because it is either a mistake or Leaf as a whole is actively coordinating to shun us, starting with the people we consider to be friends.
- Location
- Yes.
Didn't Shikamaru literally say he had to take steps to distance the Nara from us?
That was when Hiashi was kage though. And even now I still feel that was a weird action for the Nara
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
He brought it by but did not leave it with you.
The following is only my opinion, not WOG:
If you put sufficient effort into leading Hazō to make scientific discoveries then no, we won't stop you. That said, 'sufficient effort' to make major discoveries like penicillin or nitroglycerin is going to require months or (more likely) years of in-game time and many, many words of plan-space devoted to the exact experiments to be performed. We won't stop you leading him to a conclusion but it's not going to be easy -- consider his thoughts about kites as being lifted by sky spirits, not air pressure.
It took me some effort to parse this, but I finally got it. No, there has been no statement that Panjandrum is transgender.
More detailed response when I'm not headed for bed soon. This is solely my opinion and not discussed with the other QMs:
Sincere thanks for the pointer. Part of this is limited screen time. You've had merchants and craftsmen in and out of the estate, you've been nigh-continuously in contact with other clans, the Merchant Council has been reaching out to you, etc. Hazō doesn't typically get involved in that stuff so it doesn't end up on the page.
Another part is limited brain space. There's too much to model so some things are going to fall through the cracks. I'll talk with @Velorien and @OliWhail and we'll take a closer look at this and see if we should spend more screen count on it so that it doesn't look weird.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
Part of my concern in their vein is the weird discrepancy between what we find out ahead of time (almost nothing) and the number of things kept from us until we actively go searching for them. I have absolutely no idea how it was possible Hazou didn't know about Keiko going on the scroll mission given the sheer number of people involved and his connection to so many of them. If Ami is not perfect Velorien continues to fail to show it.
Basically, we don't need to see the mundane meetings, but we should be learning information from them and being informed of such.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Kiba I honestly don't know if I should tell you that's a bad pun due to you taking things literally. I enjoyed it very much.
@eaglejarl when I wrote that I meant to include "and couch everything in reasonable-ish 'spirits want this sacrifice' talk" but forgot due to a work induced lack of brain space
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I think the rest of this comment is a bit unnecessarily pointed, and you might not have intended that to be the case. Consider changing the wording?
On the topic in question...
Its clear to me that she cheats, that she cheats hard and that she probably cheats with the Frozen Skein at least.
I have some (not mutually exclusive) theories on this:
Theory Zero: Lol idunno
Theory One: Ami has multiple personalities in the classical fictional sense. Similar to a Yu Yu Hakusho antagonist, this allows her to weather the brunt of any FS related deficits multiple ways (if not shunting them onto whichever one is most convenient alltogether). Likewise, this boosts her XP gain rate.
Theory Two: All of her actions each day are chosen from a dozen likely variations that were precomputed via the FS. She takes data in every day, she goes home and locks herself in a room. She unseals reference texts, notes, graphs, models, enough yarn to sate a thousand cats, etc. and gets to work. She models the best way to play off the current worldstate, including the best Ami to play in said state.
You see, "Ami" isn't a real person. There's an okder Keiko-like person on the inside, pushing the buttons and pulling levers, but everything you actually see is a fake cobbled together persona.
You get the Ryugamine persona, who she probably started emulated as a kid (hello academy minions).You've got the Mari persona -- carefree social spec crazy sadist-- , etc etc. All hacked together for optimal manipulation via Frozen Skein boosted copycat nonsense.
She was serious when she said something to the effect of "I'm tailoring the optimal personality to you."
Theory Three:
She's actually just that good, but only because she sold her soul to chakra demons (Mori Voice, chakraAI subunit, Out stuff, whatever).
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I wonder how she'd respond if we proferred these theories upon her.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
On that note: I understand why we are still bothering with the Nara in general and Shikamaru in specific...
...but does anyone else get that weird feeling that hes sort of a shitty person?
Its very strange and kind of subtle, but theres still this undercurrent of meh-ness to some of these interactions.
Theres bits like the time he threw some coin at us and sheltered our folks for a night which I can't really say are anything but nice, but then theres like:
SHIKAMARU: I'm basically soft-cancelling the alliance and keeping Keiko because she's great, aren't you glad to be alive?
HAZOU(cardboard smile) : Aren't you the best friend, Lord Nara...
SHIKAMARU: Message received, am shitty friend.
