This is more, not less
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
- Location
- UK
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- He/Him
It's not a vote, just a suggested format for people to express their opinions in.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Preface
I'm going to begin by encouraging caution. We were asked to give percentages, but there were no examples given as to what those percentages might look like, so each and every post people make is up to a wild amount of interpretation.
I suspect that this will cause a severe amount of chaos, misunderstandings, and arguments… but such is the case when there are fundamental changes to a longstanding organization such as Marked for Death (and isn't that wildly flattering to be able to say?). I feel that there are decent odds that the quest will survive this time of change and become something better for the struggles. The transitory period (as transitory periods often are) will be rough, though, lol.
Now, my "numbers" are as follows:
[X][Hardcore] 40%
[X][Simulationist] 40%
Now. Like I said, numbers without a frame of reference or discussion opens up each vote to wild misinterpretation. So I'm going to flesh out what I mean when I say "40%," under the assumption that the QMs will be reading the posts, themselves, and not simply collecting the vote tally and rolling with their personal assumptions about what these numbers mean –again, some guiding examples would've been preferred, but c'est la vie… it also gives me an excuse to ramble at a captive audience. >:3
Difficulty
I play video games and RPGs for the story, not for the gameplay. When I boot up an RPG like, say, Dragon Age or Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time, I set the difficulty to the lowest settings. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that gameplay isn't so much an obstacle that gets in the way of my enjoyment of the game's narrative storytelling, it's also not the primary reason I play games.
It's only upon following playthroughs that I raise the difficulty, and engage meaningfully with the mechanics. Otherwise, I yeet the difficulty to the lowest setting, and stomp my way to the next dialogue interaction or cut scene.
Now, I enjoy a good boss battle. I enjoy souls-like games well enough (provided I've watched enough
But "how do I min/max my build for maximum destructive power" is, for me, more a vehicle for "how can I speedrun this battle encounter and get back to the narrative stuff" as opposed to "cue the evil laughter, I'm going to murderhobo this combat encounter so hard."
Now, how does that relate to Marked for Death, specifically?
Y'all, I'm fucking tired.
I've been saying (for the last several IRL years) that the accelerator has been going on since Akane died. I've had to take several, multi-week breaks, because the Plot Accelerator wouldn't stop. Jiraiya, Collapse, Akane, Rift, Great Seal, Rockwar, Dragons, Akatsuki, and more. Constantly more. The apocalypse plotlines happen, and are on a countdown, and we've been scrambling to raise our research stats to deal with them.
Maybe there's an argument to be made that we could've ignored those plotlines, but when we see the Dragons actively genociding entire Summoning Clans, eating scores of Hornets/Arachnids each day, with the overhanging threat of further Great Seal deterioration releasing ever-more powerful Dragons, and the threat that "if the Dragons, who are currently the weakest they will ever be, reach their full power, then they may very well come to the Human Path" …well, what choice do we have but to put our heads down, ignoring the Rockwar in favor of an existential threat to all of civilization?
So!
What does 40% Hardcore mean?
A fucking break, honestly. I've had to take several multi-week breaks from this quest because the plot would. Not. Slow. Down.
So 40% means that The Akatsuki and Orochimaru take a Fantasy Xanax, prop their feet up, and chill out for a while. Let us fight against Insane Afterlife Spirits, or Quasi-Dimensional Rift Beasts, or let us return to Uplift Quest, playing Civ Builder and using our chakra to MEW up some villages for those who exist in the afterlife.
Just something, anything, that lets us have a breather.
Lets have some downtime where we fight on-level monsters in the Afterlife, or solve moral conundrums in the Afterlife.
Simulation
Now, onto Simulationist 40%.
I'm here to have a good time. You're here to have a good time. We're all here to have a good time, having fun at this digital table. This last arc was not fun. Run, roll research dice, review. Run, research dice, review. The chakra capacitor rune [does/does not] attract the chakravores. Noburi doesn't know how to use his research skill to study the chakravores. Run, roll research dice, review. Run, roll research dice, review... meanwhile, Mari, Kei, and the non-sealmasters of the group... sit around, donating chakra? Not coming up with tactics, or discussing rumors of powerups that might be worth exploring?
Back when I first joined in… fuck, what was it? 2019? I said that I engage with MfD, primarily, as a narrative-story. This remains true, ~6ish years later.
