Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Sir Stompy · Oct 4, 2024

Unaligned Player said:
If she truly loved Hazou, she would have tried to kill Mari, not try to make her suffer. I'm willing to give her an extremely cautious shot, however, because she appears to be trying to be better.

Some "No True Scotsman"ing here, why do you get to decide what she would do if she "truly" loved Hazou? By all appearances she seems to. I think she does.

What evidence do you have that she does not?

_The_Bomb said:
It was meant to be a statement reflecting that her actions were extremely bad for her village, and not just for her child and her own place in her child's life.

....who cares...?

Unaligned Player · Oct 4, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
I think she does.

And you are entitled to that opinion just as I am entitled to mine. My apologies if you didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Sir Stompy said:
What evidence do you have that she does not?

I didn't believe she loved her son more than she hated the monster that hurt him because, when left alone with it she did not:
A: Kill it, which will at best lead to her immediate and messy death by Rasengan, but make sure it cannot harm him any longer.
B: Keep up the facade that she's willing to tolerate its existence so she can be around and protect her son.
and instead chose
C: Hurt the monster and specifically not kill it, losing the ability to protect her son, and leaving him with the monster more sympathetic than ever.

From that I concluded that vengeance took far priority over her son at the time. Now she believes she's willing to put vengeance aside for her son, and I am willing to cautiously give her that chance.

Sir Stompy · Oct 4, 2024

Unaligned Player said:
And you are entitled to that opinion just as I am entitled to mine. My apologies if you didn't mean to imply otherwise.

I didn't believe she loved her son more than she hated the monster that hurt him because, when left alone with it she did not:
A: Kill it, which will at best lead to her immediate and messy death by Rasengan, but make sure it cannot harm him any longer.
B: Keep up the facade that she's willing to tolerate its existence so she can be around and protect her son.
and instead chose
C: Hurt the monster and specifically not kill it, losing the ability to protect her son, and leaving him with the monster more sympathetic than ever.

From that I concluded that vengeance took far priority over her son at the time. Now she believes she's willing to put vengeance aside for her son, and I am willing to cautiously give her that chance.

Are you unwilling to believe that she can love her son with her whole heart but make a bad decision when confronted with the woman who stole him?

Objectively, it was a bad decision. She should have kept the peace or died to kill Mari, absolutely. Yet I can easily imagine her making that decision and not seeing the consequences, or deluding herself that Jiriaya would put up with it for the sake of the prospective alliance.

Do I think Hana should be in charge of Hazou? Hell no. But I also do not think love is a thing that helps you make better decisions. If anything the opposite. So I think her decisions were understandable in hindsight and they were based on valid feelings.

If she ever enters the story again, needless to say I will make every effort to keep Mari and Hana separate. I cannot imagine them occupying the same room without disaster striking. However, I think she could productively live in Leaf as the ambassador. If we sit with her and lay some ground rules.

Inferno Vulpix · Oct 4, 2024

Love is famously a very strong emotion, and Hana famously feels that emotion especially strongly. It's specifically the kind of emotion that leads people to not strategize when acting upon it. I don't think it parses very well to say "this action was not strategic, and therefore cannot have been motivated by love".

Like, when we cut right to the heart of it, Hana hates Mari because she loves Hazou. They aren't separate things, they're very intertwined and it should come as no surprise that Hana, who famously does rash things in the name of her love, acted rashly when her love-fueled hate told her to.

It is a genuine problem, that she let this happen. It got in the way of what she actually wanted for herself and for Hazou. But it's not that she chose to ignore her love or anything, it's that her love was self-sabotaging. If she had loved less, felt less strongly, was able to restrain herself from acting on the torrent of emotions inside of her, perhaps she would have obtained a better outcome. But it's not that she didn't love enough, or that she set her love to the side so that she could hate instead.

Unaligned Player · Oct 4, 2024

Oh, do not worry. I have not believed for even a second that she does not love Hazou or that the love she holds for him did not motivate that anti-rational decision. If I did I would be firmly against her ever interacting with Hazou again. I support her chance to be better than that decision.

But that decision, emotionally driven as it was, did happen. And it'll take extra time for me to build trust in her because of it, though I will endeavor to give her a fair shake of things.

