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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Voting is over.

Action Plan: Trees Bearing Fruit is victorious. It is fantastic to see two serious competing plans.

I am combining the votes for Flower Plans "Ask Ino AND Mari for help", "Actually ask Ino and Mari for help, and go with it", and "Actually Ask Ino and Mari for Advice", rendering the combination victorious. If anyone sees any reason why such a thing should not be done, speak now or forever hold your Akane.

In accordance with the winning votes, no training is taking place this update.
 
Velorien said:
Don't waste time arguing with her.
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Does the 'her' here refer to Kabuto?

On a metagame level, I worry that this is going to be a push in the direction of ultra-micromanaged plans, as it ends up looking to me a lot like "you never actually said you gave her the flowers", and that worries me.

At some point, we have to be able to rely on Hazou not being a robot we're programming. Like, I also don't think we've specified that Hazou should be sure to use the restroom occasionally at any point during the quest either, but he hasn't exploded yet.
 
OliWhail said:
Does the 'her' here refer to Kabuto?

On a metagame level, I worry that this is going to be a push in the direction of ultra-micromanaged plans, as it ends up looking to me a lot like "you never actually said you gave her the flowers", and that worries me.

At some point, we have to be able to rely on Hazou not being a robot we're programming. Like, I also don't think we've specified that Hazou should be sure to use the restroom occasionally at any point during the quest either, but he hasn't exploded yet.
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"Her" is the nurse presently overseeing intensive care. Kabuto's a world-class specialist - Akane is a special case because literally no one else can do the job, and he has his own motivations, but it's not like he does ordinary doctor work as a matter of course.

As for the flowers, it was more a case of me forgetting, then me remembering but seeing no way to comfortably slot it into the scene as written, then not having time to do an actual rewrite. Since it was a fairly trivial detail, I decided to file it under "small things that don't end up happening this update". Had you emphasised its importance (for which spelling it out would be one means), or had it been in any way important in and of itself, I'd have made more of an effort to fit it in. Either way, you're not going to end up penalised for the omission.
 
By my interpretation, Velorien forgot to write the two or three lines of story where Hazou gives her flowers, and then took the opportunity to screw with us a little.

Ed: And my interpretation is CORRECT. Bow down, people with slightly less accurate mapping - in this one single instance - of our QM's mind!
 
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Of course I missed the chance to give feedback to the altered plans and the vote. A few general thoughts for the next time then.

OliWhail said:
(O) "Keiko, I assume you have considered the utility of brushing up on wind jutsu if you intend to ask for further jutsu training?"
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I know we decided the be slightly less tight lipped about things so we can plan with the team, but please lets not train and reveal jutsu we have managed to keep secret thus far. Especially jutsu like ZR, that are more useful when our enemies don't know about them.

Same thing with Stealth training. Stealth is the number one weakness of the team, lets not train it in public training grounds where we can be spied on by pretty much anyone.

OliWhail said:
At some point, we have to be able to rely on Hazou not being a robot we're programming. Like, I also don't think we've specified that Hazou should be sure to use the restroom occasionally at any point during the quest either, but he hasn't exploded yet.
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It will always be a balancing act between readability, detail, and story progression. If we want to keep our plans shorter yet detailed, we need to tackled fewer scenes and shorter time spans in our plans.

Even if the QMs don't actively try to penalize us for not going into details, they do make more errors that lead to bad things when the plans get too long and the readability plummets.

gbear605 said:
[See, this is why I've been lurking for the past 11 months. Too many unwritten rules and not enough real life time to figure them out]
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Would you mind answering few questions so we can help other people to make the transition from lurkers to participants? (If anyone else wants to answers these, please do.)
  1. Do you feel like you now understand how the written and unwritten rules of voting and participation go?
  2. Have you read the voting guide in my signature? Did it help at all and if not, why?
  3. How could we make the quest more accessible in your opinion?
 
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Twofold said:
Especially jutsu like ZR
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It's the only wind jutsu she knows and I really want her to get that discount before she starts training with Asuma.

I'm not sure how to interpret your criticism of stealth training - if it's our number one weakness, shouldn't we try to mitigate it ASAP? Finally getting more dice seems of higher value to me than people realizing we're not so hot at stealth.
 
OliWhail said:
It's the only wind jutsu she knows and I really want her to get that discount before she starts training with Asuma.
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She can get 1 XP on it for now and level it up when we are not being spied on and we know the actual details of the jutsu so we can advice her on how much it should be leveled considering the big picture.

