A thing we appreciate. Although there is some concern that confining it all to one location means that the only people reading / commenting in that channel will be the ones, well, bitching and that this could lead to self-reinforcement and increasing displeasure instead of reducing it via offering a relief valve.
As a thread-only lurker I wonder how much the discord contributes to internal politics. Does thread opinion diverge significantly from the discord? Does well-meaning intention to spare the thread from salt mean salty opinions are more common on discord?
The average short-response forum post might take a few minutes to write up and post, depending (Fake Edit: This one took like 5 minutes). The average Forum Netiquette style of formatting and saying things + localized internet social norms + site rules/norms means that most of the posts here take some time to write. You can fire off a 2-3 sentence message in a Discord channel in like 30 seconds. A chatroom doesn't require refreshing the page, sifting through many forum-length messages, etc.
Sometimes posting some massive, well written 10,000 word banger of an analysis is what you need to do to convince someone of something, but in my experience the average case with the average person (anyone who doesn't have priors made of lead anyway) is that you can just directly yap back and forth at someone for like a couple minutes and you will generally understand where the other person is coming from or successfully communicate what you needed to communicate.
It can be inherently more efficient in some ways, depending on the individuals involved, conversational preference, bandwidth, how ADHD people are, etc.
As promised, omake for the public enjoyment! (Sorry for the triple post. Please let me know if I should merge them.)
I wrote these (mostly) for my own enjoyment. I should try to write omake more, it was fun!
These two omake are my preferred continuations for the story. I feel like they maintain plausibility while not buffing Hazō too much. Especially if Jashin's immortality is only a temporary boon.
Yes. Please ping me with an @ every time you make a plan. When I'm skimming thread discussion (when I'm busy or the thread is moving really fast) I often miss plans and have trouble going back to find them. Pinging me in the plan means I can easily find your plan again.
A thing we appreciate. Although there is some concern that confining it all to one location means that the only people reading / commenting in that channel will be the ones, well, bitching and that this could lead to self-reinforcement and increasing displeasure instead of reducing it via offering a relief valve.
While I think this is a reasonable concern and certainly the most likely failure mode, I think the channel actually been very helpful and we have largely managed to avoid this (so far).
A thing we appreciate. Although there is some concern that confining it all to one location means that the only people reading / commenting in that channel will be the ones, well, bitching and that this could lead to self-reinforcement and increasing displeasure instead of reducing it via offering a relief valve.
Speaking only for myself and nobody else...yeah. It can feel at times like an echo chamber of frustration and anger, and while a lot of it is just being critical, some of the comments...
EDIT: Also, there are times when the channel starts talking about stuff that doesn't need to go there, like what our future moves are and stuff.
In case you didn't know. The vote tally tool is a convenient way to see all the plans. Under thread tools button
edit:
SV has group messages. It would be cool to have public group messages for different topics.
This would first allow mass pinging without Mod actions. The groups could be tailored to certain types of plans too.
It would also allow discussions focused on certain topics. This helps make it easier to find posts of a certain topic if you aren't interested in reading the whole thread, have your posts on that topic heard by those uninterested in reading the whole thread, and easily look back and review previous discussion on the topic.
However, this kind of thing needs people interested in participating. And the last time I made a place for listing public groups, linked below, no one joined.
Public List of Conspiracies. Include brief description and preferably Sufficient Velocity username of at least one member as a contact point for new members. Feel free to add your conspiracy below! Anyone can edit the wiki. Leaf Submissions -Brainstorm contest submission ideas for Leaf...
SV has group messages. It would be cool to have public group messages for different topics.
This would first allow mass pinging without Mod actions. The groups could be tailored to certain types of plans too.
So I was looking into starting a group message, and apparently to add more than 10 people you need SV premium, and I'm not going to pay for that.
I think the system we have mostly works, but I admit it is a bit annoying not being able to ping voters for major plan updates.
As for general inability to get stuff voted in, my major suggestion is to just ask planwriters to incorporate it. I realize it's frustrating, but such is MfD voting dynamics. It took me AGES to get skyslicers voted in, and look how that turned out!
If I don't like the idea and don't want to incorperate it, I'll try to explain more about why I don't like it and I am (usually (I think)) amenable to changing my mind if there seems to be significant pushback from multiple members of the thread.
So what I'm saying is that if I hear 3 people all expressing the same concerns I am much much more likely to incorporate something. We all have weird pet issues, and I don't necessarily feel it's my responsibility as a planwriter to make sure they all get incorporated. But if 3-4 people are all expressing the same concerns then I get concerned
That said, I love vote trading and I can be bought pretty easily. That's democracy baby
Feels weird to ask planmakers to add something if you don't plan on voting for them even if they add it. But I guess it is still a net benefit for that to be a social norm.
Feels weird to ask planmakers to add something if you don't plan on voting for them even if they add it. But I guess it is still a net benefit for that to be a social norm.
Feels weird to ask planmakers to add something if you don't plan on voting for them even if they add it. But I guess it is still a net benefit for that to be a social norm.