Sometimes, to tell a good story, you bend the rules a bit. Realistically, Hazou should have died, prenatally. His was a ninja birth –which is hard on the mother –and a bloodline birth at that –which is even harder on the mother. Hana had been ousted out of the Clan, and forbidden from doing much more than D-rank missions. Yagura's Mist is no Leaf, so their Hospital isn't cutting edge, and how is a poor, clanless outcast supposed to pay for decent medical care?
Or why did Hazou, clanless son of an exiled woman and a dead clanless man, who had "rebellious" branded into his academy file from day one, survive a week past Academy Graduation in Yagura's Mist? How was he not taken by Yagura's Secret Police the day after he graduated, and... idk, tossed to the village biosealer for study?
But if you do that, you don't have a story.
So, reduce the simulation constraints. Let Hazou-pilot know more stuff, give him more plothooks. Tsunade sees Noburi struggling to train Athletics (narrative expressing the fact that he's pyramid-locked), and she tells him to go to the Shin Mountaintop, over in Lightning, and eat the raw brain of a Thunder Goat.
Kei knows that Team Uplift is currently preparing for war against the Akatsuki, and that they're horribly under-prepared. So after Hazou's finished with his Rune Research for the day, Kei approaches him, cautiously, to tell him some Deadly Secret from the Nara Thinker Annals about a Legendary Steroid, sealed away by one of the Sage's Companions, deep in the Western Deserts.
And that's not to say that we should be free of consequences or danger. Let bad stuff happen, sure... but let most of the bad things happen as a result of our action/inaction, with foreshadowing.
For example, most genin die. This is a key part of the setting's worldbuilding. But, narratively, Hazou-the-character has taken an interest in Sasha's training. Narratively, Hazou-the-character's training modules are so successful and desirous that both Shikamaru and KEI sought to collaborate with Hazou about them (indeed, one of Hazou's Contest Submissions was the "Hoz. Mantle + Water Whip" Build Package, though he named it "the Noburi Package" or something).
So, narratively, even though genin die in droves, let Sasha have a boost to her survivability (in addition to the usual advantages of being a clan ninja). Let Sasha suffer, sure. Maybe her teammates die while she and her jonin-sensei live. Classic tragedy arc, right there. Maybe Hazou going missing nin (after all the time he spent training her, and guiding her training) means that she's far more wary of Hazou when we return, and we have to work to regain her broken trust.
Or, if our buildplan had a flaw that could lead to Sasha's death, then have Sasha return with a Moderate or a Severe, and say that… idk, she wants a movement-jutsu akin to a Fire Element version of Vacuum Step. So Hazou has to engage in inter-Clan Politics to get one from... idk, the Hagoromo, or perhaps arrange for Reo to study various Fire Element movement jutsu so he knows how to build a decent one for Sasha, or Hazou ignores Sasha's request, and Sasha dies a few months later due to a lack of movement jutsu.
...I understand that the QMs treat MfD as more a simulation than a story, but this is my (to borrow EJ's phrasing) "if I were Godking of Marked for Death" want. Collaborative storytelling means that we'll all have to compromise, somewhere, and I understand that I am not Godking of Marked for Death.
As another data point, I quite liked it when EJ rolled to see if any of Kakashi's Summons would join Hazou in fighting against the Akatsuki, and when the answer was "none of them do," he decided to allow one of the Summons to agree, under the reasoning that it would "be fun to write, and make for a better story."
...Which, I suppose, is what it comes down to, for me. Sure, let our fuck ups have consequences. Sure, don't let Taijutsu 40 Hazou effortlessly stomp Jashin, himself. But, by that same token, don't let the simulation get in the way of a good story.
Give us plothooks and threads that can be solved by means other than "sit and raise research stat higher." We weren't a research-spec until the Great Seal happened. Indeed, for a long while, it was a joke amongst the playerbase that Hazou had a research stat, but never did any research.
So...yeah.
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I think a lot of the challenges people are suggesting reducing simulationism/hardcoreness to combat... aren't actually simulation/gamemode difficulties.
The plot long ago worked itself into a place with serious pacing and difficulty-scaling issues, but that's more a fact about the current state of play than about the principles of the game.