OliWhail said:
I'm not sure how to interpret your criticism of stealth training - if it's our number one weakness, shouldn't we try to mitigate it ASAP? Finally getting more dice seems of higher value to me than people realizing we're not so hot at stealth.
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We won't be so hot at Stealth ever, so keeping our ineptitude there as a secret is very important. Especially the sort of detailed information where our enemies get to know how many "dice" we have at it. (Translated to IC knowledge of course, Hazou is probably the only one who sees the world as dice.)

It's not like we can afford to get more than few dice at Stealth for now. We can do that once we get out of Konoha.
 
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Velorien said:
I am combining the votes for Flower Plans "Ask Ino AND Mari for help", "Actually ask Ino and Mari for help, and go with it", and "Actually Ask Ino and Mari for Advice", rendering the combination victorious. If anyone sees any reason why such a thing should not be done, speak now or forever hold your Akane.
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*bursts into the chapel* I object!

Or at the very least, I think it might be worth breaking these down and combining the pieces. There are parts that are kinda contradictory, so I think hashing it out is important.

I read "Ask Ino AND Mari for help" (1) as:
  • Flower Plan Akane: Something we choose [highest-rated other Flower Plan Akane]
  • Flower Plan Ino: get Mari's advice "for Akane" and give her that
  • Flower Plan Mari: get Ino's advice "for Akane" and give her that
"Actually ask Ino and Mari for help, and go with it" (2) is a Flower Plan Akane only--I guess I could see glomming it together with (1) if Ino and Mari give contradictory advice, in which case (2)'s Flower Plan Akane also defaults to whatever the highest-rated other FPA is.

"Actually Ask Ino and Mari for Advice" (3) has a Flower Plan Akane and the same Flower Plan Ino as (2).


If we don't assume votes for other Flower Plans include "Ino: None" and "Mari: None" by default, by eaglejarl's posted tally I think we'd just follow (1) and get Akane the Butea?

(Might not be able to respond, since I'm heading out now, but it's fine (of course) if you can see a way to reconciling them and want to do that instead.)
 
Twofold said:
Would you mind answering few questions so we can help other people to make the transition from lurkers to participants? (If anyone else wants to answers these, please do.)
  1. Do you feel like you now understand how the written and unwritten rules of voting and participation go?
  2. Have you read the voting guide in my signature? Did it help at all and if not, why?
  3. How could we make the quest more accessible in your opinion?
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1. I mean, I've read nearly every post in the thread when it was posted, so it's not like I haven't known a lot in the past. The primary issue is that the unwritten rules are unnoticed unless you're actually posting (and thus trying the edge cases). This isn't really something that you can figure out without messing up some, so that's just a necessary part of joining a thread with more than 1300 pages. I know all of the written rules (well, except for the xp rules, I haven't spent the time to figure them out yet, and I don't particularly care to).
2. I read it back in June when you posted it, and I just read it again. It didn't tell me anything new, but I'm not the average lurker.

Twofold said:
If you want to deploy humor or use joke votes in general, please us tags like [jk], [evil], [jashin] etc. instead of the normal vote tags [X], [+] or [-]. It's really annoying when the winning plan is something like [X] Kill Everything and Eat the Corpses when there is 30 minutes left in the voting deadline.
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I see that the active participants in the thread would've been aided by reading it again...

3. The main thing that I've felt against voting is that when there are two competing plans that are mostly the same, figuring out the differences between them is difficult. It would be helpful for people like me if one of the more active posters could summarize the differences between the plans. This also would probably help active voters determine which is better too, which would be beneficial.
 
gbear605 said:
3. The main thing that I've felt against voting is that when there are two competing plans that are mostly the same, figuring out the differences between them is difficult. It would be helpful for people like me if one of the more active posters could summarize the differences between the plans. This also would probably help active voters determine which is better too, which would be beneficial.
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This is a good suggestion, and I think we used to do that more early on in the quest.
 
Langevin said:
*bursts into the chapel* I object!

Or at the very least, I think it might be worth breaking these down and combining the pieces. There are parts that are kinda contradictory, so I think hashing it out is important.

I read "Ask Ino AND Mari for help" (1) as:
  • Flower Plan Akane: Something we choose [highest-rated other Flower Plan Akane]
  • Flower Plan Ino: get Mari's advice "for Akane" and give her that
  • Flower Plan Mari: get Ino's advice "for Akane" and give her that
"Actually ask Ino and Mari for help, and go with it" (2) is a Flower Plan Akane only--I guess I could see glomming it together with (1) if Ino and Mari give contradictory advice, in which case (2)'s Flower Plan Akane also defaults to whatever the highest-rated other FPA is.

"Actually Ask Ino and Mari for Advice" (3) has a Flower Plan Akane and the same Flower Plan Ino as (2).


