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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Radvic said:
If we're just going to kill ourselves, we should really do this instead. Like, stabbing out your neck? Lame. Destroying the vast majority of civilization via sealing exploits? That's cool. Bonus is when the cascading failures start as infused seals elsewhere are destroyed triggering untold sealing failures across the globe.
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Split the difference. Have Hazou kill himself while fantasizing about doing all that.
 
Velorien said:
"Noburi's ability to sense and drain chakra through Mist is a Wakahisa trump card, a secret Bloodline Limit technique of the kind that clans legitimately kill to protect. The Mori have such techniques as well. All strong clans do. Now that our own clan holds the Wakahisa bloodline, it is our clan's trump card as well, in the same way as Hazō's perfect seal-scribing."
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No, it's Mist's Wakahisa trump card. We have exactly one user, and by the time we have a second on our team, Noburi will be S-Rank or dead. Keeping this secret from Leaf does nothing to make us safer, and everything to make us weaker. It is in our favour for our village to be aware of how to counter our bloodline's abilities. I've honestly found the kids' adherence to keeping these secret rather strange.

Whilst reasoning about this use in the long-term matters, it's uninteresting for a character like Kagome, who cares about the team now, not future generations of Leaf ninja.
"As a secondary concern," Keiko added, "this kind of secret ability typically serves as the cornerstone for an eventual jōnin career, much like Zabuza's Silent Killing or Uzumaki's shadow clones. Uzumaki was famous for his use of shadow clones, but the full properties of this Leaf forbidden technique remained a mystery. By all accounts, Uzumaki was considered unstoppable—until he was defeated instantly by a former Leaf prodigy who would have had access to the same knowledge.
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If this ability sufficed to bring Noburi to S-Rank, the Wakahisa clan wouldn't be primarily in support, so the comparison is unsuited. Generally speaking, people don't get to hear about tons of other clan's special abilities, else (a sane) Mari would have told us about them. Ergo either these kidnapping-tortures are either sufficiently rare or ineffective for the risk to be particularly low, or most people don't get to hear about other clan's bloodlines. Note that the latter doesn't make sense, since it's not a good idea to keep your enemies' abilities secret. So if such information comes in useful it's either an unlikely coincidence or because Noburi is some kind of special character worth specific assassination.

If Noburi becomes a special fighting prodigy, rather than going largely into, say, medicine, we've already concluded it's not going to be because of this ability. It's going to be because we've figured out a way to do something special. Ergo in that case the risk basically doesn't matter.
"Thus, after having Noburi's mist abilities explained to her, and observing them in action together with the misterators, Minami became capable of greatly endangering him were she ever to be captured and interrogated."
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This is such a crazy hypothesis. If the only person we've told outside of need-to-know happens to be captured and tortured, rather than any of the many Wakahisa that know this technique, the capturers aren't Mist, they happen to consider this the most vital information they hear, rather than say skywalkers, the few people privileged to hear this information happen to then fight the one Leaf ninja with this ability, who happens to be relying primarily on this ability, which they happen to have prepared for (foreknowledge alone isn't a major deal against an ability this slow), rather than, say, a couple-hundred explosive tags, Skywalkers, macerator weapons, teammates, etc., then he'll be at a slight disadvantage relative to normal. So?

If Kagome was happy with us giving out Skywalkers and all that other jazz that actually kept us safe (both to Minami and to Leaf altogether) it makes no sense for him to betray us over what amounts to a rounding error.
 
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[X] Poll (Agency): Yes, I want to give up some control of Hazō such that he will generally follow the plan but the GMs will make him do whatever they think is sensible whenever we (the players) vote in something that they (the GMs) think is inappropriate for Hazō-the-character to do. I fully understand that "inappropriate" and "whatever they think is sensible" are subjective and might not be things I approve of or would prefer and I promise not to complain about it in those cases.
 
Veedrac said:
No, it's Mist's Wakahisa trump card. We have exactly one user, and by the time we have a second on our team, Noburi will be S-Rank or dead. Keeping this secret from Leaf does nothing to make us safer, and everything to make us weaker. It is in our favour for our village to be aware of how to counter our bloodline's abilities. I've honestly found the kids' adherence to keeping these secret rather strange.

Whilst reasoning about this use in the long-term matters, it's uninteresting for a character like Kagome, who cares about the team now, not future generations of Leaf ninja.
[...]
This is such a crazy hypothesis. If the only person we've told outside of need-to-know happens to be captured and tortured, rather than any of the many Wakahisa that know this technique, the capturers aren't Mist, they happen to consider this the most vital information they hear, rather than say skywalkers, the few people privileged to hear this information happen to then fight the one Leaf ninja with this ability, who happens to be relying primarily on this ability, which they happen to have prepared for (foreknowledge alone isn't a major deal against an ability this slow), rather than, say, a couple-hundred explosive tags, Skywalkers, macerator weapons, teammates, etc., then he'll be at a slight disadvantage relative to normal. So?

If Kagome was happy with us giving out Skywalkers and all that other jazz that actually kept us safe (both to Minami and to Leaf altogether) it makes no sense for him to betray us over what amounts to a rounding error.
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I have to state my agreement with both of these points.
 
fiirofa said:
Minus the part where we actually set things off, I support this.
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Fair. I've edited the plan to include just researching. We can set them off in the next update.

faflec said:
@Radvic FYI the Watchers are gonna kill us, and Hazou knows it.

