will408914
(slouching towards bethlehem)
- Location
- California
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- 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
- Phoenix, AZ
Well, current plans involve attending. I figure there's probably a 30% chance something unexpected comes up which prevents me being there.
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Name starts with "W", is Wildbow confirmed
will408914
(slouching towards bethlehem)
- Location
- California
Wait, I am? But I'm so far behind on Twig! How can I be writing it wen I haven't even caught up reading it?
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
[] Research: Kawarimi and PMYF Munchkining
[] Research Akane: DIY Enthusiast
Background
Whatever parts of Tree-ty of Friendship don't get finished, plus:
- How much earth needs to be present to create more real earth from it using MEW? Test different masses, volumes, surface areas.
- If the answer is "an amount that we can put in a storage seal", does adding more granite to an unsealed PMYF projectile slow it down disproportionately more than would be expected with the larger surface area?
- Does leaping from large blocks of granite in midair allow us to substitute from them? (After all, a planet sized amount would clearly do it, and human-massed chunks apparently don't, so the line has to be somewhere. Maybe it'll be in a reachable place.)
- Can MEW be used while airborne?
- Look into developing tactics based on rapid application of mind altering drugs, paralytics, and other toxins.
- Research a wide range of drugs
- Find vectors good at delivering these quickly, with rapid onset of effects
- Coating kunai?
- Hollow senbon?
[] Research Akane: DIY Enthusiast
- Can we produce a writing duplicator? What about brushes with consistent ink flow from a well (pens)?
- Work on new traps with the materials from the inn
- Mari has mentioned aerial surveillance of the former Uzu, as well as scouts on gliders employed by Wind. Find out from her what kinds of techniques and devices were involved, see if any of them can be adapted for our group.
- Designing hengeable shapes that will let us PMYF further/slow down more safely (yay gliders/aerodynamics!)
- As a first step, try them out with paper (paper planes/origami) and then wood
- (w/ Hazou) Maaaaybe zeppelin stuff? Dubious value without modified EM.
- Designing hengeable shapes that will let us PMYF further/slow down more safely (yay gliders/aerodynamics!)
- (w/ Hazou and/or Kagome) Case for the Chakra-Poor Man's Storage Scroll to prevent accidental activation but keeping deliberate use easy
- Work w/ Keiko to optimize ice production
- Do pangolins have a transformation jutsu? If not, maybe it'd be a good idea to gift them the technique, or trade it for one of theirs. This is especially true for any of Keiko's contracts, who benefit from not looking like pangolins while on the Human Path.
- More pangolin ettiquitte, ideally in a more organized way and in small chunks
- What was the issue with the Mori bloodline? Is this an issue with bloodlines in general?
- Inter-summoner etiquette, e.g. if the pangolins are allied to a clan whose summoner is a Mist hunter nin, what do?
- Is it okay for the summoners to bring their allies into the summon realm? Is that even possible?
- Is the pangolin economy currency-, barter-, and/or favor-based? What do elite Pangolins have that lower status Pangolins lack?
- Can we get historical info that the village was denying us? (e.g. what happened to Ui/what are the last interactions the pangolins had with him?)
- Is Keiko able to sense when a pangolin desummons?
- Summons that are not combat specialists that might be useful (if Hazou is presenting these to Keiko, frame them as considerations rather than suggestions, using their Clear Communcation no Jutsu, since our last suggestion didn't go over so well)
- Sealmasters
- Medics (Make sure it'll work on humans first)
- Various ninjutsu teachers - ideally do some survey of what techniques exist, even if Kei isn't allowed to share with the party
- Communication/coordination jutsu
- Technique Hacking
- Sensory jutsu
- What are the other elements Pandaa mentioned? (could lead to nature chakra/Sage Mode Stuff)
- Therapist? (Don't actually suggest this one to Keiko without thoroughly vetting the idea with Mari)
- Sensory specialist/scout (Kei didn't like this idea? Pandaa even agreed with us!)
