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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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eaglejarl said:
Eh...not exactly what I was looking for. That kind of thing gets old, and I much prefer characters that aren't so one-note.
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Fair enough, but I think my point still stands. Lay out the vibe you want the party to have and explicitly encourage players to build characters suited to it. Most players, I feel, can also be trusted to take a one-note concept and shape it into something more multifaceted that appeals to them, so as long as they know what they're aiming for and are working in good faith it should work out well enough.
Sir Stompy said:
I think you could do some interesting stuff with gear that travels with the user when they die. Let's call it "soulbound". Soulbound stuff would be highly desired by the players, and you could incentivize conflict with real stakes that way.

It's also a way to get them adventuring, if they have a really cool item, but it's not soulbound, they could hear a rumor of a wizard who can do it for them, but there's a dragon in the way etc. that's a conflict with real stakes, without putting the end of the quest at risk.
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This sounds promising but tricky: what if they get a good non-soulbound item, and don't want to lose it, but there's a big fight up ahead?

Another cooperating angle could be impermanence, like in Breath of the Wild. Weapons and armor that break, enchantments that run out of magic... and the circumvention of such limitations with the soulbound mechanic. So now you have your permanent toolkit and a handful of purely temporary items that may be situationally more useful than your permanent set.
 
eaglejarl said:
Every time you die your soul absorbs a bit more mana from the void before reincarnating back into your original body. This means that death is not permanent, it simply means losing time.
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So my initial (0 second) thought, is that this is neat and cool and incentivizes punching "slightly but not significantly up", because you'll get more XP out of it... But my experience with most of the tabletop games I've played (through ~5-10 DMs) is that this might be largely moot?

So my general experience with these systems is that XP itself is not a currency that you can easily trade with the players, mostly because a) a wildly unbalanced party is very hard to work with from an engaging standpoint, and b) because of (a), XP allotment (even through CR), tends to be approximately on the cadence of either "we'll keep you at this power level" or "we'll scale you to the next power level". I've done parties where XP was strictly allotted based on CR, and (interestingly, because attendance wasn't necessarily a given in that campaign) whether or not your character went on that specific adventure, and even then, even with the characters more than willing to throw their lives away (there was a good mechanism for introducing new characters), we didn't particularly see much difference in terms of how risky we were or how high we punched?

All of which to say, you might get the same end result you desire just from up-front saying that that's what you're looking for, and (this might be the big one), not letting the campaign go too long (or not letting the campaign go too long without people cycling characters)... this way, people don't get tied to their characters, and that in and of itself might encourage a bit more recklessness over caution.
 
_The_Bomb said:
It actually would be essentially trivial for Mari (and probably also for @faflec), since Mari's specifically trained to pay attention to and remember small details and is apparently skilled enough at it to briefly notice the effects of the grue.
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Without commenting on what Mari can and can't do, I'm unconvinced by the parallel. If anything, Mari's social training is the polar opposite of rote memorisation, being rapid, short-term, complex, and heavily grounded in context. It's very different from memorising vocab items off a sheet of paper.
 
Talking abbout mari, we probably will go find a scroll for her dont we? Like the hole retirement is out of the window anyways. Her only escape is go full S-Rank "I am too powerfull to follow your rules".
 
Velorien said:
Without commenting on what Mari can and can't do, I'm unconvinced by the parallel. If anything, Mari's social training is the polar opposite of rote memorisation, being rapid, short-term, complex, and heavily grounded in context. It's very different from memorising vocab items off a sheet of paper.
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eaglejarl said:
"I should be able to remember exactly what Hazō said, but I don't," the redhead said, the hint of fear having graduated to a genuine note of near-panic. "That's a key part of my training as an infiltrator: Remember conversations and visual details accurately for at least long enough so there's a chance to record them." She squeezed her eyes closed, concentrating. "Hazō, you were the last one into the room. The order was me, Noburi, Akane, Kagome, you. You were carrying the tea tray. It had a pot of tea with steam coming out of the spout. There were five cups in an arc behind it; the rightmost one was the chipped one and I remember thinking that I should throw that out before it cracked the rest of the way. The tray had three bowls, left to right from my perspective: honeyed almonds, carrot sticks, and the last of those apples that you harvested up in Iron the first time we were there and have been hoarding in your scrolls. Noburi asked 'What's this all about, Hazō?' and you set the tray down before you replied." Eyes still closed, she gestured with one finger. "You distributed the bowls and Kagome promptly grabbed the honeyed almonds. You said it was a Nara thing where they try to figure out how to destroy each other, I asked if the blackboards and whatever weren't a bit much, you said it seemed like a good idea. You wanted to start with money. You said: 'It's one of our biggest weak points right now, given the loss of the Pangolin gold. We need to establish revenue streams quickly, which means setting up investments with merchants. If someone wanted to interfere with that, they could poison our professional relationships.' Then I said 'Seems a bit baroque. Complex false-flag plays like that are fragile.'" She stopped talking and opened her eyes, frowning. "That doesn't make sense."
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You are absolutely right that Mari's memory training is a compltely different flavor than that required for memorizing a bunch of codes. I misremembered the above quote and based my assumption off that. I was wrong; it would not be trivially easy for her.