Replace Watchers with Lupchanzen if you believe Kagome, but the result is the same.
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Eh, unless they have perfect information gathering abilities, we should be able to destroy the world before they spot us. If they do have perfect information gathering abilities, then we probably would already be dead.
 
Veedrac said:
If Kagome was happy with us giving out Skywalkers and all that other jazz that actually kept us safe (both to Minami and to Leaf altogether) it makes no sense for him to betray us over what amounts to a rounding error.
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Yeah, that does feel pretty off. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that's not how we've done opsec in the past and this does feel like a special case that came out of nowhere. People can kill the pangolin summoner and steal their contract, and we're not nearly as sensitive with that information. It does feel like we're treating that particular secret as like a completely different class of secret, and that came out of left field. I still don't understand why it's different.

Oneiros43 said:
we trust Minami with those
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Trusted. Past tense.
 
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Actually. Fuck it. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

[X] BUY SOME YOUTHSUITS!
Kneel in front of Kagome-Sensei, and tell him you need his help to get through this, but to help us, he has to go through with a plan that might seem crazy.
Don't explain the plan to him. Or anyone.
Convince the others to let you two leave for however long it takes (rough mental estimate) to get to the closest town you can get to BUY A YOUTHSUIT! Don't let the others know why you chose that duration of time.
Dispel the Air Dome.
Travel with Kagome to the nearest town/city that you can BUY A YOUTHSUIT! at.
BUY TWO YOUTHSUITS!
Induct Kagome into the cult religion of YOUTH!
 
[X] Action Plan: Lore Update

@eaglejarl : I hope I've not been an ass. My only goal with my previous posts was to point out how this is a systemic error that is very hard for the hivemind alone to solve. It's just a matter of too few tuits spent collectively.

That said, this is a wonderful quest. And I do really appreciate the work you @Velorien, and @OliWhail put in. In the worst case I might switch to lurking for a bit until I can get enough enthusiasm back to contribute more.

Also, this was absolutely a reasonable outcome for our actions. I just think it's very difficult to keep from committing this class of mistakes over and over as a hivemind, where an actual person in this world would find it orders of magnitude easier.

@Velorien : The chat has long moved on, but there's this class of errors caused by lack of tuits spent on planning. A few that come to mind:
  • Tactical actions in the Hot Springs Incident (esp. w/ regards to the other jounin that we didn't realize would come to help.)
  • The whole getting kicked out of Leaf incident.
  • Going to snow, for no good reason.
In each case, the specific actions would have seemed unreasonable to someone with the context someone in the world would have. (Knowledge of how a DMZ works, Fear of jiraiya)

That context is not impossible for the hivemind to figure out, but it is incredibly expensive. We have to juggle exponentially more hypothesis than the QMs to reverse-engineer the context to any given fidelity. It is much harder to for a party with little info (the story posts) to find probable hypothesis and simulate reasonable outcomes, than it is for a party with significantly more information (the story posts + worldbuilding notes). Not to mention, your job is to find a reasonable way for the world to respond. Our job is to figure out the specific way you're likely to choose.

And we simply don't have enough people spending enough time to even do a good job of finding sufficiently probable hypothesis given the limited amount of information we have access to.

Honestly, the following is probably the best way to solve the context problem.

[X] Poll (Agency): Yes, I want to give up some control of Hazō such that he will generally follow the plan but the GMs will make him do whatever they think is sensible whenever we (the players) vote in something that they (the GMs) think is inappropriate for Hazō-the-character to do. I fully understand that "inappropriate" and "whatever they think is sensible" are subjective and might not be things I approve of or would prefer and I promise not to complain about it in those cases.


The only thing that feels in-character for Hazou right now is a nervous breakdown. This is just too much in a dozen different ways. I honestly can't see him as able to make the choice between Kagome, Akane, Leaf, his ambitions towards leadership, his violence-minimizing nature, etc..

There's just too many things he values all suddenly conflicting at once.

[X] Action Plan : Nervous Breakdown
 
Jello_Raptor said:
Going to snow, for no good reason.
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Hey! We went to snow for a very good reason! We were gonna build world destroying weapons.

[X] Action Plan : Nervous Breakdown
I can support this. It seems by far the most in character of the options. Probably just frantic dispelling fading into wimpers and crying, followed by silence and staring and non-responsiveness for a few days.
 
[X] Action Plan: The Watchtower

I don't know what to vote for. So I'll just vote for the one plan that removes the problem entirely while still attempting to be useful.

The problem being us.
 
As an aside, I really do enjoy seeing the reaction to this. This whole thread seems like a reasonable reaction for Hazo, including the "am I retarded" bits.
 
J is going to have to find out and help cover this anyway, so there's not much reason to kill Kagome.

Besides, if that's what you want, the safest option is to just tell him that he's not welcome anymore and let him kill himself.
 
[X] Action Plan : Nervous Breakdown

TBH, this seems like a very in-character thing for Hazo to do.

You know, said the problem-solving part of his brain, there's a limit to how many constraints you can add to a problem before it really is impossible, you know that?
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In the instant when Harry had realised there was no way at all left to save everyone, his mind's voices had fallen away, become one, a single purpose taking up every fraction of his mind.
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