- Location
- Yes.
Sounds like Earth Domes are fixed in place to the earth it's in contact to rather than to the surface of the earth.
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
This is pretty reasonable and I'm seeing a lot of push back on the final section of the plan. I'm going to cut it and wait for more information to proceed.
I'm not sure either but Hazou is a skilled enough sealmaster that I think he could do "spatially locked Earth Dome" and then "CA- activated, spatially locked Earth Dome"
oh hey I like this idea, yoink
- Location
- USA
[X] Action Plan: The Returning Heroes
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Actually @eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
in the interest of minimizing meetings. How does Tsunade feel about the following?
"An Akatsuki pair may be present in Leaf to moniter it. Can we discreetly search for them with Ninja Radar, then quietly set up Boss/Essie Rush, drop a Force Dome, and force a fight on our terms?
Our forces are much stronger proactively than they are reactively, and Hazou/Noburi/Kurenai/etc will be easy pickings for Akatsuki assassination if any Akatsuki get left behind."
in the interest of minimizing meetings. How does Tsunade feel about the following?
"An Akatsuki pair may be present in Leaf to moniter it. Can we discreetly search for them with Ninja Radar, then quietly set up Boss/Essie Rush, drop a Force Dome, and force a fight on our terms?
Our forces are much stronger proactively than they are reactively, and Hazou/Noburi/Kurenai/etc will be easy pickings for Akatsuki assassination if any Akatsuki get left behind."
- Location
- USA
In the interest of more player-QM communication, I want to make a post about this. This is just coming from me, not from the QM team.
Poisons are great. They're very thematically appropriate for ninja, at least in as much as we're trying to pay respect to ninja's historical roots instead of Kishimoto's kung-fu battle-wizards. Narratively, they're very exciting -- see all the ways they've been mentioned in MfD over the years. Having them exist opens up neat parts of ninja conflict that might be harder to access otherwise.
Poisons are terrible. They open up all sorts of annoying questions. Are there instant death poisons? Why can't we just coat all our kunai in them? Why isn't ninja combat basically one party tapping the other with a poisoned weapon, then running away and waiting for the poison to take effect?
I like the idea of game-mechanical poisons. Maybe you would need to fail a Physique check for this to take effect. It could inflict a penalty to attacks that's on a different track than Consequences. It could just be represented as a higher weapons rating. It could be a disruptor to your chakra system that makes casting jutsu more expensive. Unfortunately, I expect that, given the general optimization pressures in the world, all poisonmaking and use would tend invariably towards maximizing lethality (or incapacity, if the goal is to capture alive). l certainly expect the players to immediately optimize for one-hit-kill weapons that they could use in the "hit then hide" strategy.
This is not very interesting, nor does it fit the idea of ninja combat that I have in mind. The Naruto setting is really odd in that there are so many competing "dominant paradigms" of combat -- jounin can have a dozen different specializations and still be competitive with others. I don't want poisons to dominate, yet with all ninja chained to the same biology, it feels like if poisons are strong, then poisons will dominate.
More importantly, trying to figure this out is a headache. Any solution we come up with needs to be closely scrutinized to see whether it's compatible with the rest of the setting. We have finite time and attention, and want to keep things moving instead of getting hung up on setting details that aren't important, that we don't want to be important. So, poisons just get quietly brushed under the rug, one of MfD's many rough edges that don't ultimately impair the gameplay.
...until it starts to ripple out and cause other misunderstandings.
So, this wasn't actually a low-res/high-res issue. We had already discussed the pool's benefit long ahead of time. The 20% was set. I admit I didn't think it was nearly as bad as the playerbase made it out to be, but I certainly knew it wasn't game-breaking. I knew it probably wouldn't be the single deciding factor between the Sannin surviving Hanzō and not. This was the original draft of that section in that chapter:
Clearly, the pool isn't the single reason why they lived! I was thinking about adding a bit where Hazou comments that this would have been when Jiraiya was trying to replicate elemental ninjutsu with seals, which could also lend to an impression of stamina, when this (rephrased) discussion happened about the snippet above:
ANONYMOUS QM: This could be the start of another headache. The players want to be able to use poison.
ME: Poisons are baked pretty deep into the guy's canon characterization, so I can't just cut out the mention of poisons. Maybe I just cut the whole paragraph?
OTHER QM: It's not necessary, and it'll cause player salt.
ME: Makes sense. I need to get this out the door and get to bed.