- Engineers and craftspangolins
- Be sure to also answer Pandaa's questions about humans!
Background
- Kagome suggested that the sparseness of the population is the fundamental reason behind the effectiveness of scorch squads.
- Can we fix either or both of the contributing problems?
- The difficulty of patrolling large areas of populated land
- The difficulty of growing enough food in a small area to support a condensed population
- Make that technique or technology available
- globally?
- to our allies?
- Doing this might be a quick way to modify the tradeoffs for that method of warfare.
- Can we fix either or both of the contributing problems?
- As discussed in the thread, there is an additional underlying problem of lack of empathy and trust between nations which prevents simple de-escalation.
- Teleportation tech like the safety poles/safety sticks in Significant Digits (which we may want to keep for ourselves/Hidden Heaven)
- Automated defenses against ninja (golems? seal-based clones?)
- Would need to be good enough to stand up to jounin, which implies that this would only be a good solution at much higher power levels than we're currently playing with
- TH-ing plant growth jutsu, or creating relevant seals, or combining existing jutsu and seals in a clever way that optimizes plant growth, or in any way enabling large numbers of people to be fed while being secured against invasion, seige, crop burning...
- Bigger-on-the-inside tech to let people farm in their own homes within cities (heavily modified storage seals?)
- Get others' thoughts/critiques/contributions, and start working on the approach we judge to be most promising
- Learn about current agricultural practices and try to figure out improvements to equipment or techniques (e.g. better fertilizers, seed drills, focused selective breeding...)
Whatever parts of Tree-ty of Friendship don't get finished, plus:
- If the topic of why Fire isn't a model for what Hazou wants to acheive comes up again, consider drawing from
When you asked why Fire wasn't a utopia, I was confused because you had practically just said the answer yourself: none of the major players can trust each other, because each of them consider only their own people to have any moral weight. And that is what you said, that you would sleep well after killing a foreign citizen to save a Leaf one. Not that you would consider it a necessary tragedy to protect the people you care about, and not that you would devote so much as a second of thought toward avoiding having to make that choice again in the future, and you said all your counterparts in other villages feel the same way.
When the whole world does that, then everyone looks like monsters to everyone else. At that point, it's even easier to say all foreigners are morally irrelevant, trapping the entire world in a spiral of indifference and hatred, so we get the current state of the world even from initial conditions where everyone cares about people outside their clan or their village just slightly too little. And at that point, it becomes impossible to trust one another to do things like build utopias, since all that power looks like a threat.
Which gives us the answer to your original question: the reason Fire isn't a utopia is that even though it's strong, it's not as strong as everyone else all at once, and if you withdraw resources from maintaining your current military dominance to focus on things like civilian wellbeing, other nations will see that apparent weakness as an opportunity to help their people by hurting yours, who as we've established they don't care about. Boom, the next shinobi war. And if you did anything with your vast resources that would put you on a clear trajectory to become strong enough to fight them all off at once, like letting civilians live well enough to lead to significant population growth, the entire world will throw everything they had at you, even though they'd be eviscerated afterwards and have an even harder time stalling civilization's collapse.
They'd do it even if you weren't being hostile, like the world did to Whirlpool. It's probably pretty easy to see from the reversed perspective - if Mist suddenly became insanely good at sealcrafting, and started using it to protect their civilians and grow more food and help all their citizens live comfortably, would you be glad your neighbors were growing happy and prosperous? Or would you see the impending population boom as a threat to be sabotaged and undermined? And if you find a low-risk method that sabotages your enemies' future strength without going to war, well, how could you not take it, even if it's morally horrific and accelerating the gradual downfall of the human race.