I very rarely do that, but occasionally you spot or think of something that you expect widespread agreement on. Sometimes that happens for plans you're opposed to for unrelated reasons. It's rare, but it happens.
I very rarely do that, but occasionally you spot or think of something that you expect widespread agreement on. Sometimes that happens for plans you're opposed to for unrelated reasons. It's rare, but it happens.
Oh if you think there is widespread agreement that feels more natural to point out. I was talking about asking planmakers to add something you aren't confident other people care about, or is a pet idea only you care about.
Oh if you think there is widespread agreement that feels more natural to point out. I was talking about asking planmakers to add something you aren't confident other people care about, or is a pet idea only you care about.
Hey everyone, if you're craving more MfD but Hazou is too dead right now, I suggest Stormfall, a FtD quest, run by the inestimable @Shrooms
We are entering into a new chapter of the quest and there is a major decision point coming up. I highly HIGHLY recommend this quest for any MfD enjoyers out there.
Plus we get bonus XP for unique voters per arc so please come vote!
"Simulation lag" involves situations in which the players cannot access the resources that Hazou should, by any reasonable interpretation of the in-universe situation, have access to, due to the fact that faithfully modeling the particulars of these resources would eat up too much of the QMs' time.
Concrete examples:
Jiraiya's seal hoard. Little more needs to be said on that topic.
A quick question for players dissatisfied with Jiraiya's sealing hoard.
In an alternate universe, we might have said something like:
Article:
Jiraiya's seal hoard contains seals with the following difficulties:
1x TN 120s
3x TN 110s
5x TN 100s
[...]
40x TN 20s
20x TN 10s
To put it simply, we don't have the time or ability to flesh out these seals. The difficulty isn't with coming up with mechanics; the issue is that even specifying that a seal has a given capability is setting-warping. Therefore, these seals will operate on the following system:
Players can propose a seal to exist within Jiraiya's seal hoard, at most once per plan. If approved, we will tell you its difficulty, along with any changes to the description that you gave us.
If we are backlogged by more than three seal designs, then no more proposals will be accepted until we can clear the backlog. Feel free to ping us about this if we're running behind.
When working on any project, players can declare that Jiraiya had a relevant seal that would help Hazou do this project.
Completing any relevant seal provides a -20% complexity discount.
Relevant seals provide -5/-4/-3/-2/-1 veterancy discount to the Sealing TN, -3/-2/-2/-1/-1 to the Calligraphy TN.
Even Jiraiya doesn't have infinite seals perfectly relevant to anything that Hazou wants to do. To truly maximize his veterancy, Hazou would still need to do some projects of his own.
This is before the usual diminishing returns for veterancy.
These benefits are provided if Hazou researches the seal. Its TN will be ~10-20 points lower than Hazou's target project, prior to the notes reduction.
These benefits may still be applied to a lesser extent if Hazou researches related seals in the overall "tech tree".
For example, if Hazou researches a relevant seal for Rocket Boots and gets a -20%/-5/-3 reduction, when Hazou researches Reusable Rocket Boots, he will get a lesser reduction at QM's discretion.
These seals have no mechanical effect. We will never flesh them out. For Jiraiya, they were similarly intermediate projects with zero practical use.
We may at any point declare that a particular seal design exists within the hoard. This is just in case we want to introduce some element that might be relevant to the story.
(TNs and numbers at each TN are made up fully; in practice we would obfuscate with the difficulty scale the same way we usually do)
Would something like this have been better or worse than what you got?
Is it appropriate to model Sealing/TH and MedNin as completely different fields with basically zero overlap? I would assume that they're both subfields of the general chakra science, and that, while a large chunk of their knowledge base is specific to them, there's also significant overlap in studying the behavior, properties, and classes of chakra.
Under this model, the collaboration between a MedNin and a Sealmaster should be analogous to the collaboration between an electrical engineer and a biotech scientist with a focus on bioelectricity; or, say, between a cognitive scientist and a ML researcher. Which very much seem tractable.
Personally, I don't model them as having nearly that much overlap. By my understanding, if the mednin is an EEG tech, the sealmaster is like a hardware-level cybersecurity engineer. Yes, they both technically study systems that run on electricity so there is some shared background, but their tacit knowledge, the abstractions they use to solve problems, etc. are almost completely unrelated.
It would definitely have been better. Multiple players even proposed player-suggested seals instead of waiting time, because the wait itself was a huge loss (irrelevant to the actual content of the hoard).
A quick question for players dissatisfied with Jiraiya's sealing hoard.
In an alternate universe, we might have said something like:
Article:
Jiraiya's seal hoard contains seals with the following difficulties:
1x TN 120s
3x TN 110s
5x TN 100s
[...]
40x TN 20s
20x TN 10s
To put it simply, we don't have the time or ability to flesh out these seals. The difficulty isn't with coming up with mechanics; the issue is that even specifying that a seal has a given capability is setting-warping. Therefore, these seals will operate on the following system:
Players can proposea seal to exist within Jiraiya's seal hoard, at most once per plan. If approved, we will tell you its difficulty, along with any changes to the description that you gave us.