So I cut out the paragraph, edit the rest of the chapter, and get it published before 2am. The result:
Looking back at it now, I see what went wrong. When I wrote initially, I wanted to immediately soften Noburi's expectations. He implied that the pool would be very strong, and Kei's line was supposed to mitigate that and remind Noburi that the Sannin had a host of other advantages that would have contributed – that this was one component among many. Hopefully, Kei's general sober attitude would have lent her viewpoint some credibility.
Except it was late for me, and I wanted to post the chapter, and the easiest thing to do was to remove the whole paragraph. With that line removed, the subtext changes. Noburi's expectations go unmitigated, and instead it comes across as pure hype. I get why it seems like the chakra water seemed like it was "apparently the thing that let the Sannin survive Hanzo long enough to earn their title." That wasn't ever the intention, but QM-steering around a potential salt-mine and limited time to review chapters caused it.
All this is to say: I don't know. QMing this quest is very tough, and I don't know that any wrong decisions were made here. I don't think I made a bad call here cutting the poison line – it legitimately would have been very draining to go through another round of having the rough edges of our worldbuilding scrutinized in the name of uninteresting, non-interactive munchkinry. The chapter could have been better, but that's always the case. I can't chastise myself for bad decisions made in the limit of finite time. There's always finite time when working on a serial publication like this (especially since quests by nature don't allow building up a backlog). Perhaps I should have seen the players fixating on the chakra water and tried to lower expectations? I'm not even sure how I would have done that.
That's a very lukewarm finish. Hopefully it corrected a miscommunication. In the absence of something more solid to say, here's my contribution for other FtD QMs that like the idea of poison but don't want either MfD's weird Schrodinger's-poisons situation or the degenerate situations we wanted to avoid.
Paper's Poison Proposal:
- Ninja biology resists regular poisons. Yes, all of them. Sucks to suck.
- Chakra poisons can affect ninja.
- Just like ninja are ~immune to regular disease, but there are still some special ones that can hit them.
- Chakra poisons have chakra, so they can't be stored and mass distributed.
- Chakra poisons aren't stable, so they need to be formulated shortly before use. Depending on how shortly, it could be the case that the poisoner needs to infuse their formulations with chakra mid-combat.
- Chakra poisons have the range of relatively weaker mechanical effects I described above – rolling MedKnow against Physique, then applying some interesting effects.
- There are no instant-death/instant-paralysis chakra poisons. A narrative instant death-by-poison is just a high weapon-rating poison that landed a direct hit.
- In other words, all poison effects are interactive.
Would this work in MfD? I don't know, and it would take a long while to figure out whether it's compatible with everything on-screen so far, and I don't want to bother.
That's all. I don't need any follow-up here. I mainly wanted to clarify how the weird rough edge of poison led to an important player-QM miscommunication in a seemingly unrelated area.
- Location
- Can’t say. I know my momentum.
HAZOU: Now I'm the biggest
Aww. Oh well, we tried.
I like to think that you QMs do in fact have a model of how chakra and seals work. This kind of thing is the reason why. I see the magic flashing lights and I want to believe that an explanation exists.
In the immortal words of Baymax: Oh no.
Ohh, smart! I wouldn't have thought of that.
Very interesting! Thank you for sharing.
Amazing how swerving to avoid the salt-pothole can have you drive off the road and into the salt strip-mine
I doubt we can keep our actions in Moon secret for that long. The timeline will match up way to clearly with Leaf forces making a pit stop on their way to the rift battle, and with Noburi rejoining Leaf.
Best-case, I'm hoping that it says secret for a week, maybe two, so the Akatsuki can't immediately use it as a rallying cry to gather an AMITY force against Leaf.
Or even a turbocharged version of Jaraiyas movement-resistance inertia seals. We don't actually need these Skywalkers to let you stand in place indefinitely, we just need each foothold to not drop more than a centimetre or so in the first second or two. Skytowers are fine for long-term perches over Icarus Runes, and this might be easier than a full spacial lock.
You'd perhaps think this would be easier, but I think it will actually be harder. Since we're turning a seal that does not affect chakra-containing objects into one that does.
nah, you inertia-lock the ninja's sandal.
Inertia-locking the whole ninja wouldn't just be difficult, it'd get them stabbed to death.
I don't think chakra is capable of distinguishing a ninja's sandal from a ninja. But this could just be vibes.
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
Does Hazou the jounin sealmaster think that seals can be reliably applied to a ninja's clothing/shoes (as opposed to the ninja themself) to avoid the issues around chakra containing objects?
