Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[Velorien]

I've done that before.

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And what was the improvement to your chakra efficiency like afterwards? Would you say closer to +20% or to +25%?

 

[Halberdier]

So leopard and hyena are both probably going to be wiped out and/or subjugated, in a way that temporarily weakens Dog and Pangolin. And we didn't really have time to interfere. And Kei and Hazou are on opposite ends of this issue. And while we didn't like Pangolin overall, it is useful to Kei's personal power.

I honestly don't know that we do anything? If Kei and Hazou stay out of it, that about cancels out? Though it seems like dog utilizes us better, and Kei will have to do some stuff to stay in sufficiently good graces, so it more skews towards Pangolins.

...I doubt they'd go for it, but what if Hyena declared themselves part of Dog? Like a reverse break-off of what leopard did. Hyena still fundamentally loses some of who they are, but less than under Pangolin rule, and Cannai would get a huge power bump from territory expansion? Though I could see other groups being nervous at that level of control of territory.

 

[Paperclipped]

Batching responses into themes...

I think interesting and dangerous areas will have interesting and dangerous stuff to poke at, some portion of which might be "loot" (by virtue of some property intrinsic to the region, or by virtue of some other mid-to-high level schmuck dying in the region, etc.).

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If we thoroughly explored some high-chakra high-danger adventure location and didn't find anything interesting, no cool chakra beasts or plants or mysterious phenomena or leads for further research, then I would be disappointed.

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And again to be clear rewards beyond unstagnating don't HAVE to be literal loot. Actionable intel/lore, reputation progress with e.g. 7th Path clans or something, or achieving other useful goals like diverting Akatsuki attention or whatever is narratively applicable at that time are useful too and plot relevant/compelling, and plot hooks in those directions will be fruitful, I'd think. "Pro Forma" adventures with no benefit besides unstagnating - that EJ himself said he didn't prefer - are not going to encourage further adventures/plans the QMs claim to desire.

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I wasn't actually considering "loot" in my original post. I agree that other stuff like interesting beasts, random shit dropped by other dead ninja, intel/lore, and general narrative progress are generally good (for the "loot from other dead ninja", I do wish we'd ever get through the backlog of seals owed to the players so we could design new stuff to just occasionally be on enemies' bodies and the like) .

Relatedly:

I think it has been all but stated outright that some of the more obscure and dangerous locations (that we have a subset of) probably contain lore and/or treasure and/or secrets of the setting. The CSI maze for instance.

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CSI seems like a particularly good example here where a trustworthy source who would never lie to you has told you that you can find valuable lore there.

I think it has been implied to a moderate yet infrequent degree that some of the strange bullshit-powerups we see several Essies walking around with are the result of striking metaphorical gold somewhere like this.

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What I've gathered over the years is that raiding these high chakra locations can give you access to "shinies" that are otherwise impossible to get. The sannin did it, Itachi did it, and we are trying to emulate their success. It is not always a literal object, but it sometimes was (Itachi's mirror and soul-sealing gourd-sword). The fact that the QMs don't hold this opinion seems strange to me since that has been hinted at or outright stated for years.

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...kind of, yeah? Like, as someone who does just enjoy adventure in and of itself, when I'm trying to persuade other voters to support it... why bother doing it if there's no reward or boon to our current objective? There's in-universe justification for literal loot in the cases of these dungeons - supposedly this is what made the sannin big and strong, and not everyone does it because it's dangerous and kills even jonin. Or it can have other things besides loot, like lore and actionable intel (perhaps locations of additional dungeons for example) rather than some power up.

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I think apart from the Sannin/Itachi, other S-rankers haven't been implied to have gotten broken-juice from magic dungeons. In fact, the first of @ProperAttorney's quotes is maybe even argument against, i.e. that this route has been tried and proven unsuccessful. Apart from the deadliness of such adventures (which, aside, I don't think was present in this one), there are other reasons why such dungeon delving for literal magic items might have been unsuccessful for imitators, for instance that the loot might have just already been taken.

but looking at the actually chakra numbers it doesn't allow you to do much more than fight 1-2 additional rounds.

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As a player, my approach to 'strength of boon x' in this case was to more or less weigh "what does this enable us to do that we couldn't before? Who can we defeat that we couldn't before?" and at least for us specifically, I don't think it really changes that.

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Furthermore, it doesn't really enable us to do anything we couldn't do before, we cannot win conficts even a half-rank up from where we were with it

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Is there any amount of chakra-efficiency gain that would actually make this happen? The team isn't chakra constrained in fights (except the chakravore fight which was different for obvious reasons).

and a slight bonus to FOOM for a few weeks was not what we had in mind when we sunk a month of time into this IC.

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It's nitpicking, but I think it's worth avoiding undue catastrophizing. The duration of clearing the caves was 10 days: September 20-29 on the timeline.

 

[Sir Stompy]

Is there any amount of chakra-efficiency gain that would actually make this happen? The team isn't chakra constrained in fights (except the chakravore fight which was different for obvious reasons).

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Yes, @Shrooms was proposing crazy stuff like 67% reduction in cost. That would allow us to cast/hack jutsu that are otherwise too chakra intensive for regular ninja to cast. We've even heard of them in the context of Kisame, so called "Jinchuuriki Ninjutsu"

Sufficient cost reduction would allow us to no longer timeladder up rune infusions on Prime, which with our increasing PS skill is starting to become an issue.

In addition, if the cave affected SCs, even 25% efficiency gains would be sufficient to allow us to FOOM at Resolve-limited levels.

[1315 - 207 (SC + 5 Clones)]/60 = ~18

Hazou could run 18 blocks of FOOM. That's enough for us to run 15 blocks during prep days.

I'd have been happy with either of the those.

t's nitpicking, but I think it's worth avoiding undue catastrophizing. The duration of clearing the caves was 10 days: September 20-29 on the timeline.

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IIRC we spent 5 additional days traveling to the cave, and finding the cave. You could argue that we would have spent ~3 days traveling either way. So fine, 12 days wasted. Still, when people are putting themselves on a 90 day timer, ~15% of that is significant.