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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Cariyaga said:
Right, so I guess it's worth doing a ninjadar run if possible when we research that but it doesn't really reduce the relative-value of scrying in the eventuality where that doesn't pan out.

Also I kind of expect -- the site to still be inhabited, even if Oro stole it? It's a holy site for Jashinists now.
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I don't think making a scrying run is particularly useful as something to do before we're ready to take the Rift. So I'm happy to do other important runes first. Especially if (like Chakra Water) they'll be useful in the meantime.
 
Sir Stompy said:
I don't think making a scrying run is particularly useful as something to do before we're ready to take the Rift. So I'm happy to do other important runes first. Especially if (like Chakra Water) they'll be useful in the meantime.
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Well in that case we should have Mari gather information on places where we could get some Good Shit from scrying there.
 
I'm not convinced we can find Quality Loot by just asking around. Any good shit that's known will have been snapped up by clans, villages, or ninja.
 
Kyreneryk said:
You are making questionable assumptions.
  1. Plant body structure probably means that plants have much less space for chakra coils (since photosynthesis incentivizes them to maximize surface area and therefore much of their body is probably thin) and they therefore likely have less storage capacity than ninja relative to their intake.
  2. You're assuming that the plant pulses its nitrogen fixation technique instead of having it constantly active at a level low enough that chakra intake can sustain it (in which case it would be expected to sit at nearly full reserves and would likely suppress any growth expenditures in response to chakra depletion; compare to energy charge in cells).
  3. You're assuming that once sufficient nitrogen is available, the plant has nothing else to spend chakra on. Examples of additional sources of expenditure:
    1. Phosphate Creation Technique (chakra is demonstrably capable of creating matter ex nihilo).
      1. Ditto for other scarce inorganic nutrients.
    2. Chakrasynthesis Technique (using chakra directly to produce NADPH/ATP and enable carbon fixation).
  4. You're attempting to model plant growth using XP. (I feel that I should not need to explain why this is questionable.)


@faflec has kindly provided the citation (thanks, by the way), and it does demonstrate what you claim, though there are manifold more impactful ways we could make civilians' lives easier if we were willing to use runes to do it (and as I said, taking chakra only during harvest-phase does dramatically reduce the available chakra the rune would supply).
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if the plants have other ways to spend chakra on accelerating their own growth, that doesn't change my conclusion at all, so long as there's still an attainable point of overall diminishing returns - and I'm reasonably certain things would look very different if there weren't. The pulsed vs. continuous expenditure distinction is also not relevant, nor the exact ratio of chakra intake to storage capacity. On the XP issue, I cannot reasonably be expected to rebut an argument (or accept, and derive new conclusions within, an alternative model) which you don't bother to spell out.

I'm not claiming that this proposal couldn't possibly fail, only that success is plausible enough to be worth further investigation - and if it did succeed, benefits would extend beyond the domain immediately under consideration. If rice paddies can now double as chakra batteries, that makes them a logistical asset, something to defend or try to capture intact rather than recklessly incinerating. If the crops have to be healthy and high-yield for best results, ninja worrying about the security of their ammo stashes will be more inclined to listen to what civilian farmers have to say, particularly in a context of "valued specialist's advice on matters of mutual interest" rather than antagonism or pity.

On a more narrative level, if the chakra batteries have an easily-exploited weak point tied in to existing worldbuilding, rather than being a pure black-box win button, might make the GMs more inclined to be generous with the benefits.
 
The problem with going on a mid-trip scroll hunt is that it's a multi-week-of-not-researching affair, unless there's some obvious thing I'm missing.
 
Also, unless people have changed how long they think we have before Pain gets rezzed, new Scrolls are useless to us within our operative timeframe. Hard minimum, 3 months to train a new Summoner, and then there's all the social complications.
 
Cariyaga said:
The problem with going on a mid-trip scroll hunt is that it's a multi-week-of-not-researching affair, unless there's some obvious thing I'm missing.
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Hazou doesn't need to be present

Unless we really want to unstagnate rn but I think we want to level combat stats before our next fight. That's literally the next thing to raise if our CR is enough for Cannai
 
Shrooms said:
Hazou doesn't need to be present
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So, personally, the impression in my mind's eye here is that we get three updates into the scroll hunt before Hazou gets dragged into it anyways. Like, something's going to not go according to plan, things are going to get complicated and/or dire, and Hazou's going to enter "I will not abandon them" mode and drop his research to come help out.

I really just can't shake that expectation. I don't trust us to vote to not help when our team's in danger, and I don't even trust Hazoupilot to listen to us if we tried. Even if I assume I'm overestimating the likelihood that such a scenario happens (after all, the dire complication could turn out to be simply beyond Hazou's ability to affect) it still feels like the actual proposal is "if we win a coinflip Hazou doesn't need to be present, if we lose the coinflip he loses a bunch of research time and maybe takes a Severe too."
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
So, personally, the impression in my mind's eye here is that we get three updates into the scroll hunt before Hazou gets dragged into it anyways. Like, something's going to not go according to plan, things are going to get complicated and/or dire, and Hazou's going to enter "I will not abandon them" mode and drop his research to come help out.