You can't build up because you would get smacked down. You can't truly work with other nations to break out of the downward spiral because you won't be trusted and won't trust them, since you both know that trust would be exploited. So Leaf ends up having to contribute to the status quo, even if you guys are better about humanizing the enemy than others, according to Akane. But it isn't working, and something has to change, or everything is going to crumble into dust, and everyone is going to die - including Leaf. So, again, will you help us?- What to do about it? Part of that is why we need him on board - preventing wars from breaking out while the fixing is happening, and then figuring out a way to change the incentives that result in things like distrust and scorch squads. Make it so that "cooperate" becomes the winning option even in the non-iterated case of this prisoners' dilemma. (Massively improve agriculture per area to allow consolidation of civilian population? Set up a neurtral third party to arbitrate disputes and hand out the uplift tech on the basis of good behavior?) That, or make Leaf so strong so fast that everyone's best option is to give up, but even then people won't actually be reasonable since they're scared and angry and distrustful. Even if there were a jutsu to magically restore everyone's view of each other as people deserving moral consideration, it wouldn't be anything like a permanent solution, because the cycle would start all over again.
- Also, compared to slowly dying villages in the wilderness, and to some extend compared even to Kirigakure, Leaf is fairly utopian already.
- If for some reason J insists on giving us our rewards today
- Most of these rewards are centered around making us stronger and better assets, so it's against Jiraya's interests to be stingy here
- Check if he is okay with us discussing fairly frankly some admitted longshots first; if not, skip this section.
- Kurosawa Hana
- Getting her out of Kiri
- Jounin taijutsu expert with huge reasons to defect to work for him specifically, and would cause Team Uplift to be stronger, safer, saner, enormously grateful, and probably more stable due to her greater experience and mediating influence.
- If this is gonna start the Fourth Jashin-damned Shinobi War, obviously not worth it, and is obviously a huge ask in terms of difficulty and risk, but is this a thing we that is even on the table as far as favors, or even accumulated favors?
- If not getting her out, how feasible is an attempt to get a message to her, even just "your son is alive and loves you"? In addition to or barring that, could we get information on what she is up to and what her position is in Mist?
- Getting her out of Kiri
- Does any kind of pass to cross Fire borders come packaged with Akane's reinstatement and our continued loyalty?
- We recognize that this is unlikely due to the need to maintain deniability, but Akane is much less of a carrot if we can't come to see her (if she does not stick with us) / will need to be able to access Leaf resources and her friends and family if she does stick with us.
- If J gets smug / team gives us shit for saying we're loyal to Leaf/J, maintain that since we are loyal to Akane who is presumably loyal to Leaf, we are at least second-order loyal to them, and in any case they appear to represent the best chance at fixing things.
- If J asks why we're now uncertain whether she'll stick with us, maintain that we are simply planning for all possibilities and that the choice remains hers.
- Kurosawa Hana
- Check if he is okay with us discussing some generalities of less-longshot options before asking for a specific thing
- Seal designs: are these even on the table? Would he be willing to give us either an array of low-to-medium level utility seals that he thinks would contribute most to our effectiveness, or to do a deeper dive into e.g. storage seals and the extremes of what they can be used for?
- Examples of utility seals
- Communication range, especially surreptitiously
- Night vision or other sensory enhancements
- Advanced alarm seals
- SCBA / environmental protection
- Eye/ear protection
- Sound muffling seals / other stealth enhancements
- Examples of utility seals
- Jutsu: he said he would get us a teacher at the end of our interactions with him in Yuni - if that no longer holds, how much is he willing to teach us now (e.g. # of techniques at particular ranks - describe the jutsu plan if prompted)
- Can we safely assume we will be given / at least have the chance to buy new ninja gear and essentials, what with our old stuff being potentially biosealer-contaminated?
- An up-to-date bingo book or comparable intel would also be really nice but we're not about to spend a favor on it.
- Seal designs: are these even on the table? Would he be willing to give us either an array of low-to-medium level utility seals that he thinks would contribute most to our effectiveness, or to do a deeper dive into e.g. storage seals and the extremes of what they can be used for?
- Are there missions he has planned for us that he can tell us about before we make our decision?
- The update should end at this point for a vote on the reward.
- Address our desire to arrange our mom's extraction from Mist, and our concerns about how that could impact the rest of the group.