If we are backlogged by more than three seal designs, then no more proposals will be accepted until we can clear the backlog. Feel free to ping us about this if we're running behind.
When working on any project, players can declare that Jiraiya had a relevantseal that would help Hazou do this project.
Completing any relevant seal provides a -20% complexity discount.
Relevant seals provide -5/-4/-3/-2/-1 veterancy discount to the Sealing TN, -3/-2/-2/-1/-1 to the Calligraphy TN.
Even Jiraiya doesn't have infinite seals perfectly relevant to anything that Hazou wants to do. To truly maximize his veterancy, Hazou would still need to do some projects of his own.
This is before the usual diminishing returns for veterancy.
These benefits are provided if Hazou researches the seal. Its TN will be ~10-20 points lower than Hazou's target project, prior to the notes reduction.
These benefits may still be applied to a lesser extent if Hazou researches related seals in the overall "tech tree".
For example, if Hazou researches a relevant seal for Rocket Boots and gets a -20%/-5/-3 reduction, when Hazou researches Reusable Rocket Boots, he will get a lesser reduction at QM's discretion.
These seals have no mechanical effect. We will never flesh them out. For Jiraiya, they were similarly intermediate projects with zero practical use.
We may at any point declare that a particular seal design exists within the hoard. This is just in case we want to introduce some element that might be relevant to the story.
(TNs and numbers at each TN are made up fully; in practice we would obfuscate with the difficulty scale the same way we usually do)
Would something like this have been better or worse than what you got?
I think this might have been better but I want to avoid dog piling on the "obviously this would have been better etc etc" train.
Hazou had dogshit sealing and Severe Consequences for much of the time we had access to this hoard. He only really started researching all the time with MS1+ so actually fairly recently. This would have been useful but not really amazingly better than what we got.
Maybe we could model the Tower seals like this? Assuming sealing research continues to be part of the mechanics.
Personally, I don't model them as having nearly that much overlap. By my understanding, if the mednin is an EEG tech, the sealmaster is like a hardware-level cybersecurity engineer. Yes, they both technically study systems that run on electricity so there is some shared background, but their tacit knowledge, the abstractions they use to solve problems, etc. are almost completely unrelated.
People have asked what the QMs want from the quest. Unfortunately, I can't express what I want positively nearly as clearly as I can explain my issues with the quest at present. Perhaps even more unfortunately, time limitations mean that "clearly" means "like a whisky-laden sailor explaining calculus to you while the ship's having its mast torn off by a hurricane". Apologies in advance if this post is pretty incoherent, as it's going to be gesturing at ideas that I haven't fully solidified and might not even agree with on reflection.
I think the quest is basically fun at default, and then there are some fun-blockers installed. Remove the fun-blockers, and the quest becomes more fun, regardless of what exactly happens on the way there. This list isn't meant to be exhaustive. If you think there's a fun-blocker that should be on the list, then you should tell me and I can check if this is something I missed. If not, then we probably just find different things fun.
I'm keeping this very high-level, instead of trying to think about what the minimal change needs to be to keep the quest going. Also, I'm trying to mostly not propose solutions yet, except where those solutions are extremely obvious. I think understanding problems necessarily needs to come before proposing solutions.
Fun-Blocker 1: Low-Fidelity Communications
You know it, you love it. Hazou doesn't know something important about the setting, so he needs to spend an update going through it with an NPC to figure out whether his latest new idea is worth implementing. Meetings galore. Much rejoicing.
"QMs, this is solvable if you just answer our questions OOC about what the NPCs think about X, Y, and Z!"
Kinda. Two things:
We're all adults with higher priorities in life than writing MfD. We have the time for it because time on Thursday and Sunday can be pre-allocated, and time elsewhere can be scrounged up sufficiently to keep the quest running, but I at least can't afford to be constantly on-top of questions, especially complex ones.
Frankly, questions asked OOC get less consideration and time than questions discussed in-chapter. It takes time to fully boot up our world-model and our NPC-model, and handling things OOC means we're going to give more wrong answers. Answering OOC questions freely would technically solve the problem, but would make the quest experience worse in other, very meaningful ways imo.
Fun-Blocker 2: XP/Day
Frankly, this incentivizes sitting around with your thumb up your ass waiting for XP to come in. I think LotRoL has thoroughly shown that associating XP with doing things makes the players go and do things. Stagnancy is a patch over the general problem – XP is now associated not directly with doing things, but with doing the bare minimum of things to keep stagnancy away before carrying on with the prostate-play.
The fix is obvious, but implementing it is anything but. The current mechanical and narrative underpinning of MfD depend on the XP/day model. We could diverge from it, but it would break things, and doing this poorly might cause a lot of trouble fixing things, especially since our "fixes" are usually unwanted by the playerbase.
Aside, while it's on my mind: this is my model of how stagnancy works. Imagine this is the distribution of mission difficulty:
This is what happens to a normal genin-or-chuunin ninja, who is constantly taking missions every day or week. They mostly get missions that are comfortable for them, and stave off stagnancy just through the accidental yellow-zone missions. Eventually, most die because of hitting red-zone mission, but it's not really that preposterous to say that a good fraction of people make it to jounin by just getting lucky and hitting yellow-zone missions without hitting a red-zone one.
