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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Quiet_Voice said:
Alright. I'm sorry if this counts as a plan, but I don't know how to show this any other way, and I haven't seen the idea show up in thread yet. I will delete this if any of you tell me to.
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The Superchiller should indeed still be a viable weapon. Runes fall very slowly and iirc it would take more time than has passed for it to be buried completely.
 
Questions I didn't realise we should have asked:

Do Shadow Clones pop when you die?
If Hazo dies and the information is shared with his Shadow Clones this may result in Hazoclone activating the Superchiller Rune.
 
Velorien said:
To clarify the situation, I'd like to tell you a story from my first ever roleplaying campaign. Our party was climbing down a vertical tunnel running through a mountain, with fire at the bottom causing smoke which made it difficult to breathe. I, in all my youthful brilliance, decided that the way to solve the problem would be to disperse the smoke with a wind spell.

Our DM's response, roughly, was as follows: "The sudden influx of oxygen causes a massive blast of fire to erupt from the depths. All of you are instantly incinerated. The campaign is over. Would you like to pretend that never happened and keep going?"

We are now following in that noble DM's footsteps. That is to say, we would like to know whether you want to roll back time and keep going without Hazō having died, and if so, what the best way to make that happen is. Alternatively, if you want to keep going in the current timeline, we'd like to discuss what we all want that to look like.
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Another option, in line with this story: Roll it back before Hazou got the bioseals, and have him decide against it, then roll it back forward and see what happens as a result in the fight to come; alternately, roll again for which of Akatsuki is present there.
 
Buggy said:
I would like to note that we should have so many Jashin points, we could open a Jashin Bank at this point. Not only did we just murder a whole bunch of people but also, if we permadie, the EN becomes a cold frozen wasteland. Jashin likes change and novelty. You know what is unchanging and boring? A frozen wasteland.
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Look. Jashin points work very simply. To get Jashin points, three things must happen.
  1. Kill someone
  2. Personally
  3. In Jashin's name
Otherwise, it doesn't count, no points. EM proliferation doesn't get us anything because it fails the last two points.
 
I am against non-minor retcons, for the record (i. e., beyond the four-sentence retcon at the end of the last chapter I'd suggested). It'd feel unsatisfying to me.

Or, if we do do any sort of timeline manipulation/branching, I'd prefer if it happened diegetically within the story. Like, a biosealing failure in the last moments of 702 sends Hazou's mind backwards in time or something. And preferably, it won't be just a straightforward boon: have Orochimaru's mind be sent back too, for example, and then also reroll which Akatsuki are present at the rift.
 
Oh my god. Orochimaru pulled a Quirrelmort on us. Nothing has changed since the HPMoR days, we keep falling for this character archetype. Ami couldn't seduce and delude us despite having years to work on that, but the Affably Evil Dark Mentor Orochimaru? He shows us the slightest sign of affection, and we're falling over ourselves eating out of his hand. (I was, at least.)

He got us. That fucking snake boomed us.

Mad respect.
 
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Noumero said:
Oh my god. Orochimaru pulled a Quirrelmort on us. Nothing has changed since the HPMoR days, we keep falling for this character archetype. Ami couldn't seduce and delude us despite having years to work on that, but the Affably Evil Dark Mentor Orochimaru? He shows us the slightest sign of affection, and we're falling over ourselves eating out of his hand. (I was, at least.)

He got us. That fucking snake boomed us.

Mad respect.
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I don't think Hazo's actions are related to the affection certain suggestors have for Orochimaru. We decided we needed to teach him runecrafting, otherwise apocalypse, and then we decided we needed bioseals from him, otherwise apocalypse. His mannerisms were irrelevant to the necessity of preventing apocalypses.
 
the most satisfying 'good end' outcome but unclear if mechanically/simulation-wise possible would be if kagome+Mari+Keiko alpha struck orochimaru right after Hazo dies (having seen this coming and coordinated behind Hazos back), locate the rift, and drag us back. Meanwhile we can look for Akane :p
 
DanZapman said:
I don't think Hazo's actions are related to the affection certain suggestors have for Orochimaru. We decided we needed to teach him runecrafting, otherwise apocalypse, and then we decided we needed bioseals from him, otherwise apocalypse. His mannerisms were irrelevant to the necessity of preventing apocalypses.
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Not quite the point. The point is that I did not, in fact, expect him to do that. I mostly thought he was on the level.