Solutions in the form of "keep the current unfun situation on the game board, but undermine the principles of the game and hope that helps", seems weird, especially when the game just naturally ended. Why not say "this game is fun, and we learned a lot about how it runs. Let's take what we learned and play another round with different starting conditions that incentivize better pacing"?
The plot long ago worked itself into a place with serious pacing and difficulty-scaling issues, but that's more a fact about the current state of play than about the principles of the game.
Solutions in the form of "keep the current unfun situation on the game board, but undermine the principles of the game and hope that helps", seems weird, especially when the game just naturally ended. Why not say "this game is fun, and we learned a lot about how it runs. Let's take what we learned and play another round with different starting conditions that incentivize better pacing"?
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because both (a substantial fraction of) the players and the QMs feel that this would be a really unsatisfying ending to the story.
That's how I feel, at least. Orochimaru has won the Rift and as such has made significant progress towards his ultimate goals while having revealed himself to be down-to-his-core evil. The world may well be a frozen hellscape in a year. Everyone we know and love is either dead or going to die. That's not...fun, it's not satisfying, it's not anything other than depressing.
(I this isn't anything I can back up with citations - just my read, although I'm quite confident in it. I'm equally confident that no quantity of debate or discussion is going to appreciably dislodge opinions; at the very least those attached to the story would want to see a month or two of epilogue chapters to see how the rest of the world fares, and given the state of play, that seems unlikely to actually be satisfying for anyone on the 'it can't end this way' side of things for reasons outlined above.)
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redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
hypothetically, were we to do that, it might still be useful to hammer out what changes we would want to see in how the next game is run, if parts of the current game caused dissatisfaction.
In either case, it's a useful discussion to have. It might be correct to try and divorce the discussion from the current state of the quest, however.
No, I was thinking about things like what I think you mentioned a while ago in an earlier post, about the difficulty of engaging OOC with the fundamental theory of how magic systems work. The chakra blackbox, the sealing blackbox, and so on. Things like Hazopilot's understanding of sealing being retconned make it difficult to think of ideas for seals beyond just throwing desired results at a wall and seeing what sticks.
- Location
- [REDACTED]
I had highkey, for years, assumed this was exactly what they were doing.
Zampano
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- Location
- Simping for DSB
Interestingly, Brennan Lee Mulligan made a point about high-stakes limiting player drive. From Thursday's "Adventuring Party" on Dropout.TV:
I recognize that this is sort of what MfD was going for at the beginning. But the "sanity check" meetings are a real obstacle for enjoying the quest, imo. Especially now that we're out of the depths of the Leaf Politics mines, needing to run all of Hazo's ideas through a focus-group really undermines his position as the Clan Head and degrades the screentime of our allies by forcing them to only react to the gaps in Hazo's planmaking rather than ever making their own contributions to the story.
I recognize that this is sort of what MfD was going for at the beginning. But the "sanity check" meetings are a real obstacle for enjoying the quest, imo. Especially now that we're out of the depths of the Leaf Politics mines, needing to run all of Hazo's ideas through a focus-group really undermines his position as the Clan Head and degrades the screentime of our allies by forcing them to only react to the gaps in Hazo's planmaking rather than ever making their own contributions to the story.
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- [REDACTED]
I do very much like this idea. There should be more of these little adventures we can go on where there are known good rewards. I feel like it actually fits neatly in the setting, that there are certain "rights of passage" that come with xp free power ups and a TYS point or two.
Knowledge of such things might be passed down from mentor to student, or from clan elder to clan junior. Given only to the most promising chunin.
There's many such traditions in the real world. Why should the EN not have them?
- Location
- Finland
As I've understood it, dice rolls are (among other things) a tool to introduce randomness to counteract impossible-to-avoid QM bias. It's easy to construct a narrative for most any outcome, and so the dice are meant to give us a specific outcome drawn from a pre-specified distribution around which the narrative is then built, mitigating somewhat the issue where a human is far more likely to choose the outcomes they think of first - or depending on their personality maybe good outcomes or bad ones or funny ones - as 'simulationistically correct' even when many other outcomes could've been equally justified by a human's limited ability to simulate.
Under this like of thought, narrativism is used to describe 'choosing what happens directly on the basis of whether it would make a good story and then writing it out' while simulationism is meant as 'shaping a probability distribution that takes into account as much as possible about the world as described previously, and then randomizing an outcome from the distribution, then writing out what happens without choosing the outcome directly'.