However, if you try to minimize the number of missions you take, so you're only taking exactly 1 mission every time you stagnate (to minimize the amount of time you're on mission, e.g. because you want to research a lot…), what you want to do is shift the distribution right so that the yellow zone is where the peak of the bell-curve is, as that maximizes your odds of getting a yellow-zone mission. The curve then looks like this:
…and unfortunately, it ends up looking to any such ninja that unstagnation should be literally impossible for everyone else, because like 30% of their missions are basically certain death, and like 30% of the time, you don't even unstagnate from it!
Anyways all that's to say that the current stagnation system doesn't seem like it supports the player's playstyle well, no matter how good it is at representing features of the setting.
Fun-Blocker 3: Risk-Aversion
Reasonable, honestly. Who plays to lose? However, as has been mentioned before, it's not exactly fun for us to write endless meetings about picking the exactly perfect option, or to write ever more elaborate ways in which true stakes in a combat are evaded.
Ideally, we would create scenarios where downside-risk is inevitable, and the only choices are among different types of downside risk, with lower-risk options becoming possible through clever play. In fact, no-risk options seem like a great reward if play is exceptionally good! I'm not saying that there should always be risk. But there should always be the potential of risk, and at the moment, Hazou is mostly at a position where he mostly doesn't need to take any risks (except a couple notable exceptions, where the risks are immediately and horribly game-ending). More risk, especially risks that aren't immediately game-over, would be good.
A part of this issue is Fated to Die itself being a high-lethality system. If your combat system allows engaging an enemy, realizing that they're too strong, then backing off to lick your wounds, then that behavior will happen more. If it instead makes glancing blows likely to lead to your immediate death, the correct response is to avoid combat altogether except when overwhelming victory is guaranteed. This is an intentional design decision, but it's one that almost-necessarily has these downstream consequences (the "almost" left there as an out if it turns out that you can have low-stakes combat in FtD anyway without cheating. Hidan and Orochimaru are both cheating, they don't count).
By contrast, Hazou took far many more risks socially and politically in his tenure as a clan head in Leaf, and simply tanked the many and varied consequences because they didn't actually affect anything he cared about (e.g. his ability to do research, the continued lifespan of his team, etc.).
Fun-Blocker 4: Research
Look, there's fun elements to research too. I get why it's exciting to stride boldly forth into possibility-space and come back clutching some new ability that probably no ninja has ever had before, and then to go on to use it to change the world.
It's a pain to simulate. It makes, generally, for boring gameplay, where the only form of interaction is between Hazou-as-modeled-by-me and a TN-as-chosen-by-the-QM-team. There's nothing interesting or clever the players can do to make research more interactive. Their only real option is to subject us to ever-more-deranged rune ideas and to optimize the SC-spreadsheets ever-more-closer to oblivion.
Research-as-lighthousing, accurate as it may be to the real-world, just doesn't lead to good gameplay. For all Orochimaru's pontificating, if he were a PC, his quest would be pretty boring to run. "Yes, I retreat into the woods and research bioseals for 14 years." Screw that.
Fun-Blocker 5: The Great Seal
It's just not a very interesting plotline. It's both an apocalyptic threat, and something that can't be interacted with by any means except throwing XP into a skill. Perhaps at one point there was a different intention for what to do with it, but at the moment it's just the world's most boring existential threat. Like other existential threats, it has the narrative tendency to make everything about it, but it just sits there instead of doing anything interesting with that.
I am once again asking you for 5,000 more XP into research stats.
Now, there are things downstream of the Great Seal which are interesting. Mustering the Conclave and getting all the bosses into accord about what to do about the existential threat was an entertaining plotline and a fun (if thinly-veiled) analogy for the various existential threats we're dealing with IRL, and seeing it trivially solved by each party's ability to make binding commitments to each other was a similarly entertaining contrast.
That said, the main part of "you need to sit around for 40 years to level your magic skill to make a roll and the problem goes away" is boring.
Fun-Blocker 6: The Rift
Similarly to the Great Seal, it's a totalizing existential threat. Unlike the Great Seal, it's also a totalizing victory condition. Whoever secures the rift and thus the resurrection of their dead just gets to win the Elemental Nations. That's not to say that it's the only plotline that can be engaged with – in fact, it was very hard to engage with before Hazou got 55 XP-free levels of Sealing and also runes – but rather that if it can be engaged with, it's the most important one to ensure is solved.
There's a couple issues with this plotline, generally:
If there isn't opposition, then it reduces to the Great Seal's plotline, i.e. put XP in stat then problem go away and you win
If there is opposition, they're going to fight you with everything they have because of how totalizing the victory condition is.
The latter issue could be resolvable if there were another chuunin-tier sealmaster for Hazou to compete with. Unfortunately, the opposition was Akatsuki, and, well.
Like the opposition of the Great Seal (the Dragons), the opposition here is way too big for Hazou to deal with. There's no narrative scaling of threats. I definitely learned something here for use in my TTRPGs: Scale slowly from immediate to global threats. I.e.