Past our first meeting with him this arc, I thought that the precautions we took were sensible (and indeed, I argued for stricter ones), but that we needed to take them because it was proper, not because I expected him to actually betray us.

I'm not, like, flabbergasted that he did it; it makes perfect sense. But he successfully manipulated me into not seeing this outcome as blatantly obvious.
 
Halil said:
Huh?
The Dead Man's Switch is not a rune, seal, or something that Hazou has to activate. It's the knowledge of what even a moderately skilled application of EM jutsu can do, which means you can speak the entire world into nuclear proliferation.
So, barring narrativium, Orochimaru's fucked if he kills Hazou. At least that's how MAD is supposed to work, but perhaps the paranoid obsessive immortality-survivalist has changed his outlook on survival.
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I was referencing two different things. The first sentence is about the dead man switch stuff Mari, that others talked about. The second is the Chakra dispersal issue of the kill switch Orochimaru installed in us, that had also already been talked about.
 
Noumero said:
I am against non-minor retcons, for the record (i. e., beyond the four-sentence retcon at the end of the last chapter I'd suggested). It'd feel unsatisfying to me.

Or, if we do do any sort of timeline manipulation/branching, I'd prefer if it happened diegetically within the story. Like, a biosealing failure in the last moments of 702 sends Hazou's mind backwards in time or something. And preferably, it won't be just a straightforward boon: have Orochimaru's mind be sent back too, for example, and then also reroll which Akatsuki are present at the rift.
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I'd honestly say that this last chapter is a little different, retcon-wise. The QMs have explicitly stated that this chapter is happening now (and not later, in Leaf or during bioseal maintenance) because it allowed the question to be brought to us sooner. For instance, they confirmed that Hazou would not have by-fiat gone into the forest with Orochimaru otherwise. This whole chapter is "on rails", in a way built to be replaced, and so I don't feel a game-fairness pressure to retain the rest of the chapter.

I do still think this chapter is really cool and impactful on the whole and all else being equal would like to retain what makes it so potent, but that's a different kind of pressure from a different kind of motivation. I also agree that I wouldn't want to roll back to getting the bioseals in the first place, larger rollbacks like that, but in my head this entire last chapter is fair game to alter.
 
Noumero said:
Not quite the point. The point is that I did not, in fact, expect him to do that. I mostly thought he was on the level.

Past our first meeting with him this arc, I thought that the precautions we took were sensible (and indeed, I argued for stricter ones), but that we needed to take them because it was proper, not because I expected him to actually betray us.

I'm not, like, flabbergasted that he did it; it makes perfect sense. But he successfully manipulated me into not seeing this outcome as blatantly obvious.
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Ah, gotcha. I'm surprised to hear that, but it's remarkable, yeah.
 
Buggy said:
We didn't know runes were so fucking hard to reverse-engineer that it's a small miracle we managed it, so we sold Orochimaru runes to get ahead of the game when he may well have never invented them at all.
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It is actually a reasonable assumption that reverse engineering an entire new sealing paradigm from a single example will be hard.

Anyway, I'm most interested in afterlife quest. Tempered by QMs saying it's doomed. But it doesn't feel doomed to me, so maybe they haven't thought it through. After all, EJ previously thought the players won the game after Jiraiya died allowing Hazou to become clan head.
 
Noumero said:
I am against non-minor retcons, for the record (i. e., beyond the four-sentence retcon at the end of the last chapter I'd suggested). It'd feel unsatisfying to me.

Or, if we do do any sort of timeline manipulation/branching, I'd prefer if it happened diegetically within the story. Like, a biosealing failure in the last moments of 702 sends Hazou's mind backwards in time or something. And preferably, it won't be just a straightforward boon: have Orochimaru's mind be sent back too, for example, and then also reroll which Akatsuki are present at the rift.
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Paper mentioned this on the discord server:
Paper on Discord said:
Right, agreed. If we're taking the opportunity to break from simulationism, I also think that we could go for something more ambitious than "the minimal workable change"
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And to be honest I'm kinda on board? I feel like we've squeezed out the last drop of blood from simulationism and player agency. At this point the decade of accumulated baggage of the story seems to get in our way more often than it makes the story fun, and this feels like an opportunity to start with a somewhat cleaner slate.
 