I really just can't shake that expectation. I don't trust us to vote to not help when our team's in danger, and I don't even trust Hazoupilot to listen to us if we tried. Even if I assume I'm overestimating the likelihood that such a scenario happens (after all, the dire complication could turn out to be simply beyond Hazou's ability to affect) it still feels like the actual proposal is "if we win a coinflip Hazou doesn't need to be present, if we lose the coinflip he loses a bunch of research time and maybe takes a Severe too."
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Tbh what is he going to contribute if it's too much for everyone else...? If the mission isn't going well then having one more guy rolling mid chuunin attacks (generously) is kind of irrelevant? If it's too much for them they just have to quit. Hazou pitching in changes pretty much nothing from a combat capability standpoint imo.
 
strange_person said:
if the plants have other ways to spend chakra on accelerating their own growth, that doesn't change my conclusion at all, so long as there's still an attainable point of overall diminishing returns - and I'm reasonably certain things would look very different if there weren't.
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I agree that there likely is a point of diminishing returns. However, we know for a fact that increasing chakra absorption capacity to the point it's at now for this strain increased growth. It therefore follows that, at the level of chakra intake this plant has available, it has not yet hit diminishing returns - at least, not to the point that the effect from reduced chakra availability would be irrelevant.

strange_person said:
The pulsed vs. continuous expenditure distinction is also not relevant, nor the exact ratio of chakra intake to storage capacity.
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You described this chakra-harvest rune as operating by taking excess chakra above a certain level. If expenditure is pulsed, then the plant could reasonable be expected to sit at low chakra reserves during growth (since it would have to regularly activate the growth technique and drain its reserves) and so would dodge the effect of the rune. If, on the other hand, expenditure is continuous, there's no reason for the plant not to sit at high chakra capacity (in order to have chakra available for defence) and be subject to the rune's drain constantly - and probably respond by throttling chakra flow to growth techniques, since it would expect to get that chakra back relatively quickly and would want to have a reserve available for defence.

strange_person said:
On the XP issue, I cannot reasonably be expected to rebut an argument (or accept, and derive new conclusions within, an alternative model) which you don't bother to spell out.
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Fine. The level system in MfD is a system principally intended to model human skill growth (effectively, training of a neural network); as you reach higher levels in skills, you require more and more training to asymptotically approach perfection, and/or the number of different things you have to be good at increases, hence the linear increase in XP needed to buy the next level. This is, itself, an abstraction, and flawed in a number of ways - but it's not a terrible abstraction, it does at least reproduce the rough behaviour we should narratively see. The few non-neural skills (Physique, Chakra Reserves) can be explained by the increased difficulty of pushing further from homeostasis (humans are not adapted to have more muscle than they need day-to-day), and Doylistically by the QMs not wanting to model them differently. (Though this is one of the major flaws in the system - we've heard narratively of people having variably sized chakra reserves for genetic reasons, but there's no mechanical provision for this. Similarly, adults ought to be stronger than children, but there's not provision for that either. I'm inclined to suspect that physical skills for ninja are actually almost entirely chakra-based, in which case they can display this behaviour because chakra is weird.)

Plant growth does not work like this. Plants are not growing by training neural networks, they're growing by accumulating biomass. (Or rather, chakra plants may indeed have neural networks; but we're not talking about that kind of growth.) That accumulation of biomass is exponential, in that the more mass the plant has the more light it can absorb and the more carbon it can fix, and is extremely poorly modelled by the MfD level system. (I'm aware that the level system is likely nonlinear; but the point stands regardless.)

To put it another way: the MfD level system explicitly fails to account for developmental changes (example; a 20-year-old adult has the same Physique progression as a 13-year-old child) - whether because of Doylist abstraction or because those changes are insignificant in the face of chakra, it doesn't matter. In the chakra rice, nearly every change is developmental, and so trying to model it with XP seems to me to be a poor choice.
 
Cariyaga said:
The problem with going on a mid-trip scroll hunt is that it's a multi-week-of-not-researching affair, unless there's some obvious thing I'm missing.
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Shrooms said:
Hazou doesn't need to be present
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Hunting the squirrel scroll will take a lot of interacting with other groups of ninja(we think someone has the scroll but don't know who), which is multiple kinds of security risk.

Also, sending off Mari and Noburi for an extended time is devastating to our research progress for chakra reasons.
 
Oneiros said:
There's also unstagnating Noburi. He's already at a .5 and that's just going to get worse
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Yeah I mean there are other benefits too, but Hazou is the one with 8 different research stats stapled onto a combat build that is so out of date he's a goddamn liability.

I would be fine pushing Nob's and Kei's unstags off until after we kill Akatsuki. Hazou is so far behind where he needs to be that IMO we cannot afford that.
 
Why is there a plan to hunt for a Summoning Scroll when there is no way to convert a Summoning Scroll into winning% for our objective in any reasonable timeframe?
 
Shard said:
Why is there a plan to hunt for a Summoning Scroll when there is no way to convert a Summoning Scroll into winning% for our objective in any reasonable timeframe?
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Because it's better to unstagnate with missions that provide meaningful loot than just risk our life in random combat and because we actually have no idea what our timeframe actually is right now
 
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