The goblin is going to kill you.
The local lord is going to tear down your neighborhood.
The orcs are going to ravage your village.
The necromancer is going to unleash skeletons on the region.
The evil duke is going to enslave your whole province.
The enemy army is going to loot your country.
And then, maybe, you can progress up to "The evil cult is going to end the whole damn world".
In contrast, Hazou fought some genin-level opponents as a genin at the Chuunin Exams, briefly fought Daizen, prepared to fight Ritsuo but didn't get it, then suddenly the Great Seal plotline happened and the opposition was S-rank and Hazou's hopes of natural challenge progression died ignominiously.
To be clear, this isn't a boring plotline – anything but! It's just one that overshadows everything else in a way that makes conflicts and narratives much harder to write.
Fun-Blocker 7: The Shadow Clone Technique
I'm going to struggle to describe how much I detest this technique.
It's incredibly inexpensive for what it does. It's not quite so cheap that Academy students can cast it, but many genin could certainly accumulate the reserves to cast the technique before they go on their first mission. What it does, of course, is make a perfect copy of you that's free of the normal pricing scheme for elemental clones and summons. How much does a baby genin pay for their clone that punches at with an incredible skill of 32? 25 CP/clone, plus fixed startup cost. How much does Tsunade pay for her clone that punches at 92? 25 CP/clone, plus fixed startup cost.
It accelerates training in a super complicated way. It makes building ninja with SC a pain, since their SC rate changes over time as they invest in it (and the decisions of how much they invest in it matter quite a bit for their eventual total XP and effective-total-XP less the amount they invested in SC).
It accelerates research in a super annoying way. Imagine, for a second, that Orochimaru and Sasori are pretty similarly skilled sealmasters. Suppose that both can do a TN100 seal in around a month. In a year, 12 months, how many seals does each of them make?
Both 12? Nope. Sasori makes 12, since he doesn't have Shadow Clone. Orochimaru makes 60.
(Numbers made up, except for the 12 months in a year bit. That part's true.)
Fuck, I really don't want Orochimaru to be that powerful, but it seems like a necessary consequence of Shadow Clone being the sealmaster's perfect research tool.
As a consequence of this, it makes simulating Hazou's research pretty annoying. For instance, when I sat down to write Chapter 698, what I wanted to do was not "spend 2 hours figuring out how his veterancy grinding works across 5 instances of himself". I wanted to write, and SC kept me from doing that because SC is an endless source of bullshit work (not actually bullshit since it gets things done for the players but it irritates me nonetheless).
Oh, and it annihilates the possibility of stakes in combat, since engaging via SC first is what you should always do if you're smart. Again, we can contrive up reasons why a particular encounter can't be beaten with SC (fwiw I came up with the dark miasma in the violet flame sealing failure), but these are contrived for the sake of a challenge. For anything upstream of combat (e.g. social situations that could go south, infiltration of an enemy base, etc) it similarly makes interesting stakes evaporate unless some incredibly unlikely things happen.
I will grant that it's not entirely negative. It can be fun, usually briefly, when something unusually clever happens with SC. Snowflake is also great. For the most part, it's possibly the worst single element of the quest.
Kishimoto was smoking crack when he made this jutsu and I expect the only reason why the QMs didn't grue it immediately when porting the setting over was because the erstwhile main character had the gall to make it his signature technique.
Fun-Blocker 8: Chakra Transfer
If in D&D terms, Shadow Clone is a 3rd-level Multi-Simulacrum that gives you XP instead of costing it, and can also give you new spells to boot, Chakra Transfer is the equivalent of an ability that lets you move spell slots between people. Less obviously broken at a glance, clearly busted if you really think about what you can do with infinite spell slots in a system that assumes they're finite and uses that as a balancing factor.
In particular, I dislike what it does to the "metagame" of MfD. Did you see my earlier post about poisons re: how I like that there are multiple dominant paradigms of combat in MfD? Unfortunately, summon spam + SC spam + refills is a pretty dominant paradigm, because it is both much more powerful than previous strategies, plus approximately downside free (modulo contrivances and very specific enemies like Itachi). It's boring.
Potential Future Fun-Blocker 9: Runes?
Maybe a bit of an addendum here, since I don't actually think it's blocking fun yet.
Runes have a pretty clear design goal: Powerful effects that are much vaster in scope than seals, and are especially good at manipulating the rules of reality, but are static. Overwhelming power, complications in how to deploy it.
As a meta-goal, I at least intended for runes to be at a particular power level: Capable in aggregate of being worthy of an S-rank trick, rather than each rune individually being an S-rank trick, so that Hazou-with-runes is an S-ranker, rather than a Pain-tier threat. Unfortunately, it seems like honestly simulating what runes should be capable of in our vision has produced a bunch of tools that, in my estimation, will be boring for the quest in the long-run.