On an unrelated note, I just realized that it would be quite easy for Kagome, given his background.
 
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Sir Stompy said:
For real is there a definition of treason anywhere? As far as I understand it's basically whatever the Hokage says. Giving aid and comfort to enemies of Leaf? Who are the enemies of Leaf? Rock and Cloud for sure, Sand and Mist too? What about random missing nin from halfway around the world?
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Asuma: If you have to ask if it's treason, the answer is probably yes.

Velorien said:
It seems a bit of a no-brainer to choose between "get a boatload of XP and save your friends" and "run away, fail to save your friends, and quite possibly get killed anyway for less XP". I think you need to reconceptualise heroic sacrifice for somebody who will never be in genuine peril compared to normal people.
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That starts to get towards the question of what a selfless act truly is. After all, most people do selfless acts to feel good about themselves, or because they've been told it's good to be selfless. At which point it's no longer a truly selfless act.

I believe that it's far better to do selfish acts that benefit others, but to go above and beyond to find such acts. That way you are incentivized to keep doing them (as they benefit you) but no longer have to worry about if you're truly acting selflessly or whether you're just being selfish in a particularly weird way (since you already know you're being selfish).
 
[X]: [SageMode] Keep it to full Team Uplift only. (Hazō, Noburi, Keiko, Mari, Akane, Kagome)

Look, I appreciate that we should treat the other members of our clan like family.

But also, this is very, very important. It certainly sounds like Sage Mode is an S-rank trick, if Jiraiya, hardened jounin when he got the Scroll, had to train long and hard to get it and still got a massive power-up for it.

S-rank tricks are important. Sure, we have SC training that will give us boatloads of XP, but that just gives us big-numbers like an elite-jounin, not the unique "I win" button tools that let you play at S-rank. If we had Sage Mode in hand, you could argue that this is more important than our SC Training efforts, but it seems like the same class of secret we'll need if we want to become truly powerful.
 
Paperclipped said:
[X]: [SageMode] Keep it to full Team Uplift only. (Hazō, Noburi, Keiko, Mari, Akane, Kagome)

Look, I appreciate that we should treat the other members of our clan like family.

But also, this is very, very important. It certainly sounds like Sage Mode is an S-rank trick, if Jiraiya, hardened jounin when he got the Scroll, had to train long and hard to get it and still got a massive power-up for it.

S-rank tricks are important. Sure, we have SC training that will give us boatloads of XP, but that just gives us big-numbers like an elite-jounin, not the unique "I win" button tools that let you play at S-rank. If we had Sage Mode in hand, you could argue that this is more important than our SC Training efforts, but it seems like the same class of secret we'll need if we want to become truly powerful.
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Meanwhile, on the Seventh Path:

SHIMA: Should we really have said all that?

FUKASAKU: Of course! Didn't you see his face? It was hilarious!

SHIMA: How long do you think before he catches on?

FUKASAKU: Only took Jiraiya a decade, and this kid seems quicker on the uptake. I give it six, seven years of regular bribes before he asks straight out whether humans can use nature chakra on the Human Path.
 
[X] [SageMode] These people are family. Let's treat them as such. (All Gōketsu ninja including Haru, Atomu, Rei, etc)
 
[X]: [SageMode] Keep it to full Team Uplift only. (Hazō, Noburi, Keiko, Mari, Akane, Kagome)
[X]: [SageMode] Keep it to full Team Uplift only. (Hazō, Noburi, Kei, Mari, Akane, Kagome)
 
Velorien said:
SNIP
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Then 20 years pass qnd Noburi dont ask, Fukiwatsu finaly lose the patience and confront him abbout it.
Noburi: Ah The Nature chakra thing, yeah my brother figured a way to ise on his own, turns out he is realy good with sealing and bio sealing, like unaturaly good, and figured a way around it.
 
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Just a reminder that Jiraiya's initial instinct when he he thought sage mode was going to leak was to murder everyone in the chunnin exam. Let's practice minimum level of opsec around things that are worth murdering for
 
eaglejarl said:
Isobe poured himself a cup of the blackberry brandy that Asuma kept in the cabinet against the wall, then sat as directed. He was seventy-three years old and had been the secretary to five (six, depending on how you counted) Hokage over a period of forty years. He had been there for the birth of all of his twelve children and had been such a good provider that only five of them had been lost to childhood illness. He had attended the birth of literally scores of his grand- and greatgrandchildren and been there for the Naming Days of the ones whose births he couldn't attend because he was busy helping whichever Hokage was in power prevent the latest crisis that threatened the peace and safety of the nation in which those descendants lived. He had given up on being surprised by these requests for conversation back when Asuma's father was in power the first time. Isobe was no Shikaku with the blinding intelligence that pulled correct deductions seemingly from thin air, but he had a practicality and common sense that his superiors recognized and valued. Plus, they knew that he was absolutely loyal and would not judge them.
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Wait a minute….how many?

Add this to the list of "Isolde = Sage" references.
 
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