Note that there are limits to simulationism - the act of shaping the distribution is already making choices about what kind of things could happen, and if some thought isn't given to what would make a good story, then there is very likely going to be no story. That is why nobody wants or is capable of 100% simulationism. Dice add a step that forces some (but not full) consideration of possible outcomes and mitigates bias towards certain type of outcome.
They do other things as well, such as allow players a better understanding of what they can do to shape the distribution the outcomes are drawn out of, give people less excuse to be salty to QMs about things that happen and so on. That doesn't have to do with the simulation, though.
- Location
- Finland
This is a familiar phenomenon to me. I've played in a campaign for thirteen years where the GM acts as close to an impartial arbitrator as possible and the world is very lethal. Stage one of a player's journey through this system, after getting their character killed a few times, is indeed getting extremely cautious and paranoid. After some months to years of not achieving much progress due to taking too long and being too careful, and still getting occasionally killed because if you keep doing dangerous things like adventuring you'll eventually make a mistake or run across something you couldn't have anticipated, they'll realize that risk-taking and proper judgment over when it is worth it is a critical part of player skill here. And as said skill develops, unintuitively, they'll start achieving more victories and also dying less. Despite being less cautious! Because taking the right risks actually improves your chances.
This leads to more interesting play, with spectacular victories and defeats and the sense of real accomplishment about them. And we'd never have seen it if the GM or the players had given up at the occasionally frustrating grind stage.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
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- Canada
I didn't use those exact terms; 'QM bias' 'randomizing an outcome from the probability distribution', but I did directly address those topics, yes. This post reads like an intended rebuttal, but it says nothing I have not already addressed and even agreed with so I'm not sure where we're going here. The only thing I really feel a need to respond to here is this:
I have already agreed that a QM who wishes to use dice as a mental aid to help them decide what to write is not something I have an issue with. Ideally however, a QM could simply consider these outcomes without needing dice. I am arguing that it should be an individual preference, not a requirement.
Simulation to me refers to how deeply cause and effect are considered when considering all aspects of the setting, from individual motivations to the likelihood of certain eventualities when considering a population size. 'Dice rolls' might serve to reduce a certain degree of bias, but they do so by introducing a level of randomness or luck that is detached from cause and effect. Events happen this way not because of a person's life experiences leading them to make a decision, events happen that way because instead of considering what the character would do, the QMs stopped simulating his motivations once they discovered what the character could do and let the dice do the rest.
Yes, I agree and understand that actual 100% simulation, what I previously called a 'perfect' simulation would require omniscience and is not actually possible. Yes, I understand that the QMs might not be able or willing to simulate every single decision made by every single character with such a degree of focus, and so using the dice to bridge the gap allows them to actually write a story. That's why I agree with it's use as a tool, but I will continue to decry their supposed necessity. Or their relevance to what I consider good simulation.
As for eliminating or mitigating QM bias... that's what all the 'fairness' talk was about. I don't think I have much more to add, except that fairness doesn't rate very highly on my list of storytelling values, and I engage with this quest as an interactive story more than a game. I'm much more willing to accept QM judgement on any issue than most in this thread. In fact I have distinct memories of arguing in favor of previous QM decisions shortly before the player saltmines and/or well-reasoned arguments made them reverse that decision, leaving me looking and feeling like a clown. In short, I have no problem with accepting their biases, it's inherent to reading the text that they wrote.
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- Finland
So I'm mostly saying that the necessity of dice comes from the fact that, as you seem to agree, we need dice to be able to actually write a story (in a simulationist fashion). Or, I would rather say, dice in practice improve the ability of the QMs to write a simulationist story.
There is nothing inherently wrong in simply writing a story based on the narrative, or 'accepting bias'. But as I understand it, the QMs in this particular quest specifically want to do it the other way.
There is nothing inherently wrong in simply writing a story based on the narrative, or 'accepting bias'. But as I understand it, the QMs in this particular quest specifically want to do it the other way.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
Well the point of my post wasn't about what the QMs want. It was about what I want. So nyeh.
Less jokingly, it really was about what I want, because I was answering the question they asked of me about my own preferences. I couldn't give a number such as [] Simulation: 100% without actually explaining what simulation means to me, and to me, it absolutely does not mean more dice rolls. But when other people speak of less dice, they vote in favor of [] Simulation: 40% or whatever, so it would be very irresponsible of me to throw out a number that means the exact opposite of how I really feel.