They're interesting specifically for the conflict with Akatsuki, because Akatsuki is also drowning in busted tools, but that really does seem like the end to me. In a hypothetical world where Hazou successfully deals with Akatsuki and Orochimaru, there is no more meaningful conflict for him. He would be the next super-S-rank, fortunately every bit Pain's ideological peer. Every other Hidden Village is unequipped to deal with "Force Dome them, Superchiller them, wait and seal the bijuu once things calm down". That is to say, it seemed to me, as the time of conflict reached its highest, that we were getting closer and closer to the end of the quest.
The main thing about the "multiple dominant paradigms" model was that everything was interactive. That's what I tried to do with my proposal for poisons: try to design effects that can be interacted with somehow, even if that's only by numbers. Runes hardly seem to care for numbers, instead generally throwing down absolute or near-absolute effects. They're non-interactive.
That's fun! Hazou having epic power and the ability to reshape the world is fun! Except it's fun once.
Remember what I said above about how, when dealing with risk-aversion, it seemed fine to reward clever play with zero-risk? Unfortunately, SC and Chakra Transfer and Runes all allow a range of zero risk strategies. These are interesting once, when you come up with them, and should be rewarded by succeeding on the objective without any complications. After that, they're boring.
IRL, this happens. If you invent artillery, you have a dominant advantage over militaries that don't have artillery. Yet, authors make interesting military histories out of situations where artillery exists. What gives?
Well, IRL, capabilities tend to be more symmetric (and I think there's a reason why people are much less interested in the details of battles between colonial European powers and the places they were colonizing). If you invent artillery, the other guy, who in this situation also has a similar level of gunpowder and machining, will just invent their own artillery. Inventing artillery gets you an advantage, but it's transient. Like a Red Queen's Race, you need to be constantly pushing to not fall behind.
It's not like that in MfD. No one else has SC, no one else has so many summoners, no one else has chakra transfer. Those are all fixable, maybe. We could fiat in some chakra-transfer bloodlines into non-Mist villages and give them ways to exploit it. We could declare that they can invent seal arrays that act on SC or summons to make an attack on their villages at least somewhat interactive.
Runes aren't like that. There is no IRL analogy for a technology that the enemy is ontologically incapable of copying, reverse engineering, or maybe even countering. Runes present perfect, non-interactive solutions to many things. Not every problem, as abundantly evidenced by recent problems. Certainly not personal combat power. But anything that they do apply to, and strategic-scale considerations like destroying a village is definitely one of them, they can make trivial.
Once Hazou got runes, the timeline to a quest-end got a lot shorter. Admittedly, it got a lot shorter in a way that benefitted Hazou, but the number of interesting conflicts left in the setting dropped a ton. If we want to keep the quest going with interesting problems, I think something needs to be done here.
Post-script: Why deal with high-level quest problems instead of making a minimal change to keep the quest going?
Well, mainly because the "minimal change" is a rollback plus a minor change to the simulation so that Hazou keeps on living. Let's examine what that would look like. These are ideas that I grabbed from the thread that I thought were remotely plausible.
The deadman's switch works and deters Orochimaru from killing Hazou.
The most obvious one. I'll fess up – I missed it. There were thirty things to track, and I missed this very important one. As per usual, chapters come together on a fairly short timeline, but this is an unfortunate thing to miss. On the other hand, Hazou explicitly decided not to tell Orochimaru when he got the bioseal, and again didn't tell him after the rift assault, when Orochimaru's motivation to kill Hazou rose dramatically.
I recognize that this sounds suspect, as if I've already written my answer at the bottom of the page before I constructed the reasoning, but I don't think the deadman's switch would work. Reasons:
Hazou has every reason to say he has a deadman's switch right before Orochimaru is about to kill him. The claim is non-credible by default.
Deadman's switches work better when they're shaping a party's actions to never betray you in the first place (c.f. Ami being known to have deadman's switches before she even threatened Mari, so that everyone knew that if they killed Ami, they'd be eating consequences, so they don't even meaningfully threaten her). Now that Orochimaru has already betrayed Hazou and made his intentions clear, submitting to a deadman's switch is much more costly: Hazou will forever be on edge about Orochimaru's betrayal, and will never trust him again. Contrast to if the deadman's switch were revealed ahead of time. Orochimaru could spout some bullshit about how he would never betray his nephew and preserve good relations.
See: Dr. Strangelove for a not-quite-analogous-but-c'mon-you-see-what-I-mean example in film.
Orochimaru wouldn't believe Hazou by default – not because Hazou's not capable (Orochimaru knows that Hazou has been researching runes with SC-acceleration [for almost a year, and knows that Hazou has made runes that he hasn't revealed to Orochimaru), but because it's at odds with Hazou's character, as Orochimaru understands it. Orochimaru knows he's not the best judge of character, but it does downweight the credibility of the deadman's switch considerably.
Unless Hazou explains the specific details of how his deadmans's switch leads to the end of civilization (which Hazou wouldn't), Orochimaru is pretty certain that he'll survive the fallout and the world will rebuild, as it has from many other catastrophes.
Orochimaru doesn't instantly lose if he kills Hazou. He can still try to disarm it, probably starting with a pointed interrogation of Hazou's family.
