Why add more to the backlong when no significant time is passing IU? We still waiting for the prep days we voted in last month.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rational 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
Good question!
As the start of a longer chain, these are time-sensitive in a way that one-off fortifications and weapons are not.
We can always slot a weapon into our schedule later on, but the getting a rift-mover in a timely fashion means starting research *now*
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You asked to prep them, not to research them.
There is no benefit to doing so, because we won't get answers. That is all
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
IIRC, we believe Orochimaru was behind the missing Senior Koi Caretaker (which is why the Wakahisa had to send the junior one). He could just splice her bloodline onto a minion, or just go out and kidnap another Wakahisa ninja. He's a Sannin, it would be as easy as going out for milk.
I'm ngl I feel less certain of that after hearing Asuma had 1k chakra for whatever fucking reason, Minato might have been on whatever bullshit leaf sauce too, but not so uncertain that it isn't worth trying.
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I suspect it's Sarurobi sauce, and specifically the sort of sauce you feed a kid you know will grow up into a Summoner.
Like, Asuma isn't just some guy, his dad was Hiruzen and we know that Hiruzen had the scroll when Asuma was tiny. If I had a Summoning Scroll and a chakra-capable kid you bet I'd make sure they ate their veggies (or whatever).
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
What if Bear is just a place that is so nice, no one wants to come back?
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
[X] Action Plan: The (Sand)worm's Turn
Overall though, I like this plan. I'm not certain we'll be able to get away with not choosing our destination ourselves, but this plan accomplishes everything I want to happen. Contrasting it against the other plans:
Left-Hand Mutant's plan looks fine at a glance, it's just focusing on different scenes than what I want done this cycle.
Noumero's plan, we've had a conversation about this on Discord and my opinions are broadly the same seeing the plan written down properly. To recap, I don't think we know enough about Jashin to make this a positive value on the cost/benefit analysis. We're trying to bargain with it when we don't even know if it's the kind of entity that can be bargained with, or if meaningful communication is possible with it, or if drawing its attention will just worsen our risks of getting Hidan thrown at us. One thing I will add, given that LHM already raised objections about the promises (which I broadly agree with), is that a large chunk of my probability mass for Hidan-threat comes in the first month or so of the hunt, and with the most recent update I think a large amount of that probability mass just evaporated. We empirically do not live in the world where Hidan spun in a circle and walked in our direction until he found us. We may still live in a world where Hidan follows a slower, more circuitious path that yet inexorably leads towards us, but I think the odds, and thus the risk, are substantially lower at this point. The probabilistic benefits shrink with each day that Hidan fails to find us, and it's not clear that the same is true for the probabilistic risks.
It also just... it's hard to place the feeling, but it feels like a misstep narratively. Like the kind of moment where the plucky protagonist pushes a bit too far for their own good, thinks they can take more control and shear away the mystery without the power to back that up. It feels like hubris, to think that something like Jashin is just sitting there waiting to become legible with a mild amount of effort and ingenuity. I know, I know, cowardice and ambition and all that, but it genuinely does feel like we're being metanarratively foolish instead of metanarratively clever, and even in a simulationist setting I think Jashin was designed in a way that such a lens of analysis would apply.
This can probably be condensed into something like "Ask Kei what her probability distribution is for how much time we have left." If not that, I broadly think that the last line here is still unnecessary, as if we're explaining our model of plausible Akatsuki research speeds there's a lot more to say than this and I feel Hazoupilot can handle it.
Failure mode analysis: this gets read as "you want to ask Orochimaru if we need to return right now", as in, pinging the current state of the rift instead of setting up a future ping.
I know it might be awkward to fit in, but if we want to go ahead and execute the dead drop this update I'd like to suggest again including our Force Dome notes in the dead drop. Recap of the argument in favour: we want Oro to take our contributions seriously, and the best way to do that is to show him that we've done high-level work. Force Dome in particular is a defensive rune that we will in no way be keeping secret, and so sharing it with Oro costs little and heavily pads the odds that he takes our request seriously. Especially since it also serves as a bribe. And to Team Uplift we can emphasize that Leaf having Force Dome makes it much safer no matter how any of the rest of this turns out.