Wait...we know Akatsuki opened the rift. If they were able to do it from one side, we just need to wait until Sasori dies and he can help us do it again. If they did it the easy way. By killing a sealmaster after teaching them how to make paper and ink from skin and blood and opening the rift on both sides, then we are still in trouble.

As for dead-man switch. I didn't realize Oro was gonna kill us until the very end, so it's believable that Hazou didn't mention it. Hazou-pilot was evidently on edge, but he might not have been confident Oro would kill him and thought that Oro would give more warning to allow him to mention switch. I was actually surprised that Oro chose such a sudden and lethal method on Hazou. Instead of interrogation or a statement first that he would kill him.

edit:
Also, if Oro's immortality works by creating a clone of him. Or downloading his memories into a victim's body via curse seal like in the anime. Then we might find Orochimaru himself in the afterlife, or several of him. One for each time he died.
 
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Cariyaga said:
I would like to keep going, yes:

Perhaps in the form of "Hazou mentions his deadman's switch, this gives Orochimaru pause, Oro attempts to intimidate him into giving up details. This Does Not Work, because Hazou invokes on all of his tags for Resolve." And go from there.
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I really like this, but I would like it to go even further:
As hazo falls down, chakra system exploded he seizes the iron nerve to say "armageddon contingency" or similar. Oro decides this is sufficiently ominous to use his mednin to undo the explosion (potentially with semi-permanent crippling of Hazos chakra system, due to being exploded). Oro attempts intimidate, and fails, we go from there. This is a very minimal rollback.

It would be sad if Hazo suffered no permanent consequences imo.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
Keep in mind, the current course of the world if nothing changes is that Mari sets off the EM contingencies and many ninja across the EN learn of it. From there, once someone reinvents it, nothing stops the inevitable chain of logic that other agents will also reinvent it and that it's impossible to defend against the nuke either directly or though diplomacy, and in fact their village is simply doomed unless they kill the entire rest of the world first. That is to say, in the world Orochimaru has created civilization has months left to live, maybe half a year, before one way or another the village system ceases to exist. Given ninja mentalities, this is essentially impossible to avert once the word starts spreading.

Which isn't to say, overall, that we couldn't do what you suggest. But we'd be on a time limit before "and then the apocalypse happened", and as players we would know this even if the character didn't. To me, that kind of saps most of the interest out of the idea. There's no shot at making a meaningful difference, no way to beat the odds and try to make something of ourselves, make a better world for the future. It'd kind of just be us idly playing around with a disposable nobody of a character until the setting unceremoniously throws them in the trash.

So for me, no, it's Hazou ride or die. At this point, given how all the dominoes fell, he's still the only character that can meaningfully be the protagonist of this story.
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I feel like following up on this a little more. In what world does Orochimaru prevent the incoming apocalypse?

I don't off the top of my head know if Mari's had the time to set up the deadman's switch independent of her. That is to say, it's possible that Orochimaru just needs to kill her, but it's also possible that he'd need to either interrogate her and hunt down her contingencies or convince her to disarm them herself. Both scenarios, however, require Orochimaru to take action against Mari before she reaches Leaf, at the very minimum.

How likely is that minimum? We know that Orochimaru doesn't think that any deadman's switches Hazou has are going to be too problematic for him. Moreover, however, even the ones that are troublesome are most likely in his head to take the form of "Hazou designed a special rune" rather than "Mari does something". It's always possible, of course, that Mari is the one instructed to activate Hazou's deadman rune, but even that scenario has its limitations: Hazou has only been to so many places during his journey, and infused runes can only exist where he's been. There can't be a deadman's rune in Leaf threatening his Basement, for instance, since Hazou could not have pulled off that kind of infiltration job.

So he's unlikely to see the deadman's switch as a true threat to himself. Even if we prepared a special rune, we can't have done so in a position that actually threatens his interests meaningfully. And what else could we have done? Poisoned his reputation further? As if. Overall, I simply do not see a route in which Orochimaru concludes Mari must be dealt with immediately for the sake of preventing the activation of a dead man's switch.