(not doing to write out the full list of reasons why Orochimaru would respect the deadman's switch for comparison because I think it's obvious enough to the players)
THAT SAID this could still work, because a premise of this section is that we're suspending simulation temporarily to get an out to the predicament. We just say that the factors in Orochimaru's mind weighed up differently and he decided to let Hazou go.
Hazou miraculously survives the kill-switch.
Second on the list as the officially-endorsed version by @Velorien.
Simulation-break: Orochimaru has no reason to make the killswitch survivable when he can just use 20 of Arikada's head-explodey bioseals on Hazou's skull, nervous system, torso cavity, etc. Making it remotely survivable while also not confirming the kill is a rookie mistake.
Additional complication: This leads to a crippled Hazou in the most important arc of the quest.
Kei kills Hazou while the rift is open to pull him back out.
Simulation-break: We decided that the NPCs wouldn't do this. Easy enough to go back and say that they did though.
Additional complication: If the mapping between real-world and afterlife is more complicated than a simple one-to-one, there's very little hope that Hazou finds the rift.
Orochimaru didn't install a kill-switch for some reason.
Simulation-break: Why wouldn't he?
Additional complication: The players' certain knowledge of Orochimaru's treacherous nature now has no diegetic basis – if at all, a negative one, given Hazou-the-character's generally pro-Orochimaru stance up till now.
We could resolve this by saying that Orochimaru's personality is more pro-Hazou/pro-Leaf than we've been modeling him as so far. Make him closer to the person that he presented to Hazou/Leaf than the person we've been modeling him as.
However, we're reluctant to resolve the situation of "Orochimaru betrayed you horrendously" with "Orochimaru is now magically more friendly to you." It doesn't feel right.
Orochimaru pulls Hazou out of the rift after killing him to take him as an apprentice.
Simulation-break: See above.
Hazou is Jashin's High Priest now
Simulation-break: Frankly, Hazou's Jashin-credits are probably lower than the median ninja on this mission. I don't think it makes sense for Jashin's focus on Hazou to be reflected in the same way as Hidan's.
Additional complication: Where does it end? Does Hazou get Jashin-powers for a bit, but lose them if he doesn't keep up the killing? Does he keep them ~forever? There are pros and cons, but it's not a very minimal change.
Orochimaru was faking Hazou out with a genjutsu for some reason (unlocking the Mangekyou Iron Nerve?)
Simulation-break: See above about Orochimaru not being friendly. If you're betraying someone, do it suddenly and all at once instead of teasing it then backing off.
"A shift happened, Hazou is still alive."
Simulation-break: Nothing technically, it's just an absurdly unlikely authorial fiat.
Hazou spawns into the afterlife next to the rift, with a rift-opener rune in hand, and slips back out before Orochimaru can notice.
Simulation-break: Mostly the rift-opener rune plopping into Hazou's hands. He doesn't have blanks prepared, and (even if he had substrate and chakra, both bits of which would need to be "paid for") by the time that he gets them ready, Orochimaru will likely be back at the rift to kill Hazou again.
Rollback time to pre-bioseal, have Hazou refuse to take the bioseal, then roll forward until the present day with the fortress destroyed and the team about to head back to Leaf.
Simulation-break: Nothing technically, it's just a big retcon.
The major issue with all these possibilities is that the future looks pretty grim unless we continue to put our fingers on the scales. Orochimaru will take off with the rift, and Leaf will be stuck between a rock (Akatsuki) and a hard place (no rift promising eventual resurrections that eventually lift the rock). Hazou will either be stuck in Leaf defending it or taken by Orochimaru with the rift to be Orochimaru's research monkey, neither of which sound very fun.
From a purely simulationist viewpoint, I am fine with this being the outcome. It's hard for me to argue with an outcome that seems like the most likely, logical one, even when it seems like it could be unfun in a number of ways. When people go up against impossible odds, they mostly fail. Heroes in movies succeed, but if we're trying to do an accurate simulation, the result should be mostly failure. The problem is hard, and while I'm not sure it's unsolvable with TAS-perfect play, I would bet against them being solved in practice.
We could easily return to the main timeline of the quest with many of the ideas above, but… that said, I think the quest would have a pretty grim outlook. A possible outcome might be "Hazou dies when Leaf's defenses fall". More likely imo is "Hazou escapes into the wildnerness after Leaf's defenses fall," but that's still an issue. Without the rift, many hopes for the future are dashed. Moreover, without the underlying problems fixed, the likely outcome would be more lighthousing and research grinding, which seems like an issue.
So, do we put our fingers on the scales more? Certainly it seems desirable, since it seems like there's a general desire for the QMs to optimize more for "MfD-as-a-story" and "MfD-as-a-game" rather than "MfD-as-a-simulation". But how much weight do we want to put? And is there an easier option to make things fun for everyone?
That's why I wanted to figure out my high-level issues with the quest. It seems like sorting these out will make it much easier to make the quest fun for everyone regardless of what we do (minimal change to the main timeline/afterlife quest/new point of view/???).
Also, repeating what I said at the top of the post, these are the things that I find irritating or frustrating about the quest. Needless to say, I'm happy to compromise or be convinced by reasonable arguments on any number of these points, and I don't think that my personal enjoyment is what we should be optimizing for as opposed to collective enjoyment.