Kinda feels like we're telling Kei how to do her job here, and I'm not sure I like it. The part about securing Jounin Pangolins sounds worth keeping, but I don't think Kei just didn't think to try convincing Pangolins not to be genocidal. A more agency-preserving version of this would just be to tell her to spend as much time as she needs to on the Seventh Path, securing more powerful summons if at all possible.
Overall though, I like this plan. I'm not certain we'll be able to get away with not choosing our destination ourselves, but this plan accomplishes everything I want to happen. Contrasting it against the other plans:
Left-Hand Mutant's plan looks fine at a glance, it's just focusing on different scenes than what I want done this cycle.
Noumero's plan, we've had a conversation about this on Discord and my opinions are broadly the same seeing the plan written down properly. To recap, I don't think we know enough about Jashin to make this a positive value on the cost/benefit analysis. We're trying to bargain with it when we don't even know if it's the kind of entity that can be bargained with, or if meaningful communication is possible with it, or if drawing its attention will just worsen our risks of getting Hidan thrown at us. One thing I will add, given that LHM already raised objections about the promises (which I broadly agree with), is that a large chunk of my probability mass for Hidan-threat comes in the first month or so of the hunt, and with the most recent update I think a large amount of that probability mass just evaporated. We empirically do not live in the world where Hidan spun in a circle and walked in our direction until he found us. We may still live in a world where Hidan follows a slower, more circuitious path that yet inexorably leads towards us, but I think the odds, and thus the risk, are substantially lower at this point. The probabilistic benefits shrink with each day that Hidan fails to find us, and it's not clear that the same is true for the probabilistic risks.
It also just... it's hard to place the feeling, but it feels like a misstep narratively. Like the kind of moment where the plucky protagonist pushes a bit too far for their own good, thinks they can take more control and shear away the mystery without the power to back that up. It feels like hubris, to think that something like Jashin is just sitting there waiting to become legible with a mild amount of effort and ingenuity. I know, I know, cowardice and ambition and all that, but it genuinely does feel like we're being metanarratively foolish instead of metanarratively clever, and even in a simulationist setting I think Jashin was designed in a way that such a lens of analysis would apply.
Please ask Kei about the practicality of capturing a pirate ship(and some pirates). Mari even suggested the southern isles as a good spot to hide right now.
With SCSA, a boat is ridiculously hard to find.
Hazou can continue research/training while the boat relocates.
We can easily dispose of even TR140s by letting them sink to the seafloor(along with an Elf Explosive to be tidy).
Noburi gets a chakra buffet
We can capture genie-level pirates as chakra sources, and bring them with us as we relocate.
A boat seems more time-effecient than constantly changing campsites, better hidden than most land-bound options, and potentially increases our total chakra supply, so we can open up another research track.
While I'm not willing to vote for this plan, I think getting Kei to sanity check a rift-stealing plan is a good idea. Because you're right, defending Leaf vs the entire world, all while we huddle inside desperately trying to resurrect enough of Leaf's old heroes before the enemy finds a way through our defenses is a terrible plan, and if we can manage to steal the rift without Akatsuki knowing we did (by way of slagging the rift site and the surrounding zip code with something that makes the area impassable and might be able to be passed off as a sealing failure rather than enemy action), that would be better than our current course of action.
But that's a big if, and I think it's worth spending a trivial amount of time speaking to Kei to either rule out the idea or get confirmation that it might be worth pursuing.
That being said, I'm requesting plans that have the space to add this or something like it:
[] Plan Fragment: Steal the Rift? (125 words)
Sanity check with Kei
- Our current plan is to invent enough weapons/defenses to defend Leaf from the world for as long as it takes to research the rift and bring enough friendly S-rankers back to take over the world.
- This is not ideal; succeeding still means a world war.
- Idea: Steal the rift in a way that doesn't implicate us or Leaf.