- Does Inoue-sensei think this is even a feasible thing to ask with a favor, or stacked favors, given Hana's large motivation to defect to work for J specifically and the additional utility she provides to our team in the form of jounin combat strength and decades of experience?
- Ask if there is anyone else we would need to extract at the same, and whether we should avoid doing so at all to avoid putting Inoue-senei's family at risk.
- Any Wakahisa or Mori clan members would be more difficult to extract but also less likely for Mist antagonize
- Mom would be a valuable resource, but also an addition to the team - are others okay with that idea?
- Lingering Jiraiya Questions
- What purpose did lying to us about not knowing the identity of the summon clan serve?
- (Think of less insulting ways to phrase this) Why didn't he ever reply via summons, to assign us somewhere / at least give us new recognition codes / at LEAST tell us our codes were out of date / AT LEAST acknowledge that he got our message?? Why didn't we get told how long they would be valid for?
- Advice on uplift plans?
- Sealing lessons? Access to examples of seals? Don't want to offend Kagome, but this would be an excellent opportunity to pick up new ideas.
- How to acquire power inside the current system
- Any organizations/groups/polities Jiraya and Leaf would not mind us getting rid of?
- You know, just in case we need to acquire limited resources (land, vassals, political legitimacy etc.)
- Look out for a gift for Keiko
- Discussions with/notes from pangolin sealmaster(s)?
- Get more of Pangolin Cultural Exchange Program done (seriously, what's up with bloodlines??)
- Get more info on what went down during the chuunin exams by asking civilians, if we're allowed to wander around
- If we meet Lee, challenge him to a friendly low-key spar
- Communicate Hazou's feelings to Keiko CCnJ style
- "I did not feel your responses to my suggestions after Inoue-sensei talked Arikada down were merited. Ensuring that teammates are on the same page sometimes requires stating the obvious - I did not mean to imply that you hadn't thought to thank Panchipaama. While I appreciate genuine corrections, I feel hurt by the jabs you make when I am trying to use a mode of communication that, almost by definition, requires transparency which makes one particularly vulnerable to social attacks, and I would ask that in the future you postpone sarcastic comments until we are in a relatively secure situation."
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rkyeun
Cabbitus Maximus
- Location
- ◕ ‿‿ ◕
Just read chapter 85, the bad version, after following a link from the DBZ quest.
QM's you get my mad respect both for sticking to that vote, and for being willing to reverse it after further discussion and consideration. I think both decisions were the correct ones.
QM's you get my mad respect both for sticking to that vote, and for being willing to reverse it after further discussion and consideration. I think both decisions were the correct ones.
- Location
- how about no
Whatever parts of Tree-ty of Friendship don't get finished, plus:
- If the topic of why Fire isn't a model for what Hazou wants to acheive comes up again, consider drawing from
When you asked why Fire wasn't a utopia, I was confused because you had practically just said the answer yourself: none of the major players can trust each other, because each of them consider only their own people to have any moral weight. And that is what you said, that you would sleep well after killing a foreign citizen to save a Leaf one. Not that you would consider it a necessary tragedy to protect the people you care about, and not that you would devote so much as a second of thought toward avoiding having to make that choice again in the future, and you said all your counterparts in other villages feel the same way.
When the whole world does that, then everyone looks like monsters to everyone else. At that point, it's even easier to say all foreigners are morally irrelevant, trapping the entire world in a spiral of indifference and hatred, so we get the current state of the world even from initial conditions where everyone cares about people outside their clan or their village just slightly too little. And at that point, it becomes impossible to trust one another to do things like build utopias, since all that power looks like a threat.