Great post, Paper! You've highlighted a lot of areas where structural issues of the quest prevent both players and QMs from having fun. I do think there are some valid solutions that address multiple (though not all) of these issues at once. Some preliminary thoughts:
If in D&D terms, Shadow Clone is a 3rd-level Multi-Simulacrum that gives you XP instead of costing it, and can also give you new spells to boot, Chakra Transfer is the equivalent of an ability that lets you move spell slots between people. Less obviously broken at a glance, clearly busted if you really think about what you can do with infinite spell slots in a system that assumes they're finite and uses that as a balancing factor.
In particular, I dislike what it does to the "metagame" of MfD. Did you see my earlier post about poisons re: how I like that there are multiple dominant paradigms of combat in MfD? Unfortunately, summon spam + SC spam + refills is a pretty dominant paradigm, because it is both much more powerful than previous strategies, plus approximately downside free (modulo contrivances and very specific enemies like Itachi). It's boring.
I actually thought you guys hit on a pretty good counter to the dominant paradigm of summon spam in the last arc: low-intensity, high-AoE persistent effects. Whether they be seals or jutsu, anything that inflicts even a single Consequence on all targets in range is devastating to these low-commitment strategies, and enterprising THers could have hacked ninjutsu with "very difficult to evade, armor-piercing, high AoE, low actual damage" to counter this strat, especially post-Boss Rush. It would make sense for most major villages to have at least one or two jounins with this.
Since they can take otherwise-crippling modifications like "can only inflict nonescalating Mild Consequences no matter how many times it hits," chakra might be very permissive with the other parameters. Some work would be needed to prevent this from being a full counter that makes Summons useless, but it could constrain the ability to deploy Summons universally, and make them more of an expensive gambit with serious downsides (wasting all that chakra) if you run into the counter.
Similarly to the Great Seal, it's a totalizing existential threat. Unlike the Great Seal, it's also a totalizing victory condition. Whoever secures the rift and thus the resurrection of their dead just gets to win the Elemental Nations. That's not to say that it's the only plotline that can be engaged with – in fact, it was very hard to engage with before Hazou got 55 XP-free levels of Sealing and also runes – but rather that if it can be engaged with, it's the most important one to ensure is solved.
Similarly, I thought the resolution of the last Arc deals with this problem pretty well - Orochimaru being hyper-risk averse fears the return of Nagato more than any benefits he could get from the rift while alive, and with Akatsuki exploring the Rift actively, he will just keep it closed forever. Problem solved! Unless anyone can actually hunt down Orochimaru he goes into the woods and this issue isn't relevant for years. Leaf's assault may not have secured the Rift but it succeeded in the mutual goal they shared with Orochimaru - preventing Pain's return.
Simulation-break: Frankly, Hazou's Jashin-credits are probably lower than the median ninja on this mission. I don't think it makes sense for Jashin's focus on Hazou to be reflected in the same way as Hidan's.
Additional complication: Where does it end? Does Hazou get Jashin-powers for a bit, but lose them if he doesn't keep up the killing? Does he keep them ~forever? There are pros and cons, but it's not a very minimal change.
I'd like to push back against the idea that this is necessarily a simulation-break from the player side. Assuming (a large assumption) that the washerman lore was true, Jashin does have specific reasons to focus on Hazou at this moment, especially if Hidan's in the Rift or otherwise unable to stop Mari from triggering the EM proliferation switch.
*Hazou very recently sacced hundreds of ninja to Jashin
*Hazou is the Jashin acolyte best positioned to disarm the switch and thus prevent the cessation of the Line
*Hazou is also the Jashin acolyte best positioned to increase birth rates globally and thus increase the size of the Line
If Jashin cares about "what ninja is most useful to me," it seems quite plausible from our position of lore-uncertainty that it would act to preserve Hazou, and perhaps charge him with taking direct action to actually increase birth rates globally. If Jashin needs the ninja in question to have sacced lots of people to him in order to act, Hazou has just fulfilled that requirement in spectacular fashion.
This doesn't necessarily mean Hazou would replace Hidan's position or get the exact same powers, but I had assumed the regeneration package was a feature of Jashin's dominion over life and death, and not specific to Hidan's role - that is, it's the easiest power for Jashin to grant owing to its domain.
Both Fun-Blocker 1 and Fun-Blocker 3 would be mitigated by this: the meticulous need for precise technical clarity would be less necessary if Hazou can regenerate from most physical Consequences, and that same power gives Hazou strong incentive to take the field personally, while removing the risk of being laid up for IRL months due to a Severe.
I agree with Paper's post, and I think that systematically removing all or even most of those fun-blockers would require so much grueing/retconning as to make the setting and narrative basically unrecognizable. Which is one of the reasons I think that the right call, creatively, is to let MfD die and something new grow in its place. Maybe an entirely new story, maybe an MfD remix with a lot of the same characters and setting elements but new rules and a new timeline. But I think trying to tell a story that has any continuity with the past 700 chapters is just an albatross around the neck of trying to actually remove these blockers.