And like
SHIKAMARU: My house is gone and my family are dead or bleeding out underneath.
HAZOU: That's terrible, we have to help!
KAGOME: Use my secret seal!
EVERYONE: *gasp*
KAGOME: Don't worry, he's Keiko's husband, we can surely trust him with this secret knowing full well he wouldn't abuse it.
Approximately one week later
SHIKAMARU: ...and, despite you coming to my family's aid in what may have been its hour of greatest need, and showing a remarkable display of trust in me and mine while doing so, I will still be submitting this minor secret of yours for what is probably comparatively marginal overall gains instead of kicking back and forgetting about it completely and letting you have it. Luckily, you probably submitted it, so we can let bygones be bygones and pretend that I wouldn't have done that had you not done so.
HAZOU: Umm. What the fuck?
KAGOME: Relax, he's doing us a solid.
HAZOU: ... how?
And then like
SHIKAMARU: And so I'm fucking with you because Ami said so, but its not like she would know anyway so really I chose to do this and I can't conveniently shift the blame but I will anyway.
HAZOU: Yeah don't do that shit again.
SHIKAMARU: Haha, Ami am I right?
HAZOU:
:
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- Location
- Yes.
Having read the examples you have given, I would like to state that I have zero fucking clue what you are talking about.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
I've been thinking something for a while...
I think our collective goal IC could be more or less summed up as "globally reshape the world according to our own values". The preferred methods of achieving it vary based on each individual member and our current situation, and "our values" isn't a perfectly coherent concept either, but it's roughly what the majority of us would agree on.
It seems to me that there's two different high-concept approaches we could take to accomplish it. I'll just dub them "Approach 1" and "Approach 2".
Approach 1: Gradual improvements, or what Ami called "bottom-up". We set up systems that gradually change incentive structures to those that align with our values, propagate our values among the general public, etc. It's characterized by low risk, lack of short-term payoffs, an eye for the very-long-term, and (ideally, once it gets going) lack of single points of failure (if we die, our ideals won't die with us). Among our last projects, this approach is exemplified by the Merchant Empire, the storage scroll banks, building a hospital, modifying Leaf's education system, and the entire thing with turning the Shimura Estate into a semi-separate village complete with a school.
Approach 2: Accumulation of direct personal power, or what Ami called "top-down". We make ourselves more powerful, directly twist the social fabric to follow our commands, turn powerful figures to our side. It's characterized by high-to-moderate risk, massive short-term payoffs, the expectation that we'll achieve global victory within a decade, and a complete dependency on surviving until then. It's exemplified by Mari's takeover of the Merchant Council, our expedition into the Basement, sealing research, making Jiraiya into an ally, hunting for Summoning Scrolls, and raising our stats.
Both approaches have their own pros and cons, which I believe I've made clear. Quick heuristic: Approach 2 is what we're "supposed" to do, Approach 1 is what makes other ninja stare at us in confusion.
Problem, though: These two approaches are fundamentally incompatible, and because we're trying to do both of them, we suck at both.
Approach 1 is supposed to become self-sustaining, but it depends on us surviving until we make it self-sustaining (which won't be easy in itself). Otherwise, it'll be as Tsunade had said: once we die, everyone we told to work on improving the world will wander off and go back to murder-killing each other. Until we've made ourselves obsolete, it is absolutely critical that we stay low, provoke as little attention from powerful hostile parties as possible, and generally maximize our long-term life expectancy at the cost of high-impact plays. There could be no meetings with Orochimaru, no expeditions to capture Tailed Beasts, no hunts for Scrolls, no highly dangerous research.
With the way we're acting, we're going to get ourselves killed waaay before our projects could afford it. We suck at Approach 1.
Approach 2 depends on us quickly seizing opportunities that appear in front of us, ruthlessly prioritizing which power-ups or people we're going after, and a willingness to accept risks if the reward is sufficiently high. Otherwise, we'll lag behind. With this approach, we can't waste time on projects that don't give immediate benefits, because time is our main resource and opportunity costs our main enemy. No revolutionizing education, no personally going out to build walls for civilian villages, this takes time away from becoming friends with emotionally vulnerable Clan Heads and negotiating for secret techniques.
We suck at Approach 2 not because the QMs deliberately raise difficulty levels to deny us shinies or whatever, we suck at it because we suck at it. Ami is what we'd be if we didn't.