Therefore, if Orochimaru is to avert the apocalypse, he must take action against Mari for some other reason. He has little reason to act against Leaf's manpower as things stand, but it is perhaps plausible that he wants to kill them to remove runecrafting OPSEC breaches. This is not a job that can be fully completed, however: not only was the existence of runecrafting made public long ago, Naruto and Tsunade both know that it has been reinvented in truth. He can achieve a degree of relative secrecy, but it's not like he can fully put the genie back in the bottle. Nonetheless, among all the people who know of runecrafting Team Uplift does present the greatest continual risk to it leaking, given that they may be more zealous than Leaf's upper brass and more inclined to spite Orochimaru for killing Hazou. While it's by no means certain that they would leak the reinvention of runecrafting to Orochimaru's enemies, they might, so Orochimaru has a motive.

...a weak motive, all told, compared to what it would take to kill Mari here. Mari is certainly not going to follow Orochimaru into the woods where she can be easily disposed of, and in all likelihood she's not going to stray far enough from Tsunade that she could be attacked without bringing approximately half of Leaf's firepower down on Orochimaru. That's the kicker, I think, that seals Orochimaru's fate. When he's already pursuing such an important objective as "relocate the rift to a safe location", attracting too much heat right now is unwise. Especially since he can just pick them off later, when less is at risk.

So in my opinion the odds of Orochimaru attacking Mari before she returns to Leaf are miniscule at best. And with that, his fate is sealed. Once Mari gets back to civilization she'll start to spread the information, and once the information is out not even Orochimaru will be able to stop the world from learning about it. Therefore, with extremely high confidence, the world's gonna end yo.
 
i think Mari just lied to Hazou about being willing to go through with it. So Hazou could use it without needing to bluff about it.
edit: if in a few decades Oro leverages rift power to become an omnikage dictator or something. And Yagura levels aren't enough. It would need to be something like that Out vision of everyone being frozen in stasis. Or similar to what the players feared Pain was doing with mass mindcontrol. Then at that point I could see it.
 
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For my two cents:
I would find it highly entertaining if Hazou walks this off either through afterlife portal or Hidan immortality shenanigans.

There's a certain poetic irony to him pulling an Orochimaru on Orochimaru.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
a weak motive, all told, compared to what it would take to kill Mari here. Mari is certainly not going to follow Orochimaru into the woods where she can be easily disposed of, and in all likelihood she's not going to stray far enough from Tsunade that she could be attacked without bringing approximately half of Leaf's firepower down on Orochimaru.
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If Orochimaru has reasonable evidence that Mari is going to attempt to destroy the world to avenge Hazo, he can just straight up tell Tsunade and get her killboxed with Leafs support.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
...a weak motive, all told, compared to what it would take to kill Mari here. Mari is certainly not going to follow Orochimaru into the woods where she can be easily disposed of, and in all likelihood she's not going to stray far enough from Tsunade that she could be attacked without bringing approximately half of Leaf's firepower down on Orochimaru. That's the kicker, I think, that seals Orochimaru's fate. When he's already pursuing such an important objective as "relocate the rift to a safe location", attracting too much heat right now is unwise. Especially since he can just pick them off later, when less is at risk.

So in my opinion the odds of Orochimaru attacking Mari before she returns to Leaf are miniscule at best. And with that, his fate is sealed. Once Mari gets back to civilization she'll start to spread the information, and once the information is out not even Orochimaru will be able to stop the world from learning about it. Therefore, with extremely high confidence, the world's gonna end yo.
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How does that model jive with the fact that Orochimaru just murdered Hazou? Hazou's disappearance won't go unnoticed, and Team Uplift will immediately point the fingers at Orochimaru, at which point Mari/Tsunade beat his Deceit and the truth comes out. Even if he refuses to be interrogated and avoids the group, it's not like there's anyone else around with the motive to remove Hazou and only Hazou, so if he doesn't deign to show up to court, the Leaf people immediately end up convinced it's him.

So I don't think it's a cost.

I think the next move for Orochimaru is to create an SC, AoE Team Uplift through it, then flee, before anyone starts wondering where Hazou is. I would do it just to clean up any potential loose ends. (Edit: Actually, I would do it simultaneously. Talk to Hazou through an SC, have a few SCs/Prime at the camp. Once you stop indulging yourself monologuing, dispel, unleash AoEs on the Leaf group, flee; ideally only Tsunade is left alive.)
 
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