Which gives us the answer to your original question: the reason Fire isn't a utopia is that even though it's strong, it's not as strong as everyone else all at once, and if you withdraw resources from maintaining your current military dominance to focus on things like civilian wellbeing, other nations will see that apparent weakness as an opportunity to help their people by hurting yours, who as we've established they don't care about. Boom, the next shinobi war. And if you did anything with your vast resources that would put you on a clear trajectory to become strong enough to fight them all off at once, like letting civilians live well enough to lead to significant population growth, the entire world will throw everything they had at you, even though they'd be eviscerated afterwards and have an even harder time stalling civilization's collapse.
They'd do it even if you weren't being hostile, like the world did to Whirlpool. It's probably pretty easy to see from the reversed perspective - if Mist suddenly became insanely good at sealcrafting, and started using it to protect their civilians and grow more food and help all their citizens live comfortably, would you be glad your neighbors were growing happy and prosperous? Or would you see the impending population boom as a threat to be sabotaged and undermined? And if you find a low-risk method that sabotages your enemies' future strength without going to war, well, how could you not take it, even if it's morally horrific and accelerating the gradual downfall of the human race.
You can't build up because you would get smacked down. You can't truly work with other nations to break out of the downward spiral because you won't be trusted and won't trust them, since you both know that trust would be exploited. So Leaf ends up having to contribute to the status quo, even if you guys are better about humanizing the enemy than others, according to Akane. But it isn't working, and something has to change, or everything is going to crumble into dust, and everyone is going to die - including Leaf. So, again, will you help us?- What to do about it? Part of that is why we need him on board - preventing wars from breaking out while the fixing is happening, and then figuring out a way to change the incentives that result in things like distrust and scorch squads. Make it so that "cooperate" becomes the winning option even in the non-iterated case of this prisoners' dilemma. (Massively improve agriculture per area to allow consolidation of civilian population? Set up a neurtral third party to arbitrate disputes and hand out the uplift tech on the basis of good behavior?) That, or make Leaf so strong so fast that everyone's best option is to give up, but even then people won't actually be reasonable since they're scared and angry and distrustful. Even if there were a jutsu to magically restore everyone's view of each other as people deserving moral consideration, it wouldn't be anything like a permanent solution, because the cycle would start all over again.
- Also, compared to slowly dying villages in the wilderness, and to some extend compared even to Kirigakure, Leaf is fairly utopian already.
- If for some reason J insists on giving us our rewards today
- Most of these rewards are centered around making us stronger and better assets, so it's against Jiraya's interests to be stingy here
- Check if he is okay with us discussing fairly frankly some admitted longshots first; if not, skip this section.
- Kurosawa Hana
- Getting her out of Kiri
- Jounin taijutsu expert with huge reasons to defect to work for him specifically, and would cause Team Uplift to be stronger, safer, saner, enormously grateful, and probably more stable due to her greater experience and mediating influence.
- If this is gonna start the Fourth Jashin-damned Shinobi War, obviously not worth it, and is obviously a huge ask in terms of difficulty and risk, but is this a thing we that is even on the table as far as favors, or even accumulated favors?
- If not getting her out, how feasible is an attempt to get a message to her, even just "your son is alive and loves you"? In addition to or barring that, could we get information on what she is up to and what her position is in Mist?
- Getting her out of Kiri
- Does any kind of pass to cross Fire borders come packaged with Akane's reinstatement and our continued loyalty?
- We recognize that this is unlikely due to the need to maintain deniability, but Akane is much less of a carrot if we can't come to see her (if she does not stick with us) / will need to be able to access Leaf resources and her friends and family if she does stick with us.
- If J gets smug / team gives us shit for saying we're loyal to Leaf/J, maintain that since we are loyal to Akane who is presumably loyal to Leaf, we are at least second-order loyal to them, and in any case they appear to represent the best chance at fixing things.
- If J asks why we're now uncertain whether she'll stick with us, maintain that we are simply planning for all possibilities and that the choice remains hers.
- Kurosawa Hana
- Check if he is okay with us discussing some generalities of less-longshot options before asking for a specific thing
- Seal designs: are these even on the table? Would he be willing to give us either an array of low-to-medium level utility seals that he thinks would contribute most to our effectiveness, or to do a deeper dive into e.g. storage seals and the extremes of what they can be used for?
