@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped It is important to me, and I think several other players, that you clarify this.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto 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 open voting
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We'll get back to you, but likely not straight away, as fleshing out tactically-relevant worldbuilding is a delicate and spoon-consuming process.
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Seconding this
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I know many other players feel the same way but I'm grateful for this.
It sounds like it was a player's reasoning that persuaded you which is really good, it is a big hope of mine that y'all did not feel more or less strong-armed into this by high demand and didn't actually agree - that isn't the kind of relationship I think anyone here wants to foster.
I think further investing in and discussing communication like this can only improve things for all of us... At least from my perspective, an honest "why" is much more often more important than the "what". I guess a good recent-ish example was the buffstack changes, on the one hand a lot of player ideas became limited or had to be dropped, but on the other the QM reasoning was pretty forthright about wanting to cut down on excessive bookkeeping, and it made perfect sense to me so I was ultimately fine with it and even supportive. This seemed largely the case amongst the playerbase to me but I could be biased due to my own positive opinion.
Speaking more generally, I think a lot of frustration emerges when decisions are made for seemingly inscrutable reasons, and I know there are a lot of reasons for this (a preference to have a complete answer rather than floating ideas, a preference to keep certain behind the scenes things secret.) I also know there's some frustration amongst the QMs regarding frankly obnoxious player habits, as well as some common ruts in the shape of the narrative (like trying to keep "research for 300 days fresh and engaging." or something) which then makes it more difficult to get legitimate concerns through instead of being perceived as additional unwarranted salt.
I don't necessarily mean right this minute, but at some point I think it might be productive for all of us to speak more generally about these preferences, what we want out of the community/story/game, and approaches we can take to get there together.
At the end of the day I want us all to enjoy this as much as possible and that includes the authors themselves. It just seems like we run into walls sometimes in a way in which none of us are having a good time, and I think we as a community are capable of reasoning with each other to get past it.
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@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
Just wanted to follow up on this before we write the next plan, thanks!
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My spoons are vastly depleted from Thanksgiving Holiday Socialization (and all the horrors imaginable within that), so I'm afraid I don't really have the cognitive resources to do much more than gesture vaguely and say: Seconding this.
Y'all are great. We're great. This whole thing we do together is great. Communication leads to cu-- I mean... even greater happy fun times.
(Edit to ping: @eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped)
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This seems like a suggestion you'd want to stick in the next plan rather than get as an addition to an already-posted update.
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Luckily, Hazou has secured Cannai's loyalty and love. I could easily see Cannai refusing any Orochimaru-adjacent Summoner if Orochimaru kills us... heck, I could see Cannai refusing any human summoner for a century, just to be sure he didn't Contract with Hazuo's killer.
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You can get to Dog without the Dog Scroll. Heck depending on how far we're willing to go/who we share it with, Naruto could have Ruri fly in and grab it for Leaf.
The threat of that possibility, at least, makes killing Hazou much less enticing. Even Oro can't be everywhere on the 7th Path and assassinate every leaf summoner.
Half our team is summoners they'll just physically walk to Cannai's house in Dog.
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So noted!
Do you think this question might be answerable in a relevant timeframe?
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Now you have me picturing a kaiju sized log cabin where Cannai sits in an armchair smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper
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As an aside, imagine the whole Goketsu family taking Family Vacations in Dog, though... no chakra-grass to kill you, no chakra voles or squirrels. Just green grass, blue skies, and talking dog best friends everywhere.
We're to min-maxer to actually spend time like that. Last time we had dedicated vacation time we spent it.... delving the horrors of The Basement.
Before that.... Mari got some strategically manipulative R&R during the second Isan mission
I think our first and last successful team vacation was the overplanned beach day waaaaay back when as missing nin.
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We can have a whole-team vacation/party in dog as a reward once everyone finally has summoning scrolls. Deal?
Party motto: "we don't have to live in that stupid other path if we don't want to"
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OK, seriously, we need to make a plan. Does anyone have a better idea than the above?
