It's hard. We need a lot more runes before I would feel comfortable doing this, and our research speed isn't great. Lukewarm
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
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
It has been, yes, but I appreciate your time all the same. Thank you.
My own common sense is basically telling me 'If a blunt Kunai could travel in a straight line and reach the target, so too would this rune effect.' I guess your howitzer artillery analogy is more on-point, but less suitable for our characters describing it to each other. Leaf canopy? Not a problem. Wall of flames? Might deter a person, but not this. Thin paper door you could walk through? Won't stop it either. Tree trunk? Now we're getting into the edge cases. Thick tree might stop it, thinner tree probably not. Waterfall? The kind a monk might meditate under wouldn't stop it, if for example you were hiding behind one in a cave. But something massive like Niagara falls might. These edge cases would probably require in-universe experiments to nail down for sure.
Now here's what I'm curious about; would a wind jutsu specifically designed to deflect/turn away projectiles, like the blunt kunai I mentioned, do anything to affect the long ranged explosive? That's the kind of question common sense doesn't have an answer for. Depends more heavily on the actual mechanics of the rune, which we can generally treat as a projectile but seems to not actually launch anything... at least nothing we can detect.
I'm not actually asking for you to answer this, by the way. Hazo has no reason to know this, at the moment, and I'm content with that.
I think what he was asking was about the coin-flip mechanic for targeting a zone. Yes, if you win the coin flip and hit the target, the zones next to it will also be affected because of the size of the explosion, but I think he was asking if, based on the coinflip mechanic, you could hit the untargetable zone directly. Like there's a brick wall between you and the zone you want to hit, so you just aim next to it instead and 'miss', and oops you just broke reality and hit the unhittable. Nice work! Except... no, I really doubt that's possible. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong and mechanics make possible the narratively impossible because of a technicality in the wording. Given my track record of prioritizing narrative sense and being proven wrong, I wouldn't even be surprised.
It was described as a difficulty in aiming the rune properly since each rune comes out slightly different, and you'd need to fire it to learn and adjust to those differences. He was asking if we can beat the coinflip/randomness of trying to target a zone by making it the only zone that qualifies as a valid target.
Going back to my amazing powers of common sense, I imagine the coin flip would determine whether the Rune targeted the zone we're aiming at, or on a loss it might explode against the side of the tunnel you described instead, @faflec. I don't imagine it would somehow hit an un-targetable zone instead. It's described as a user-aiming problem, not some inherent random element causing it to magically strike the zone next to the target because magic. Just for clarity's sake, I think the QMs (@Paperclipped) should set a range limit where this no longer applies. Say you were targeting the zone you're in, aiming at the floor directly under your feet, you should be accurate enough to hit it even without calibrating the sight of your sniper-rune. If we invent an even longer range variant, firing it from say 2.5 miles might have only a 1/4 chance of hitting the target initially and can miss by up to 2 zones instead of just hitting the adjacent zone, or some other numbers idk I just read the threadmarks I don't do math.
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In favor.
Not as strongly in favor as I was before we spent a month working on defensive runes, though.
Sure. that's a bit risky, but I'm game.
Given how low the DCs have been for our explosives research, why not hop right to Remote Explosiver Runes? It'll probably get done significantly faster.
Hot!
It's much better outcome, less messy/risky, and will result in a better/more fun naritive in the long term. The only major reason not to do it is if Naruto pulls the trigger first, at which point we'll just join his plan.
We'll set one DoB track to rift research, and round out the rest of our rune toolkit on the other DoB track.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
I agree completely. I don't feel that we're on-track to develop the tools needed to kill the Akatsuki without running an intolerably high risk of total failure. Stealing the rift is much more tractable and would then give us all the time in the world needed to out-research them.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
And also the narrative reason to explore it ourself, which is much more fun.
It was ....maybe.... I think the chain is necessary. Some of the ....maybe.... runes are Hard
- Location
- Texas
@Paperclipped @eaglejarl @Velorien
For the love of Jashin, I beg that we standardize rune measurements to use the Metric system like most runes have been.
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
i think we time lock the whole thing, if there is no time in the area of the mountain then there are no problems.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I like this logic...
[Jk] Explode the Great Seal. No mountain, no problems
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
What if instead we use acres?