Kyreneryk · Oct 4, 2024

Couple of questions about FOOM. One, how is Hazō able to manage 19 training blocks per day? That's 19x3 = 57 clone-hours, for a clone shock TN of 77; Hazō's Resolve is 63 and he gets a 3*(5 - 2) = +9 bonus from his SC AB, meaning he's rolling at 72. If he rolls a -9 or worse he'll take more than 4 mental stress and have to take a Mild - is the assumption just that that happens occasionally (and if yes how does that interact with DotB-and-SSA-when-we-had-it), is he burning FP to reroll -9s offscreen, or have I misunderstood something?

Two, the rules say there are only three training blocks per clone per day:

"A training block" is a fuzzy period of time that isn't strictly about hours but also learning capacity, amount of time you can focus, etc.

There is 1 training block per day in the "a few hours" time increment.

There are 3 training blocks per day in the "1 day" time increment.

but we've been running them as if it's four (see here, for example). Has this been changed, are we burning more chakra than it would seem like to make the extra clones, or again am I misunderstanding something?

Shrooms · Oct 4, 2024

Kyreneryk said:
If he rolls a -9 or worse he'll take more than 4 mental stress and have to take a Mild - is the assumption just that that happens occasionally

Yep, works out to be more xp efficient to only pass -6 and above

Kyreneryk said:
(and if yes how does that interact with DotB-and-SSA-when-we-had-it)

It means he has to succeed on -12s so yeah you lose two blocks. On top of that, sealing itself will take up 4 blocks per SC track, and on top of that, the Milds also make his resolve worse on recovery days. So yeah tracking it while researching is kind of a huge pain but it's doable. Research really is a noticeable dip in XP income.

Kyreneryk said:
is he burning FP to reroll -9s offscreen

Nope, we never spend FP on FOOM rolls.

Kyreneryk said:
but we've been running them as if it's four (see here, for example). Has this been changed, are we burning more chakra than it would seem like to make the extra clones, or again am I misunderstanding something?

Sealing is 4 "training blocks", but that is itself 12 hours. Training blocks are increments of 3 hours, and you can only get XP from 3 blocks per clone. You can just cast more Clones to get around this, but if you need to do 12 hours of researching, it cuts into 4 total blocks.

In Leaf we are not clone limited, just resolve limited. We could have 19 clones do a single block of training if we wanted.

_The_Bomb · Oct 4, 2024

Unaligned Player said:
From that I concluded that vengeance took far priority over her son at the time

Yeah, that's pretty similar to my take on what happened. It wasn't about protecting Hazō, it was about getting her own revenge, even at the cost of Hazō's emotions and safety.

Until she can recognize that, I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for the consequences of her brazen behavior.

Inferno Vulpix · Oct 4, 2024

Kyreneryk said:
Couple of questions about FOOM. One, how is Hazō able to manage 19 training blocks per day? That's 19x3 = 57 clone-hours, for a clone shock TN of 77; Hazō's Resolve is 63 and he gets a 3*(5 - 2) = +9 bonus from his SC AB, meaning he's rolling at 72. If he rolls a -9 or worse he'll take more than 4 mental stress and have to take a Mild - is the assumption just that that happens occasionally (and if yes how does that interact with DotB-and-SSA-when-we-had-it), is he burning FP to reroll -9s offscreen, or have I misunderstood something?

When we originally worked out the FOOM SOP, we considered various places to set our "safe threshold", the lowest FD roll we could sustain without taking a Mild Consequence. After doing some testing, we found out that "Safe on -6", even though it would mean taking a Mild occasionally, provided a better average FOOM rate overall, since we could fit more blocks in on the days when we weren't scaling back (since on days with a Mild we didn't want to risk overflowing to a Medium. Now that we have two Mild slots I think the calculus would be different).

I think on average this works out to -0.5 clone blocks/day when we're doing full FOOM, or thereabouts. IIRC the reason why this hasn't been reflected in our XP gains is because it's a pain on the bookkeeping. I think I once expressed interest in checking over all our SC XP gains and figuring out the correction, but then I kinda ended up not doing it.

Kyreneryk said:
Two, the rules say there are only three training blocks per clone per day:
but we've been running them as if it's four (see here, for example). Has this been changed, are we burning more chakra than it would seem like to make the extra clones, or again am I misunderstanding something?

If you're referring to the enclosed table of what we're doing on those days, our clones last 12 hours and research tasks take 12 hours but we indeed can only benefit from 9 hours of FOOM training per clone. This is as I understand it accounted for in the chakra math (days where we do more FOOM involve making more clones) but ultimately doesn't make a big difference in our chakra budget compared to the sheer cost of the FOOM blocks themselves.