- Invent Rift-Movers
- Invent a rune that will destroy the rift site and render it uninhabitable
- Preferably while looking like a sealing failure
- This will destroy evidence that we stole the rift and/or make it impossible to investigate
- Hole up somewhere with the rift and bring back our S-ranks
- Return to Leaf in glory so Naruto can pardon us
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
This is the part I somewhat agree with, although, to be honest, my actual model for how Hidan works wasn't ever really that he literally spins in a circle and marches in our direction. It doesn't feel like the kind of "hunt" Jashin would send him on, does it?
This is the part I completely disagree with. Not doing this feels like a misstep, from the reference class of missteps we're very fond of making. Primary examples:
- Ignoring Orochimaru, instead of proactively establishing some working relationship with him and/or monitoring him through Kabuto (the way Ami did), despite knowing that he might take an interest in us at any moment, until he showed up and decided to dissect Kei and Hazou.
- Ignoring the Akatsuki, instead of proactively acting against them, despite knowing that we're in a necromancy race and that they know we're in a necromancy race, until they showed up and stole all our research.
Edit: Granted, "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" is hardly solid reasoning. But unless someone has any better ideas...? I guess we can go sink the Pirate Lords' ships in the name of Jashin?
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Not exactly implemented, but the new section is less flippant. Mostly I don't offer to assist because we can't.
Implemented (mostly)
Reworded
Included, if this is contentious in the rest of the thread please speak up
Reworded.
I don't think this is the time or place, if, after we move we end up in the south of Wind, perhaps then.
Do you think you could rename these to something that doesn't make my eyes bleed?
I suggest "Microrift Rune" and "Pathbound Rift Rune" but anything without rift in the title twice is acceptable. Also acceptable is not using something with "maker" in the title.
- Location
- U.S.
Rune of Relaxation
Upon activation, this rune teleports the nervous system of any person within range, to several feet outside of their body. This will rapidly kill anyone without appropriate countermeasures, non-standard physiology, or massive regenerative capability.
Design goal priorities:
- Hazo can research it.
- Teleports nervous systems.
- Teleport distance is far enough to disconnect the nervous system from the body.
- Range is as large as possible.
Buggy said:
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I could give an answer here about the increased difficulty of finding tougher cover or terrain, but mostly I want to ask you not to poke at this too hard, this being a necessary mechanic to make the fiction line up as intended. We also ask you to not ask other questions, such as:
- How come when two guys facing off with a 40 in their main stat, one with his fists and the other with an actual sword meant for killing people, both have a pretty equal chance of winning?
- How the hell does Hazou actually manage to say "Pangolin Clan Technique: Pantokrator's Hammer", "Earth Element: Multiple Earth Wall", and "Pangolin Clan Technique: Pangolin Earth Armor" all in a three-second round?
Yes, but we (probably) won't give you the estimates as they (probably) don't matter, having already been researched.
More powerful runes are usually more difficult and also bigger, but the difficulty isn't 1:1 with substrate used.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Noburi also has no teaching experience, unlike his teacher. We discussed all these factors before making a decision.
[X] Noburi Training Plan: Removing the Weights on Better Buffs
[X] Action Plan: The (Sand)worm's Turn
My principle objection to @Noumero's plan is that I think the opening offers are much too high. The plan as it stands offers to bind ourselves either to establishing a perpetually unstable system of government, or to popularize mass death and resurrection with an unknown degree of associated risk and memory loss, in exchange for Hidan not finding us. It's offering way too much in exchange for way too little; we'd basically be handing the world on a platter to whichever entity we might happen to negotiate with. IMO, the correct decision for anyone who ever found out that we made this kind of bargain would be to kill us immediately to prevent us from spreading our contractor's influence; it's certainly not something I would ever support us doing without a gain on the scale of "instantly win the quest".
Speaking personally, I would be much more inclined to support a plan in this vein that made specific and limited offers. For example, we could offer to change the path of a river in a way decided by random die rolls, or to blow up a particular mountain (preferably a small one!) with runes, to appeal to the Unkind One. For the Washerman, we could offer to slaughter some pirates, or do some classic Uplift over in Rock or something (where we might not have otherwise reached for some time, due to the Leaf-Rock political situation) - though that last one is a bit risky, and a better option might be to do it over in one of the small Eastern countries. (Or in Snow. Does anyone live in Snow? It's a known haunt of ours, but it also seems like a place that could do with some Uplift-ing.)