I'm in favor of actually sitting there and putting in the brainwork to accurately model how the characters will act in any given situation. I am willing to accept less frequent updates as this would inevitably require more work on the QMs part to actually do this, and I don't actually want to burn out the QMs or make writing the story become something they dread. I am against adding randomness to results in the name of fairness or 'reducing bias'. I am alright with randomness as a writing or decision-making aid (but I might look down a bit on it's use from my lofty position as a consumer who contributes nothing(this is a joke)). I would call this increasing simulation, but others, most importantly the QMs themselves, might disagree, so an explanation was required and now here we are.
I suppose instead of simulation 100%, which is unattainable, I could write 'simulation: 100% of what you're willing to tolerate.'
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- Location
- Finland
I think what makes me confused about your stance is that to me being willing to accept whatever the QMs decide as being the simulationist option, and not liking the randomness of dice, seems contrary to wanting to accurately model how the characters (and the world) will act in any given situation. That is, the accuracy of the model is, I believe, higher in practice when using carefully shaped and considered probability distributions to add some randomness than it would be if the QMs simply do their very best to simulate things exactly, at least within the limit of what is practically possible to do in this format.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
There are Very Specific settings in which I enjoy this but ironically MfD is not one of them.
(For reference: Shadowrun. It fits the setting, and it's *fun* to make very detailed plans for runs and watch it all go to shit the moment you hit the bricks. This is in large part due to it being tabletop, though; I don't think it'd work half as well in a quest format.)
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
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Okay, I did the thing again where I typed up like 8 paragraphs of meandering monologue, and deleted it all. I kept the last line though since it sums up what I was trying to say fairly well.
The game of marked for death is absolutely to the determent of the simulation of the setting. Dice serve the game, not the simulation.
So I suppose a big disconnect here could be that I see the simulation as referring to the setting, the characters, the details of each. The history and continuity and overall cohesion of the story. I'm less enamored with 'simulating' the results of a fight, complete with random variables that can't be reasonably calculated and are instead attributed to luck and measured using a dice roll. That fight, in my mind, might as well be predetermined from the moment it was voted in by the players with 'random chance' being represented by whether the QM ate a hearty meal and is feeling generous at the time of writing. The end product may turn out the same and the setting is not harmed for it, only the balance of the game.
Incidentally, all this focus on simulationism is ignoring the second tag we're voting with. [Hardcore] x% referring to the game difficulty, seems like a good place to talk about balance and the role of dice, no?
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Yeah, that looks like a major simulation break to me.
It's challenging to articulate why, as it doesn't strictly contradict anything established, but it does.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
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It's like how dead space is a horror game but then the sequel 'extraction' is an on-rails shooter. Just a strong change of tone and expectations. Sure some of the big setting details and characters are the same, but the perspective is so different as to seem like a different thing entirely.
Afterlife quest might not be as extreme as the example above in implementation, but just talking about it here definitely sounds wacky.
- Location
- Finland
I don't think that is the crux. I have intentionally steered away from mechanics, fights included.
Imagine there to be some hypothetical perfect simulation which is how things would 'really' go if we simulated this universe with omniscience, and the writer attempts to make their story as close to this perfect simulation as possible. I believe that if a writer operating under practical constraints comes up with a few plausible outcomes for every event, weighs them as best they are able and rolls a die to see which one they'll end up writing out, the story will end up closer to the perfect simulation on average than it would be if the writer did their very best to simulate the single exact outcome that should happen given all the variables in play. And, importantly, the divergences will not be as systematically in a single direction, although they will still be such to some extent simply because the writer is the one who created the options for the die roll to pick from in the first place.
As for hardcoreness. I don't really care for balance. I would prefer no punches pulled, hence my 100%. But none of my preferences are so strong that I wouldn't continue reading if they weren't fulfilled, and I can also see the importance of setting up things on the meta-level so that the game we're playing or story we're reading is one we enjoy. But if we're in a situation where impartial arbitration means we all die and there is no story, then I would prefer starting from a different situation rather than weighing the scales to make this one more survivable. And especially would not want the weighing to be permanent, even if we choose to use it in this particular case. Again, this isn't an absolute, just a preference.
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- Yes.
[X] Armageddon Initiative