Sir Stompy · Oct 4, 2024

Inferno Vulpix said:
When we originally worked out the FOOM SOP, we considered various places to set our "safe threshold", the lowest FD roll we could sustain without taking a Mild Consequence. After doing some testing, we found out that "Safe on -6", even though it would mean taking a Mild occasionally, provided a better average FOOM rate overall, since we could fit more blocks in on the days when we weren't scaling back (since on days with a Mild we didn't want to risk overflowing to a Medium. Now that we have two Mild slots I think the calculus would be different).

I think on average this works out to -0.5 clone blocks/day when we're doing full FOOM, or thereabouts. IIRC the reason why this hasn't been reflected in our XP gains is because it's a pain on the bookkeeping. I think I once expressed interest in checking over all our SC XP gains and figuring out the correction, but then I kinda ended up not doing it.

If you're referring to the enclosed table of what we're doing on those days, our clones last 12 hours and research tasks take 12 hours but we indeed can only benefit from 9 hours of FOOM training per clone. This is as I understand it accounted for in the chakra math (days where we do more FOOM involve making more clones) but ultimately doesn't make a big difference in our chakra budget compared to the sheer cost of the FOOM blocks themselves.

I didn't account for this in the chakra budget. I don't think it matters but I'll have to revisit it and make sure the calculations are correct.

(This is a stupid rule QMs, "All day" should be the same number of training blocks and total hours for all activities.)

Velorien · Oct 4, 2024

Minor edit made to the Raito scene to replace the interregnum reference. Ren, of course, already has a successor in Kurosawa Hanzō.

Sir Stompy · Oct 4, 2024

Velorien said:
Minor edit made to the Raito scene to replace the interregnum reference. Ren, of course, already has a successor in Kurosawa Hanzō.

Since this is apparently canon, should it be in the main threadmark chain and not thr Sidestory one?

Kyreneryk · Oct 4, 2024

Shrooms said:
It means he has to succeed on -12s so yeah you lose two blocks. On top of that, sealing itself will take up 4 blocks per SC track, and on top of that, the Milds also make his resolve worse on recovery days. So yeah tracking it while researching is kind of a huge pain but it's doable. Research really is a noticeable dip in XP income.

Inferno Vulpix said:
When we originally worked out the FOOM SOP, we considered various places to set our "safe threshold", the lowest FD roll we could sustain without taking a Mild Consequence. After doing some testing, we found out that "Safe on -6", even though it would mean taking a Mild occasionally, provided a better average FOOM rate overall, since we could fit more blocks in on the days when we weren't scaling back (since on days with a Mild we didn't want to risk overflowing to a Medium. Now that we have two Mild slots I think the calculus would be different).

I think on average this works out to -0.5 clone blocks/day when we're doing full FOOM, or thereabouts. IIRC the reason why this hasn't been reflected in our XP gains is because it's a pain on the bookkeeping. I think I once expressed interest in checking over all our SC XP gains and figuring out the correction, but then I kinda ended up not doing it.

Hmm. Isn't there a risk that when we double-track DotB infusions, if he happens to roll badly that day he could take another Mild on top of the two he already has from DotB and end up with a Moderate? I don't see any scaling back of clone-hours on infusion days.

Also, just checking that I understand the DotB rest - we have two Milds which reduces Resolve by -AB, so -7 to 56, and also we have to take at most four stress on -12 because we can't risk taking another Consequence, giving us 45 clone hours for 15 training blocks. We seem to be doing 14 - is this just for safety margin?

Shrooms said:
Sealing is 4 "training blocks", but that is itself 12 hours. Training blocks are increments of 3 hours, and you can only get XP from 3 blocks per clone. You can just cast more Clones to get around this, but if you need to do 12 hours of researching, it cuts into 4 total blocks.

Inferno Vulpix said:
If you're referring to the enclosed table of what we're doing on those days, our clones last 12 hours and research tasks take 12 hours but we indeed can only benefit from 9 hours of FOOM training per clone. This is as I understand it accounted for in the chakra math (days where we do more FOOM involve making more clones) but ultimately doesn't make a big difference in our chakra budget compared to the sheer cost of the FOOM blocks themselves.

Ah - right, sorry, I missed that groups of four adjacent blocks weren't necessarily being done by the same clone. That makes sense, then.

acidshill · Oct 4, 2024

Velorien said:
She'd written to Leaf before, asking for permission to visit, and been politely but unambiguously told she was persona non grata, on the explicit orders of the Fifth Hokage.

