Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- 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
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- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Orochimaru was there, at the battle, and should know. He was also an active member of the Akatsuki, a Summoner/sealmaster, and should thus know insider information. He would have included it in his dossiers that we bought from him.
Could we please have a more direct answer?
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- how about no
Hazou's Shadow Clone meets with Oro while Hazou Prime infuses and/or researches runes so dangerous that Hazou reasonably believes failing at such a difficult task could end the world as we know it.
Reasoning:
- We have no time to waste so it is more efficient to meet while prepping for the battle
- Prime is needed for every edge we can get while infusing the most difficult (and therefore hopefully useful against S-rankers) stuff in our runic repertoire
- Oro is always cautious when it comes to his immortality and there is one thing even he isn't willing to risk if he can avoid it: a catastrophic, contingency-bypassing sealing failure erasing or altering him
- The 'whoops-I-can't-believe-it's-basically-a' deadman switch can be disabled almost as soon as the conversation is over and does not require outside actors like backup from Leaf or the 7th path to enforce
- It is better to risk one runic failure now when Hazou is the one in the hot seat rather than rely on a deadman switch that almost assuredly would result in a runic failure sometime in the future like with the runic cookbook contingency
- Runes are THE biggest stick we (Uplift) have to wag at S-rankers currently: we cannot threaten him with WOOSH today and nothing else even comes close to giving him pause that we can "closely control"
- We can't expect to lie to him about having a completed rune that could affect him alone already due to the disparity in our social stats, so we need to rely on exploiting his fear of unknowns (in this case a known unknown: he knows a runic failure would be VERY BAD, but not how it would be VERY BAD and how to survive it)
- Oro would be wary of even causing psychic damage as that could trigger a runic failure for all he knows so we could ensure we could have as polite as possible of a conversation with him for the first time ever
Of course, Oro could reasonably come to the conclusion that Hazou is too reckless to be entrusted with runes after this conversation and will begin making (let's be honest: more) contingencies to neutralize us. However, we are discussing antagonistically pressuring him to act certain ways anyway so we might as well go for the course of action that achieves our short term goals with the best odds of success.
If we are very, very lucky we can frame our reasoning in such a way that Oro could/should be more inclined later on to peacefully educate us on proper safety precautions before fighting S-rankers rather than simply vivisecting us to save the world from our naïvety. We can workshop with Mari to frame the conversation in terms of haste rather than challenging Oro so that the deadman switch isn't the main point of contension but rather Uplift's and Oro's upcoming date with destiny.
[X] Armageddon Initiative 2.0 Electric Boogaloo
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
[X] Lore Update
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- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
One of these days, the Armageddon Initiative will win, and the QMs will allow it because I will respect player agency, @Paperclipped will decide it's full of narrative potential, and @eaglejarl will eventually acquiesce once we convince him that the post-apocalyptic landscape will be full of punching opportunities.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Orochimaru's dossier does not discuss any of Pain's powers, presumably because Pain was dead at the time. It also explicitly states that he doesn't know all of anybody's powers because they are secretive S-rankers, and doesn't list Sasori's or Konan's seals. It especially doesn't cover anything that would be specific to the ritual, as opposed to an Akatsuki member's general ability.
That said, allow us to speak out of character:
Thank you for all the input, folks. After reading all the comments you've convinced us that your solution is the way to go. As such: yes, during the Battle of the Gods, the allied forces did summon various powerful combatants, but one of Pain's powers dispelled them as they arrived on the field, aside from Ma and Pa for whom we have an explanation but HDK what it is. As such, Akatsuki will not be able to use the same method to prevent summons from being used against them again...at least, not until they successfully retrieve Pain.
As an aside: we try to walk a fine line between not disclosing OOC information or opposition capabilities, while still communicating clearly and setting accurate expectations, hence why this post starts with an in-character and follows with an out-of-character statement. That said, it's a safe bet that when word of the Zoo Rush became public knowledge, Akatsuki were highly alarmed and greatly regretted their lack of summon-prevention.
As promised in earlier discussion, you have a 50 XP bounty to spend.
- Location
- United States
- Location
- United States
[X] Hazō Training Plan: Just. One. More. Level.
CR 38 -> 39 [78 XP]
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- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Thank you for being receptive; this is how I personally expected things to shake out and I'm hoping that folks who felt more pessimistic are reassured and update somewhat.
I will be explicitly clear that my reading of what you're saying is that the Akatsuki are unlikely to have this capability, period - when we tested the idea with runes it was not feasible and the Akatsuki do not have an experienced sealmaster who is also a Summoner, which seemingly implies that they lack the capability to develop a paper sealing array which replicates one of the abilities of the Rinnegan. While I initially commented that the Akatsuki having developed this capability between the Zoo Rush and now wouldn't bruise my suspension of disbelief, I'd forgotten that we'd tried and been told it would be effectively impossible. (IIRC, I don't have the citation to hand. Someone else?)
I guess all of that is to say: until the last sentence of the last paragraph, I felt that communication had been clear and that expectations had been set! But reading "Akatsuki were highly alarmed and greatly regretted their lack of summon-prevention" leaves me with a great deal of uncertainty. Some of that is to be expected, but it feels (emphasis on the choice of word; feelings run at right angles to reason, I am not suggesting any degree of intention on your part) like a bit of a rug-pull to have that come so quickly after reassurance of our shared goals of clear communication. A clear answer not immediately followed by something that muddies the waters would be hugely appreciated, if possible.
e: I'm realizing that starting with 'hey thank you this is great!' and ending with 'I'm very uncertain pls halp' while saying that I feel like the rug's been pulled out from under me a bit is, ah, not great form. Let me be clear: I personally am relatively confident that the sentence in question this was an off-the-cuff comment for completeness. If not for the surrounding context/events, my level of uncertainty would not be high enough for me to have made the comments that I made. In this specific instance, it would be really cool to get a clear QM statement to the tune of 'based on the design work he did with runes Hazo would be [shocked/unsurprised] to find the Akatsuki had developed a paper seal array preventing Summoning given that they don't have a Summoner sealmaster' to definitively set expectations.
On an unrelated note, in future, might you consider throwing problems like this to the playerbase before announcing tentative rulings? A post asking for help ('we realized that Summons should have been at the BotG but can't make that change now; can you generate a bunch of plausible and minimally-disruptive explanations for us? we're asking you to explore the solution space, not vote something in') would have potentially slowed down proceedings somewhat but would have been good for the esprit de corps as well as (credibly) making your lives easier. (In this specific case I think 'Pain did it; here's a quasi-canon citation that it's one of his abilities' would have bubbled up quite quickly resulting in the same time to resolution.) I cheerfully acknowledge that this is highly similar in terms of objective function to what you did, but 'we need your help' hits very differently from 'we have bad news (although we're open to being convinced otherwise)'. If you've already considered and rejected this, please ignore me and be about your business, but it seems like it might be a useful tool in the toolbox going forward.
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- United States
Sadly, this means we are going to be woefully unprepared to face Sasori's Pain Puppet. /s
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
[X] Hazō Training Plan: Just. One. More. Level.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Seconding this post.