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[X] Let Hazoupilot Ball
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
How many points of substrate are remaining at this time? Last time we had more than 1000, but RER 2.0 presumably consumed a big chunk of that.
How many points of substrate are remaining at this time? Last time we had more than 1000, but RER 2.0 presumably consumed a big chunk of that.
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Does this... sound like a paper version of the Great Seal to anyone else, or am I misreading things?
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I'd like to try and give a clearer outline of where we're coming from about this, since the disparity between what-players-know and what-QMs-know seems very salient to this example. No need to act on or respond to this immediately, I just want to help share context.
We don't know much about sealing arrays. There's been, I think, just the one quote describing them in any detail. Leaf either doesn't have any surviving examples or we never dug deep enough to find them. They were most likely used during the world wars, on missions of critical importance sufficient to justify the greater costs of the sub-discipline. I think the one example we heard of was a large defensive dome?
What this translates to, on our side, is a pretty large swath of unclearness about how strong they are, how difficult they are, how costly they are, etc. The only guiding star for this that we have is the general place of seal arrays in the world: the costs outweigh the benefits most of the time, and only in niche situations (like in world wars) do they find any use. That, to me, sounds like a tricky balance to manage, because it takes quite a lot of inconvenience to outweigh the draw of a more potent effect.
Our obvious point of comparison here is runes. Both runes and seal arrays are known for producing much more potent effects, at the cost of much more preparation ahead of time. A rune takes 12 hours to make, 3 if you're rushing, and can't be moved from its spot. Seal arrays, if they have hundreds of elements and each element takes 5 minutes to craft, would easily take tens of hours to prepare, and while they could be scribed at home the act of putting them all into place cannot be done mid-battle (unless you're Konan). It's not one-to-one, but the disciplines seem to be mirror images of each other in that regard: a comparable increase in cost, for a boost in power.
The concern ultimately stems from the following question: "what if the power boost is also comparable?" This last arc has made it pretty clear that, inconvenience or not, runes are incredibly powerful tools that will definitely see more than niche application. There's thus a concern about consistency: do seal arrays largely go unremarked if they have a similar level of power? We went through a world war of our own without the topic coming up, and it doesn't appear that Jiraiya researched any of his own. There's wiggle room still, but the fact that we haven't seen them by now after all the crazy events of the quest definitely points in the direction of "they really are niche after all". There's also a concern from tonal consistency: it doesn't feel like the power of runes would be quite so hyped if they were only marginally stronger than seal arrays. These are, ultimately, us fretting on your behalf, not actual objections so much as "what would I be worried about in your shoes?" but they are still what's been floating around my mind on the topic.
The part of me that thinks of worst-case scenarios imagines the following: seal arrays are nearly as powerful as runes, and as an established part of the setting nearly every major power in the world is well-used to using them. Now that their properties are pinned down properly, we can start to ask the question of when they should be used going forwards. Just like with runes, the answer quickly becomes "they're too useful to be ignored", and suddenly every other major power around starts throwing around rune-tier effects that they definitely always had but never felt the need to talk about until now. And on our end, all our time we spent as a sealmaster before arrays were a thing we could engage with, all the time we spent quietly ruling out that Leaf had any of its own, leaves us holding the bag with no arrays of our own and no way to get any since Leaf doesn't have any either. This is, of course, pretty unrealistic, since it runs contrary to both how niche arrays have been described as and how unprecedented runes have been depicted as, but it's still a frightening image: as if the rest of the world powerscaled up to match our runic effects.
While it is always within human nature to worry about such things even if they're unrealistic, I don't think we'd be this worried under ordinary circumstances. After all, there's no way seal arrays will actually turn out to be that powerful, right? What tipped this over into more active worry was the recent ruling (now redacted) that Hazou believes the nature chakra ward could have been accomplished with a sealing array. If so, that would anchor the power of arrays pretty high. Really high, high enough that it'd be hard to argue they aren't as powerful as runes. There are, of course, other ways to look at it, like if it was the power of a hundred arrays all active at once, but it fed a trickle of doubt nonetheless, one that we're anxious to banish.