Dude that's like, three Hokage ago. Just ask again.

Velorien said:
She unrolled a new one.

Honoured Lord Hokage, she began.

Oh nice. I'm sure she'll be thrilled to learn we've gone missing.

Velorien · Oct 4, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
Since this is apparently canon, should it be in the main threadmark chain and not thr Sidestory one?

Fixed, thanks.

Incidentally, catfish do actually eat pigeons. They've been known to leap out of the water to catch them.

Spector29 · Oct 4, 2024

acidshill said:
Oh nice. I'm sure she'll be thrilled to learn we've gone missing.

She might come looking for us herself, now.

Sir Stompy · Oct 4, 2024

Kyreneryk said:
Hmm. Isn't there a risk that when we double-track DotB infusions, if he happens to roll badly that day he could take another Mild on top of the two he already has from DotB and end up with a Moderate? I don't see any scaling back of clone-hours on infusion days

Order of operations is that the Consequences from DoB hit after we make the reintegration roll. So no need to cut back since he rolls at full strength. You're correct about the rerolling though. I believe the QMs aren't modeling things fully here and perhaps they should.

Kyreneryk said:
Also, just checking that I understand the DotB rest - we have two Milds which reduces Resolve by -AB, so -7 to 56, and also we have to take at most four stress on -12 because we can't risk taking another Consequence, giving us 45 clone hours for 15 training blocks. We seem to be doing 14 - is this just for safety margin

It's a -8, since 7/2 = 3.5 rounds to 4, times 2. Although I think Resolve has been raised by one since we came up with the SOP? Maybe we can do 15

_The_Bomb · Oct 4, 2024

@Velorien @Paperclipped @eaglejarl

Do ninja inside a TR100+ rune regenerate their entire chakra pool over the course of twenty four calendar hours or twenty four subjective hours?

Eisenhelm · Oct 4, 2024

Velorien said:
Honoured Lord Hokage, she began.

well there is a character i am surprised to see again, it's been years.

RandomOTP said:
Team Fuck Pain

errr, i recommend lube

Velorien said:
It's the curse of the Kurosawa, you know.

hazou does not have this, does he?, the hagomoro do not count, our fury is completely justified; also we mentor harumitsu who is one of the good ones.

RandomOTP said:
Hana's crime was against Mari, not Hazō. Hana's injury to Hazō was, at most, failing to trust her son. Which is understandable, given Mari's history in Mist as the Heartbreaker, and her sheer skill as a social spec.

It is up to Mari to forgive Hana about the attack, not Hazō, for he was not the injured party. And even if Hazō was? We have forgiven Mari of a much greater sin. Mari was allowed to redeem herself. Are Hana's sins so great that, if it were solely up to us, we could not afford her the same chance that we offered to Mari?

as clan head of the goketsu we have a responsability towards mari and the clan; a foreing agent atacked one of his clans most capable agents to the point of causing her to be "injured"; the goketsu are an injured party as a whole and mari in specific and hazou must see to their needs above his personal opinions.

CommunismWillWin · Oct 4, 2024

A jōnin attacking her son's kidnapper is nonsense, and ought to be retconned! Jōnin are of course known for being eminently reasonable in all situations, even in one where a well adjusted person raised in a far more peaceful culture would be driven to an extreme act of violence.

Veedrac · Oct 4, 2024

RandomOTP said:
Hana's crime was against Mari, not Hazō.

Nah, Mari reaped what she sowed. I don't blame Hana one bit for being adversarial, I blame her for being stupid about it.

Cariyaga · Oct 4, 2024

Velorien said:
Hana loathed Mari. That would never change.

But did she loathe her more than she loved her son?

Alright, I'm on board the go nab Hana train.

MarsIronPI · Oct 5, 2024

CitizenTen said:
Originally, a bunch of people were voting for "Returning to Leaf" with (what it seemed to me) to be the understanding that Leaf was largely the same as we left it. Naruto being in charge, calling the shots, following through on his original plan, etc. We'd arrive in Leaf with our two runes, Naruto would greet us, we'd rally the troops, prepare, and head off to battle against Akasuki.

Having thought about this recently, if we can't kill Akatsuki then we really shouldn't take the rift back to Leaf. If some of Akatsuki survives, they'll tell everyone about the rift and so if we're in Leaf with the rift, Leaf will get dog-piled on with no res'd S-rankers yet. Whereas if we steal the rift without destroying Akatsuki, go hide with the rift and rescue our S-rankers, then go back to Leaf, then we can defend it with the help of our newly-returned S-rankers.