My point is, if we want to be effective, we should pick an approach and commit to it, instead of switching between them based on whims. Either we're playing the same game the other ninja play, or we're playing our own. Sort of playing both is how we fail at both.
I think our collective goal IC could be more or less summed up as "globally reshape the world according to our own values". The preferred methods of achieving it vary based on each individual member and our current situation, and "our values" isn't a perfectly coherent concept either, but it's roughly what the majority of us would agree on.
It seems to me that there's two different high-concept approaches we could take to accomplish it. I'll just dub them "Approach 1" and "Approach 2".
Approach 1: Gradual improvements, or what Ami called "bottom-up". We set up systems that gradually change incentive structures to those that align with our values, propagate our values among the general public, etc. It's characterized by low risk, lack of short-term payoffs, an eye for the very-long-term, and (ideally, once it gets going) lack of single points of failure (if we die, our ideals won't die with us). Among our last projects, this approach is exemplified by the Merchant Empire, the storage scroll banks, building a hospital, modifying Leaf's education system, and the entire thing with turning the Shimura Estate into a semi-separate village complete with a school.
Approach 2: Accumulation of direct personal power, or what Ami called "top-down". We make ourselves more powerful, directly twist the social fabric to follow our commands, turn powerful figures to our side. It's characterized by high-to-moderate risk, massive short-term payoffs, the expectation that we'll achieve global victory within a decade, and a complete dependency on surviving until then. It's exemplified by Mari's takeover of the Merchant Council, our expedition into the Basement, sealing research, making Jiraiya into an ally, hunting for Summoning Scrolls, and raising our stats.
Both approaches have their own pros and cons, which I believe I've made clear. Quick heuristic: Approach 2 is what we're "supposed" to do, Approach 1 is what makes other ninja stare at us in confusion.
Problem, though: These two approaches are fundamentally incompatible, and because we're trying to do both of them, we suck at both.
Approach 1 is supposed to become self-sustaining, but it depends on us surviving until we make it self-sustaining (which won't be easy in itself). Otherwise, it'll be as Tsunade had said: once we die, everyone we told to work on improving the world will wander off and go back to murder-killing each other. Until we've made ourselves obsolete, it is absolutely critical that we stay low, provoke as little attention from powerful hostile parties as possible, and generally maximize our long-term life expectancy at the cost of high-impact plays. There could be no meetings with Orochimaru, no expeditions to capture Tailed Beasts, no hunts for Scrolls, no highly dangerous research.
With the way we're acting, we're going to get ourselves killed waaay before our projects could afford it. We suck at Approach 1.
Approach 2 depends on us quickly seizing opportunities that appear in front of us, ruthlessly prioritizing which power-ups or people we're going after, and a willingness to accept risks if the reward is sufficiently high. Otherwise, we'll lag behind. With this approach, we can't waste time on projects that don't give immediate benefits, because time is our main resource and opportunity costs our main enemy. No revolutionizing education, no personally going out to build walls for civilian villages, this takes time away from becoming friends with emotionally vulnerable Clan Heads and negotiating for secret techniques.
We suck at Approach 2 not because the QMs deliberately raise difficulty levels to deny us shinies or whatever, we suck at it because we suck at it. Ami is what we'd be if we didn't.
My point is, if we want to be effective, we should pick an approach and commit to it, instead of switching between them based on whims. Either we're playing the same game the other ninja play, or we're playing our own. Sort of playing both is how we fail at both.
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- Location
- Europe
Basically that our allies are kind of shit? Nobody even told us that a family member of our's was send on a mission and then it was covered up by jokes? I mean ninja can be ordered to go on missions without us being told all the information, like with Noburi and Kakashi.
But Hazou is a clan head and Mari is his regent and neither Asuma, Shikamaru or Keiko told us that she goes on a mission? Even if chances of death are kind of low, they aren't zero. It would have been nice and respectful to get informed.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Let me take a different track to explain my uncomfortableness with one of the interactions in the greater context:
Scenario 1: You're competing with your friend-ally in some sort of submission based contest, do you:
A) Submit something thats essentially a clone of some prior work of his, but in a way that counts only for him iff he submits the same work, but also directly signal to him that this is a thing you did (but only if he submits his version!).
B) Not do that, because that is not how allies should treat each other's inventions and secrets.
Scenario 2: Now, given that said ally had already entrusted you with quite a large secret invention for the purposes of helping bail you out of a large problem, what do the respective actions in (1)now signal ? Does option A signal that you are a paritcularly trustworthy person?