At the end of the day it's hard to say that we're not also motivated by simple concerns like "we want runecrafting to remain special" or "we don't want this tool that our enemies have but we don't to be strong". I do admit that I like runes wielding the most raw power in the setting by a mile, and that the idea of our foes being stronger only makes me worry more. I also do think that this will in the end shake out into something reasonable and simulationist, once enough time and energy has been directed to it to raise all the questions and iron out all the wrinkles. But it might be a rocky path to get there, and I hope that by sharing our perspective now we can make it smoother.
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I don't think "it has to be retconned if you think about it" really works for that. It's rather circular. The world isn't the way anyone described it to be, because two people are very noteworthy for doing something that was described as rare in the way people described the world? Why not assume they're outliers in specific situations rather than assume an oft-repeated part of the worldbuilding was shafted? We've seen a lot of summons being extremely specialised. We even know of specifically specialised Bosses - Conjura has a great mastery of spacetime ninjutsu, Pantsā's deal is legendary defence... is that retconned as well because the tendency is to consider Clan Bosses the right tool for any situation? And is the rock-paper-scissors analogy for essie fights also for us to forget? I can't stress enough that it just looks like "summon bosses are really strong, therefore they're the meta" which I don't think is convincing, YMMV but that doesn't look sufficient to me.
Also, I always interpreted the "5 elements" line as a dig at Mari through the 4th wall, if you want to interpret it as "it's stupid if you understand people to behave as if this were canonically a minmax game" you're free to do that but you have to remember Hazō's training plans are the stuff of legend because he's the only one - we are the only ones - with insight into the system. It's not exactly Zabuza going against the grain, and with his low-S-rank firepower it's not like there's any in-universe indication that he's wrong.
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I cannot help with the matter of "what can paper sealing arrays do, especially in comparison to Runes" but I may have an answer to "why hasn't Hazou researched paper sealing arrays yet?"
It is a multi-tiered answer, though...
- Someone must show you how to make your own paper sealing arrays, separate from normal paper sealing.
- Kagome, an explosives specialist, didn't teach Hazou how to research his original paper sealing arrays because he, himself, did not know. Paper Sealing Arrays are more dangerous to research, after all, and Kagome is an explosives expert. Explosives are (almost inherently) short-lived, single-element creations.
- Jiraiya, of course, never had time to teach Hazou sealing, despite wanting to.
- Paper sealing arrays are far more dangerous to research originals for than their one-off counterpart (as opposed to researching existing arrays, such as the difference between a research Sealmaster and a more mundane Sealsmith), and their sealing failures tend to be proportionately bad.
- This is in line with what is known about them being "rarer than hen's teeth"
- If this is the case, then the few multi-element seals that Hazou knows from Jiraiya/the Tower may very well be the only paper sealing arrays that Leaf has.
- Hazou, with as high a Sealing Stat as he has, could figure out how to make paper sealing arrays, but it would take a few days of dedicated study to figure out how to (technobable).
- We've already seen Leaf's public ones
- LBF and 5SB, which are "only technically" sealing arrays, which may imply that they may are used as teaching tools to guide sealmasters into learning how to make increasingly larger sealing arrays (similar to how Jiraiya's Daylight Seal has a veterancy chain leading up to the final seal).
- The various clans aren't talking about what they may or may not have in their private chests after the Collapse and the various wars
- Clan culture means secrets are secrets, and opsec is opsec
- Kei admits that if KEI had access to any paper sealing arrays, then they would have likely approached Hazou for a trade
- KEI had wanted Hazou to teach one of their ninja sealing, remember?
- Jiraiya's textbook, in the final chapter, only instructs the reader to approach the Hokage to request permission to learn how to research original paper sealing arrays.
- Jiraiya's Sealing Library contains several sealing arrays (the Fire/Lightning Absorbance Seals, and the Instant Fortress Seals, for instance), but, perhaps, no notes on how to actually research your own, original sealing arrays.
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[X] Armageddon Initiative