CitizenTen said:
It doesn't matter if I'm calling the scenario exactly. What I'm trying to gesture at, is there is a large action space where Itachi would be very justified in changing the status quo in Leaf. In fact, it's more plausible than the idea that nothing will change in Leaf. And because of this, we should mostly act as if Leaf is MIA, any help from Naruto as promised in the letter is nil, and Naruto letter plan as dead in the water.

There may be many possible scenarios in which Leaf is destroyed, but how likely is each one?

Sir Stompy said:
We're gonna call this Hazousealing boss

Where acronym?
I propose calling it HASO:
Hazō's Amazing Sealing Optimization

Velorien said:
The turnout at Ren's funeral was about what Hana had expected. On the one hand, Ren had been the Kurosawa clan head, the woman who'd guided the clan through over a decade of success. Whatever else could be said about Hana's sister, she had been a hard worker, and in a clan whose Bloodline Limit encouraged convenient shortcuts and labour-saving tricks, hard work was a virtue to respect. On the other hand, Ren had died in disgrace, the Clan Lady who'd lost the Kurosawa the hat, the diplomat who'd been defeated by diplomacy, with no legacy to leave behind but mediocrity.

Oh wow. I'd forgotten what happened to Ren. Ouch.

Velorien said:
Next to Hana, Kurosawa Raito, Mother, wept in silence. It was not the way of the Kurosawa to hide their feelings at funerals–the fact that they could, better than anyone in the world, made the sincere expression of grief a sacrament in its own way.

Very touching. Well thought out.

Velorien said:
"Oh, no," Mother interrupted," this is the Kurosawa Raito apology tour.

There's a comma followed immediately by a quote and then a space, instead of it being comma then space then quote.

Velorien said:
Apparently, he's due to marry Mori Ami soon, and if that's not destiny, I don't know what is.

[X] Marry Ami

Velorien said:
Hana stared. Formal readoption? She couldn't decide whether Mother's brain coral was fracturing with age or whether this was that notorious Raito sense of humour that had somehow never come out around her daughters.

I don't know how it took me till up to this part to remember that this is the Raito that should have married Ryūgamine.

Velorien said:
That twisted ball of feelings inside her was the size of a Tailed Beast Bomb now, and no less volatile. Screw discipline. It was the day of her sister's funeral, and nobody would raise an eyebrow if, just for today, she drank Kurohige's dry.

Interesting. So, is this WoG that Tailed Beast Bombs exist and are commonly known about?

Velorien said:
The brush hovered. She missed him. Ancestors, but she missed him. Was he happy? Healthy? Eating well? She knew what sealmasters were like. Did he have a consort, or was he still mourning that nice Akane girl? Hana was starting to feel her age, especially after yesterday's conversation, and having the question of grandchildren settled would do her heart a world of good.

We really need to get in touch with Hana. (Maybe this interlude is a reminder to do that...)

Velorien said:
(No, she was not her mother. Hana would never disown her child, not even if he chose to engage in holy matrimony with chaos itself.)

Why, what's wrong with holy matrimony with chaos itself?

Also, @Velorien, I would love to see an AU where Ami gets isekai'd to our world. I feel like it would be very funny. Maybe you could use the idea on a ~~rainy~~ low-spoon day?

Eisenhelm said:
hazou does not have this, does he?, the hagomoro do not count, our fury is completely justified; also we mentor harumitsu who is one of the good ones.

Well, I think they don't count as long as we'd be genuinely willing to make peace if and when they stop being pigs. Although I do think we were a bit too antagonistic towards Ritsuo when we destroyed his father's knife.

T_of_A · Oct 5, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
Mari is deadass one of the most evil people that we know about.

Hey, come on. Mari has done nasty stuff, sure, but "people we know about" includes Orochimaru (infinite horror dungeon) and Asuma (did a genocide and really wanted to do another). Most of Akatsuki ranks above Mari on the "does horrible stuff to individual people" scale, and of course we have Pangolin for the "mass-scale horrors".

I think you need to recalibrate your horror-meter. In your haste to remind us that Mari is actually Hitler, you're underselling all the NPCs at the top of the turbohitler leaderboard.

_The_Bomb · Oct 5, 2024

In fairness to Asuma (and I can't believe I'm saying this), he might have actually saved the world by killing those several hundred people.

Why mention him when you could mention people like Hidan?

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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