We've seen a sense of discrete objecthood in seals before(FSB, Substitution seal, Leadening seal, etc), and in this case, the seal we're using as a base naturally comes with a sense of discrete objecthood.
I'm not sure that this is the *best* way to go about it, but it seems relatively easy to research, and is visually identical to skywalkers, so we can get off at least one mass-kill by baiting an army into the air and dropping them with Icarus runes.
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Plus we've got this
So sandal seals are clearly doable.
I think it's workable and simple. We research the Soft Locking seal and then a CA activated version
- Location
- United States
Allow me to say this.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Paperclipped, for this incredibly thoughtful and open explanation. I deeply appreciate the time and effort you put into breaking everything down with such clarity and care—it's honestly a masterclass in communication. Your willingness to share not just your thought process but also the challenges and trade-offs involved in these decisions is something I value immensely.
I especially admire how you've tackled the tricky balance between thematic richness, narrative consistency, and gameplay mechanics, all while being upfront about the limitations of time and energy that come with QMing. The way you lay out the reasoning behind your choices feels both respectful to the players and insightful for anyone trying to better understand the complexities of this world. It's rare and refreshing to see this kind of transparency, and it makes me appreciate your work on this quest all the more.
Your proposal for chakra poisons is a fantastic example of how you navigate these challenges with creativity and a deep respect for the spirit of ninja conflict. It feels like a solution that preserves the narrative depth while avoiding the mechanical pitfalls you so clearly articulated. That kind of clarity and forethought is something I don't take for granted—it's an incredible gift to the playerbase.
Thank you again for not just clarifying the specific situation here but also for modeling the kind of open and thoughtful communication that keeps this community so strong. It's contributions like this that truly elevate the game and make it a joy to be a part of.
EDIT: Please note that this post was touched up by ChatGPT. My original wording was much longer and meandered on a lot of topics. I asked it to cut it down and focus it on just the appreciation.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Were you planning on sitting down and researching away in Leaf unsecured? Obviously the first thing we're going to do is plop down a Ninja-Radar or three and see what we see."
- Location
- United States
NARUTO, WHO HAS AN UNRELATED INFILTRATION PROBLEM: I fully support this idea.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Ehh. People were saying that when I was pushing for it when we made Icarus Runes, and then we just kinda didn't and instead set Kagome on some other project until we ran out of time. Without overly generalizing from that, I've still taken quite a hit in my faith that the playerbase will actually follow through on making sure this specific project gets done. Getting brushed off as "we'll have someone else handle that" is, apparently, one step away from just shelving it indefinitely.
Moreover, I'm reminded of Haruhisa's attempt to make substrate. If we do pass the project off onto someone, how likely is it that we get a viable product in the necessary timeframe, versus waiting a couple months to find out "ah yeah dang it this is beyond me"?
We've already screwed this up once, and the Icarus Rune is going to keep sitting there useless until we get it right. Let's just bite the bullet and make sure it gets done.
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- United States
Can't we just teach Reo BoC and have him level it enough to make us substrate?
It still saves us a fair amount of XP, even with the additional leveling required.
Not in the time we have. Reo's stagnant as fuck and I don't recall him having been amazingly talented before that.
- Location
- United States
Semi-Joke Idea: Finally adopt Haruhisa and make him do this.
- Location
- Europe
[X] Action Plan: The Returning Heroes
Naruto knows the Earth Element,
And he loves us.
Naruto knows the Earth Element,
And he loves us.
- Location
- United States
He's going to love performing manual labor for us.
I love it! Not too thrilled about giving him leverage over our Runecraft, but it's a good temporary fix.
@Sir Stompy I've substantially buffed my plans tactics for the Leaf Rumble, you may want to yoink them to your plan as well.
Key changes:
specifically mentioning triangulation with the Ninja-Radars(Snowflake is in the OPSEC compartment and great at maths).
Suggesting Oro just hide the rift ~20 miles away, so he and Manda can join the fight.
If Kisami(easily detectable by chakra size) is absent, we can just explode them with RER and they won't have the senses to detect us setting up.
Key changes:
specifically mentioning triangulation with the Ninja-Radars(Snowflake is in the OPSEC compartment and great at maths).
Suggesting Oro just hide the rift ~20 miles away, so he and Manda can join the fight.
If Kisami(easily detectable by chakra size) is absent, we can just explode them with RER and they won't have the senses to detect us setting up.
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