- Examples of utility seals
- Communication range, especially surreptitiously
- Night vision or other sensory enhancements
- Advanced alarm seals
- SCBA / environmental protection
- Eye/ear protection
- Sound muffling seals / other stealth enhancements
- Examples of utility seals
- Jutsu: he said he would get us a teacher at the end of our interactions with him in Yuni - if that no longer holds, how much is he willing to teach us now (e.g. # of techniques at particular ranks - describe the jutsu plan if prompted)
- Can we safely assume we will be given / at least have the chance to buy new ninja gear and essentials, what with our old stuff being potentially biosealer-contaminated?
- An up-to-date bingo book or comparable intel would also be really nice but we're not about to spend a favor on it.
- Seal designs: are these even on the table? Would he be willing to give us either an array of low-to-medium level utility seals that he thinks would contribute most to our effectiveness, or to do a deeper dive into e.g. storage seals and the extremes of what they can be used for?
- Are there missions he has planned for us that he can tell us about before we make our decision?
- The update should end at this point for a vote on the reward.
- Address our desire to arrange our mom's extraction from Mist, and our concerns about how that could impact the rest of the group.
- Does Inoue-sensei think this is even a feasible thing to ask with a favor, or stacked favors, given Hana's large motivation to defect to work for J specifically and the additional utility she provides to our team in the form of jounin combat strength and decades of experience?
- Ask if there is anyone else we would need to extract at the same, and whether we should avoid doing so at all to avoid putting Inoue-senei's family at risk.
- Any Wakahisa or Mori clan members would be more difficult to extract but also less likely for Mist antagonize
- Mom would be a valuable resource, but also an addition to the team - are others okay with that idea?
- Lingering Jiraiya Questions
- What purpose did lying to us about not knowing the identity of the summon clan serve?
- (Think of less insulting ways to phrase this) Why didn't he ever reply via summons, to assign us somewhere / at least give us new recognition codes / at LEAST tell us our codes were out of date / AT LEAST acknowledge that he got our message?? Why didn't we get told how long they would be valid for?
- Advice on uplift plans?
- Sealing lessons? Access to examples of seals? Don't want to offend Kagome, but this would be an excellent opportunity to pick up new ideas.
- How to acquire power inside the current system
- Any organizations/groups/polities Jiraya and Leaf would not mind us getting rid of?
- You know, just in case we need to acquire limited resources (land, vassals, political legitimacy etc.)
- Look out for a gift for Keiko
- Discussions with/notes from pangolin sealmaster(s)?
- Get more of Pangolin Cultural Exchange Program done (seriously, what's up with bloodlines??)
- Get more info on what went down during the chuunin exams by asking civilians, if we're allowed to wander around
- If we meet Lee, challenge him to a friendly low-key spar
- Communicate Hazou's feelings to Keiko CCnJ style
- "I did not feel your responses to my suggestions after Inoue-sensei talked Arikada down were merited. Ensuring that teammates are on the same page sometimes requires stating the obvious - I did not mean to imply that you hadn't thought to thank Panchipaama. While I appreciate genuine corrections, I feel hurt by the jabs you make when I am trying to use a mode of communication that, almost by definition, requires transparency which makes one particularly vulnerable to social attacks, and I would ask that in the future you postpone sarcastic comments until we are in a relatively secure situation."
Library visit?
Library visit.
Knowledge > Shinies
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
We have some great QMs. The best QMs. People ask me, very often, how do you run a good, solid quest? I always tell em, I say, listen, you need -- you gotta have the best people. I knew a guy once, great guy, just great, one of the best QMs I ever met, and he would always say "Oli, a good quest has to have a good, committed QM." He was a smart guy. And that's why if you vote for me, we can make Marked for Death the best quest on the whole site again!
(Welcome to the thread @rkyeun
)Crap, I thought I had that in there. I would argue knowledge = shiny.