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Sorry, Sealing (even Lithosealing) is too chaotic for such a thing. Really, we're lucky that Hazou isn't measuring distance by the length of his own hands
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
The impression that I had was that Jiraiya wasn't saying he wasn't concerned about sealing failures (though he separately has a reckless attitude towards them), but that he didn't see the need for Kagome-spec sealing facilities because at his level either he can insta-kill it or no amount of Kagome-spec sealing facility will save him. In other words, he didn't think there was no risk, he just thought the benefits were too marginal to be worth it. (And in fairness, setting up a Kagome-spec facility takes a non-negligible amount of time.)
He's in general the most reckless Sannin (and the only dead Sannin, imagine that), but that one time he sounded super reckless about sealing failures was probably carrying a bit of an "if it's some unblockable instakill then I just die" undercurrent. And, since he made it to ninja old age without dying to a sealing failure, he must not have been rolling sealing failures too often in his regular research.
Wait. Isn't moving the rift very slow due to the runes? How are we gonna run away?
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
This is a serious problem that has to be somehow addressed with some sort of rune/seal-tech solution. Ideas welcome.
Have you read his sealing style stunt? (titled "we'll do it live!")
Dude definitely rolls occasional sealing failures as part his research.
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
you joke but the iron-nerve actually makes this possible.
i think this has more to do whit the fact that he was the only sanin without self-regeneration.
Orochimaru's "I'll put it between two magnet-runes, one to push and one to pull" is cute, and we could copy it.
That's a decent MVP, But from there, it's such a tiny step to a rift "rail gun", which sounds awesome.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
1) Most of the runes we've had the greatest amount of success with are space-time related.
Orochimaru's rift runes work as a set (one to dislodge, one to move, one to receive IIRC). But they seem to literally move the rift through real-space.
Seems to me like some runes that heavily compress/pinch spacetime from point A to point B (perhaps only in the one direction -- yes, I know, but it's magic chakra bullshit at the end of the day) would vastly accelerate the actual rift yoinking and our escape. Rig some explosives to blow everything to hell after we've escaped. Might require some prior work for veterancy purposes.
2) Might be the case that we should look into combining TH and Runes to make a jutsu to do something like this too if that looks to be going nowhere. That Minato guy took a technique, slapped some sealing shit onto it, and got a combat-viable, instant-dodge teleport that seemingly had insane range. We wouldn't need anything nearly that fancy, just something that turns a heist mission like this into a several minutes long affair.
3) Orochimaru might suck at runes. Try to make his stuff not so bad. Slam our number at it and hope for the best.
4) Orochimaru might be biased. Runes seem to work best when their effects move at large scales. He's got several decades of sealmaster brain going on here, maybe it would be easier to approach the problem from a more epic scale than not.
5) Instead of sending the rift scar 25 miles in one particular direction on the map, send it a few miles upwards (potentially at an angle or something). Triangulate the position with some fancy math. These people apparently still think the world is flat, so basic trigonometry is a power beyond mortal ken as far as they're concerned, which leaves the rift floating idly in a random patch of sky. Water is wet, Aspects are True, and so are running gags in a rationalist medium.
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redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
Have you considered the possibility that, due to our obviously limited knowledge about things like 'kamimoots', multiple 'paths', and other shenaniganry... the world might actually be flat? 'They' all consider it to be flat not out of some weird QM misunderstanding about how much ancient civilizations knew, but rather because that's how the math really adds up. [x files theme]
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
The last one was not a serious suggestion besides the "Put it somewhere in the sky randomly and triangulate its coordinates with some nearby landmarks" bit.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I think we were legitimately in the middle of testing this out (delegated via Gaku) but then we had to go missing before he could tell us how the experiment went.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Variant runic air dome which involves two or more linked runes at the edges of the effect, rather than one in the center, and heats up all the air inside the dome to molten-lead temperatures. Set it up, wait for the screaming to stop (plus a few hours just to be sure), shut it down, skywalk in over the charcoal, use Oro's techniques to steal the rift, then install a non-air-dome superheater rune covering as close as possible to the same area, with enough of an activation delay for safe exfiltration. Far as any subsequent investigators would be able to tell, it looks like some failure on Sasori's part simply lost the rift scar, and also left the whole island semi-permanently on fire.
Ideally, follow-up by combining veterancy from time compression, the scenery clone array, and possibly various grue-related experiences, to create an illusion which "folds over" the chronological gap between superheater effects, so even if Itachi tries to use some sort of postcognition, it seems like the heat was continuous and we were never there.