Anyway. The point is, there are offers we could make besides "massively warp our entire future plans to gain a minor favour from Externals that may or may not actually care about most of the offer", and I think it would make much more sense to try those offers first. Apart from anything else, they're things we could do now and not after we hypothetically rule the world, so there's a much higher change of the Externals getting a return on investment even if the returns themselves are smaller.
[X] Action Plan: The (Sand)worm's Turn
My principle objection to @Noumero's plan is that I think the opening offers are much too high. The plan as it stands offers to bind ourselves either to establishing a perpetually unstable system of government, or to popularize mass death and resurrection with an unknown degree of associated risk and memory loss, in exchange for Hidan not finding us. It's offering way too much in exchange for way too little; we'd basically be handing the world on a platter to whichever entity we might happen to negotiate with. IMO, the correct decision for anyone who ever found out that we made this kind of bargain would be to kill us immediately to prevent us from spreading our contractor's influence; it's certainly not something I would ever support us doing without a gain on the scale of "instantly win the quest".
Also, we don't know what the Washerman and the Unkind One (assuming they exist) actually want, we have scraps of lore that might be anywhere from distorted truth to complete falsehood. For all we know, the part of the Washerman's job that it cares about is the part where people lose their memories in the afterlife; we're never going to support that (barring hacks like creating people from scratch just to feed them to the Washerman), and IMO it explains why it would be called "the Washerman" a lot better than it just caring about interpath travel, or even just creating new bodies in Naraka. Kamehameha's original description was:
That "washes the souls of the dead and guides them to reincarnation" might mean something other than "removes their minds and memories" but given that the end state of reincarnation (as traditionally described) requires loss of memories, that we know/strongly suspect that people do lose memories in the afterlife, and given that "washes" implies washing away something, I think it's very likely that that is at least part of the Washerman's goal (although of course, if it is the Washerman that favours us, the fact that it does so suggests it's not opposed to necromancy, which is evidence against this). Similarly, the Unkind One might not care about changes in how humans organize themselves, it might only care about changes in other parts of the world; we've caused plenty enough of those (death of the Dragons, widespread use of MEW for village walls, creation of new runes for the first time in centuries) to be worth noting. Kamehameha explicitly calls out this possibility:
Of course, if the Unkind One can be negotiated with, it presumably does know that humans exist; but that doesn't mean it considers them relevant except insofar as they affect things it does care about. So, for both the Unkind One and the Washerman, we're making an immensely costly offer, without even knowing whether they'd find it more valuable than something we could do with much less cost.
Speaking personally, I would be much more inclined to support a plan in this vein that made specific and limited offers. For example, we could offer to change the path of a river in a way decided by random die rolls, or to blow up a particular mountain (preferably a small one!) with runes, to appeal to the Unkind One. For the Washerman, we could offer to slaughter some pirates, or do some classic Uplift over in Rock or something (where we might not have otherwise reached for some time, due to the Leaf-Rock political situation) - though that last one is a bit risky, and a better option might be to do it over in one of the small Eastern countries. (Or in Snow. Does anyone live in Snow? It's a known haunt of ours, but it also seems like a place that could do with some Uplift-ing.)
Anyway. The point is, there are offers we could make besides "massively warp our entire future plans to gain a minor favour from Externals that may or may not actually care about most of the offer", and I think it would make much more sense to try those offers first. Apart from anything else, they're things we could do now and not after we hypothetically rule the world, so there's a much higher change of the Externals getting a return on investment even if the returns themselves are smaller.
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I'd like to spend some social time with Dusk Willow, if we have some spare time and wordcount at some point. They're staying in an otherwise unoccupied part of Dog away from their usual packs for our sake, feels like a nice thing to do; plus I could get a little tired of the narrative no characters other than team Uplift for months on end.
I'd certainly bet that Mari and Yuno got combat unstagnation! At least, if the QMs track XP and stagnation for them.