- Location
- floating away
If Lee has anywhere near the XP we have and is as min-maxed for Taijutsu as I think he is... well, I suppose I'd enjoy watching Hazo get absolutely dominated by Lee's 30+ Taijutsu dice.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@eaglejarl
Heads up, the formatting on Chapter 9 (both the Main Thread and Story-Only Thread versions) and Chapter 12 Part 2 (Main and Story-Only) have gotten messed up somehow in the lines between paragraphs.
Heads up, the formatting on Chapter 9 (both the Main Thread and Story-Only Thread versions) and Chapter 12 Part 2 (Main and Story-Only) have gotten messed up somehow in the lines between paragraphs.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Aye, welcome to the thread! I hope you stick around, @rkyeun!
Yep. Still, we can ask to use academy basic fighting styles (so as to avoid having to use Roki against his own Strong Fist, to which the latter would most certainly win AND give away our fighting style to any Hyuuga/Uchiha watchdogs).
Random question: just how good is our evidence for scorch squads and their prevalence? What do we have, other than Kagome's ramblings and Keiko's econometric analysis, which relies on assumptions about things Keiko couldn't know about? There was the scene between Jiraya and Hiruzen, but that would be interpreted in a number of ways.
In particular, even if Kagome had, in fact, encountered documents about something like that, a number of other explanations is plausible:
- Those documents were fake. For example, it could have been a false-flag operation or a misdirection to tie up the resources of the target village in a wild goose chase trying to capture one of those squads in their territory, or to trick them into publicly making a false accusation leading to loss of credibility, or exposing a mole, etc..
- We misunderstood the magnitude of the program: what Kagome actually saw was some village's pilot program that was ultimately discontinued because it wasn't worth the costs and the risks, but Kagome's flawed memory and paranoia blew it out of proportion, extrapolating such "facts" as, say, Konoha being nice by using bloodline talents to only murder the high-chakra children.
- This doesn't make it any less horrible that they even tried such a thing, but it does reduce the urgency somewhat.
That does raise an interesting question. Do NPCs advance by the same rules as PCs (approximately)? In other words, does Rock Lee's spending 80 hours a week running laps around Konoha on his hands not actually improve his strength and stamina until he has had enough novel and dangerous encounters and experiences in which he performs above and beyond, to be able to actually gain strength? If so, a peacetime Konoha genin career might actually put him behind Hazou even in taijutsu.
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rkyeun
Cabbitus Maximus
- Location
- ◕ ‿‿ ◕
I'm going to add this to my reading rotation, and try to work through the backlog. I probably won't be participating in the voting since I'm not going to read all the non-story posts to follow plans and rationale, which will leave me uninformed as to the thread goals and internal culture injokes and such. Also I don't Naruto (but I do rational) so I don't have a grasp of the setting. Yet. At some point the like-binging will probably start spamming your alertboxes as I read my way through the boring parts of my workday.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I suspect simultaneously yes and no. Yes, if an NPC is in stressful situations like we have been they will advance faster by necessity. No, Rock Lee-style strength training is still effective for him -- I suspect if we did something like that we might get a small bonus toward Strength/Stam XP, but at the same time it'd take a LOT of time better spent on research projects, etc.
Ahh, that's pretty much how I started with this quest. Then I got bored one day and started reading some of the discussion. And then people were so hilarious I had to comment, and then I got attached to the characters, so...
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Don't forget, the QMs said the Righteous Face Punching Style is a thing. Which lets you roll more taijutsu and engage dice. Here's the description:
Here's an analysis of it I wrote up from way back.
So, here if Lee has invested 881 XP into the Righteous Face Punching style (about 65% of the XP that Hazou has gained throughout the quest), he should be able to roll 30 dice on his engagement Tac Move, and his Taijutsu, with either being able to boost up to 45 dice if he wants. That said, he could not use any of those dice to dodge any AOE attack, so any of our genin throwing an explosive tag at him would kill him.