Some of this unease can be waived away because "Ninja maybe act like this to each other I guess?" and "the Nara don't see much inherent value in certain types of social signals", but at the end of the day ifs still kind of a shitty thing to do compared to numerous alternatives?
Edit;
And take the most recent thing.
It could have just as easily gone like:
SHIKAMARU: Keiko and Ami and Naruto went on a mission given by the Pangolins and approved by Asuma to go kill the Condor summoner.
HAZOU: Wow. I hope she's okay.
SHIKAMARU: Ami told me to yank your chain about it slightly, but I thought that would kind of not be the most prosocial thing to do, so I didn't do it.
HAZOU: And I am glad you did not! Thank you for being considerate in how slight modifications to your actions and word choices may impact the feelings and opinions of others. I too am working on learning some aspects of this, would you like to discuss it further over a game of shogi and some tea in between some consulting about mission optimizations.
SHIKA: You know what? I would like that very much.
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- Location
- Yes.
tl;dr I think ninjas are assholes.
I think the disconnect here is because I put a lot of stock into believing that ninjas are fucking assholes in general and their culture would absolutely screw each other in the way Shikamaru did, only way worse*. Look at how Kagome reacted to Minami when we leaked Mist Drain. The guy flipped because he understood the Minami would absolutely try to take the secret and learn about them so they would have a counter if we ever fought, and the Minami are/were staunch Hokage allies. The Nara would absolutely do the same thing in reverse-engineering Macerators, and absolutely put them up for submission in a competition like this. Note well that we've already submitted the seals to the Tower for selling.
*Note that there is absolutely no selfish reason for Shikamaru to tell us he submitted Macerators: the contest is blackboxed and only the winners and the submissions are released. There would have been no trail leading us to finger them, and if we weren't allies or friends in general he would have absolutely blackboxed it.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I'm partial to Approach 1. It may not be glamorous, but I feel like we're a heck of a lot more likely to win when our trials are 'people look at you funny' instead of 'you have to out-ninja all the other ninjas in a world where all ninjas are trying as hard as they can to out-ninja all the other ninjas'.
On that note, we're a Clan Head, and I sort of assume that Clan Heads get a neat advantage where most of the time they don't have to do dangerous things if they don't want to. That is, I don't expect Asuma to send Hazou specifically on high-risk missions (though we might volunteer ourselves if he's sending someone else from Team Uplift on one or other such situations) and nobody will object if we stay relatively safe. Perks of the job, right?
We'll have to stay active enough to not ding our XP rate, but just because Approach 1 is long-form doesn't mean it's boring.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In the specific, it is worth bearing in mind that it has been a matter of hours or days between Asuma's announcement and the present moment. The amount of information that has yet to make its way to you, or that Hazō has yet to get to, is staggering. You also don't know how long it has been since Keiko left, or how many of the people you know have had time to find out about it and decide that clearly you must be informed of it because you do not already know.
Where does Ami come into this at all?
(This separate from the fact that four chapters ago, she spent all of her screen time admitting to Keiko how much she failed as a sister.)
While you have a point overall, I note that, as far as the clans are concerned, a lot of the things you list are reasons for them to avoid becoming involved or associated with the Gōketsu. Clan Gōketsu, suspect from the world go due to being missing-nin foreigners, and now lacking the only check on their potentially subversive behaviour, is publicly throwing away the wealth left to them by one of Leaf's greatest legends in order to be nice to civilians. Are they mad, or merely attempting to undermine Hidden Leaf's social fabric with alien and bizarre ideas?
(It doesn't help the case that the other group undermining Leaf's social fabric with alien and bizarre ideas is the KEI, co-run by your sister.)
"Proscribed" means "forbidden". You're probably looking for "prescribed", but I don't think that fits the context either.
As a largely separate personal issue, you know how in certain cases we have been forced to bend the rules of simulationism in order to keep the game fun, such as by introducing anachronistic notions of women's rights that do not define them as property for trade? That applies on the metagame level as well. There are only so many layers you can simulate in near-real-time without risking burnout, especially when the majority of those layers are politics and economics, neither of which you care about at all in real life (or, in the case of the former, choose not to care about in order to preserve your faith in humanity). We have great players, and I am genuinely invested in the characters and what they do and how they develop, but at this point, it sometimes feels like these and the setting are all that remains of the original Marked for Death.