- Location
- ...Nice try.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Ahh, good times... that's still one of my favorite updates.
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
It's ok, I don't really Naruto, but it hasn't stopped me yet
Also from my understanding, knowing "facts" about Naruto can hurt exactly as much as it can help in this quest, since the world is so different. It's why there was such a huge problem with our initial village -- we relied on meta-knowledge which was false. So it seems like quest participants with little or no Naruto knowledge are just as useful as quest participants with lots of Naruto knowledge.
Good luck. I tried participating for a while, but eventually realized that I am fundamentally incapable of buying into the concept of "rational" and use of the phrase "hivemind" turns my stomach, so it's really no use for me to try and participate*. So if you buy into "rational" you may have better luck.
*Though even beyond all of that, I really came to despise the "What Next" prompt. I want quests that give me choices to pick from, not open-ended cues. That's not my idea of fun.
- Location
- USA
And that's without opening any gates most likely, too!
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Well, yes, but opening gates in a friendly spar is a little much, don't you think?
- Location
- ...Nice try.
Idea for Discussion: Hazou's Moving Castle
Because:
Why
Preliminary idea of how to spend our xp given this plan:
Do additional levels in MEW get us anything beyond more range?
Because:
- Wakahisa "Barrel-Boy" Noburi is unfortunately identifiable
- Kagome, as much as we all love him, ruins things with his one die of diplomacy
- Time spent travelling is not spent inventing seals
- Post rewards, split the party
- Kagome and Hazou stays in Konoha to invent seals
- Noburi stays in Konoha to learn medicine
- Akane gets better
- Mari goes out and compiles a list of missing-nin with a history of helping civilians who would also be good for recruitment
- Keiko does pangolin stuff
- Recruitment
- If we are clever, we figure out how to make sure potentials who don't work out aren't able to identify that we tried recruiting them without killing them
- Hazou's moving castle
- At this point, our party is ideally large enough for multiple teams. We loop the following:
- Come up with missions
- Send out teams that are well-suited to said missions (as opposed to our current party, which is an all-purpose conglomeration that isn't particularly good at anything)
- Everyone else stays at base.
- This will likely include our sealspeople, so they can seal, and Noburi, so he can be not identified and heal, although they'll likely venture out upon occasion as needed
- Those recovering from injuries stay at base to recover.
- The base is well-defended because it has at least two sealspeople setting up protections.
- We set up a rendezvous date/location with the departing teams, along with intervals
- Establish base there after everyone is recovered
- At this point, our party is ideally large enough for multiple teams. We loop the following:
Why
- Recruitment is a power multiplier.
- Specialization
- If we're a clever little hivemind, it will be harder for Mist hunter-nin to track us down.
- If we're a clever little hivemind, no one will realize we're building a major power.
- Moving makes it hard to track us down
- Hit a lot of points on the list of "some of the things that I use to assign XP are" from the Player Knowledge doc
Preliminary idea of how to spend our xp given this plan:
- Hazou
- If available, technique hacking to 10 (+55)
- 28 to invest elsewhere or save
- Keiko
- Deal Making to 10 (+34)
- Summoning to 12 (+35)
- 57 to invest elsewhere or save
- Two levels of capacity cost 46
- Noburi
- Medical ninjutsu to 10 (+52)
- Medicine to 6 (+15)
- 23.5 to invest elsewhere/save
- Next level in control costs 22
Do additional levels in MEW get us anything beyond more range?
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Making other earth jutsu cheaper
E: and speed of construction, especially if we want to use it in combat
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Thanks; will fix when I'm back at the computer.
Neither do I. Manga art style isn't usually to my preference (although I suppose that could be sampling bias) and the anime made me want to throw something. The setting is great, but the execution of the anime was lousy.
I'm curious -- what does the term mean to you and what is it that you have trouble with?
More volume, more range, discounts on other earth jutsu.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Does it also increase the complexity that Hazou is able to achieve with it? (ie if he's got MEW 20 can he create lifelike statues?)