If we don't assume votes for other Flower Plans include "Ino: None" and "Mari: None" by default, by eaglejarl's posted tally I think we'd just follow (1) and get Akane the Butea?

(Might not be able to respond, since I'm heading out now, but it's fine (of course) if you can see a way to reconciling them and want to do that instead.)
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I agree that this is accurate. Here is another explanation of it:

The two plans "Actually ask Ino and Mari for help, and go with it" (2) and "Actually Ask Ino and Mari for Advice" (3) are very similar, but have a couple specifics different. They both are focused on following Ino and Mari's advice for giving flowers to Akane. (2) talks about compromising between the Ino and Mari if they disagree and also mentions ignoring Ino if she gives bad advice. (3) has more specifics on what we should guide Ino and Mari to. These two plans could be easily combined.

On the other hand, "Ask Ino AND Mari for help" (1) is us giving Akane the flowers that we decided (the highest-rated other FPA), and then giving Ino the flowers that Mari suggests and giving Mari the flowers that Ino suggests. This plan intends to cause hilarity, which *probably isn't* what we want to do for something like this. This plan is completely unable to be combined with (2) and (3) as far as I can tell.
 
You know what, for simplicity's sake, I'm just going to go with "Ask Ino AND Mari for help", since it's tied for first place for the flower plans.
 
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Velorien said:
Maybe I'm tired, but I can't process this post at all. Could you rephrase?
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Check the post I just posted, I tried to rephrase it.

If it were my choice, we would go with the combination of (2) and (3) (they got five combined votes), since they don't rely on IRL flower knowledge, but (1) got the most votes for itself (five votes solely for it), so it probably won.
 
Actually, the technical way that we should do this according to "Ask Ino AND Mari for help" (1) is to combine these and give Akane the flowers that Ino and Mari suggested, while *also* giving Ino the flowers that Mari suggested and giving Mari the flowers that Ino suggested.
 
gbear605 said:
3. The main thing that I've felt against voting is that when there are two competing plans that are mostly the same, figuring out the differences between them is difficult. It would be helpful for people like me if one of the more active posters could summarize the differences between the plans. This also would probably help active voters determine which is better too, which would be beneficial.
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Twofold said:
This is a good suggestion, and I think we used to do that more early on in the quest.
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Yep. I used to do that a lot 6-7 months ago (though, we also had more action plans per vote, and they were all shorter). If somebody wants to start doing that, it's honestly not that hard: just quote the two (or more) action plans, and give bullets on what they do or why you voted for one over the other. I was going to do it last night, but wound up being busy (which is also why I didn't do a ton of last minute edits to my plan).
 
It also occurs to me that neither the action plan nor the flower plan specify what you're actually trying to express towards Ino or Mari. Look forward to the update.
 
Velorien said:
It also occurs to me that neither the action plan nor the flower plan specify what you're actually trying to express towards Ino or Mari. Look forward to the update.
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Well, the other flower plan was trying to express who Akane was and what her why she was important in our group, so maybe you could fold that in too?

*hopes desperately*
 
Dictator4Hire said:
This right here is why the action plans keep getting longer and more detailed. :/
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Pretty much no matter how detailed we make an action plan, there will be things which aren't explicitly mentioned, which come up in the writing. I assume as a QM it is difficult to extrapolate from huge beasts of action plans which are incredibly detailed in some sections what players intend in other sections with little said. This idea was the original reason I started including "goals" in action plans. It is also a large part of why I am currently trying to trim down action plans: making it more clear in situations like these what our intensions would be by reducing the amount we write on random things.

That said, you make a correct observation. I just think a better solution for both players and QMs is to make smaller, more compact, understandable, and goal oriented action plans, not massive detailed behemoths. But I might be wrong, and it's not like the action plan I wrote for this update was particularly short.
*shrug*
 
Radvic said:
That said, you make a correct observation. I just think a better solution for both players and QMs is to make smaller, more compact, understandable, and goal oriented action plans, not massive detailed behemoths. But I might be wrong, and it's not like the action plan I wrote for this update was particularly short.
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I think everyone wants shorter plans, it's just that nobody knows how to make them.
 
I suppose I'd better clarify: it's not that I'm plotting evil in regard to the flower plans (more than usual), but that I have genuinely been given no instructions, nor is the will of the hivemind on this matter clear, so I have no choice but to improvise based on my own understanding.
 
Velorien said:
It also occurs to me that neither the action plan nor the flower plan specify what you're actually trying to express towards Ino or Mari. Look forward to the update.
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I thought it was pretty clear we weren't trying to express anything in particular towards either of them, and just wanted to giggle at their confusion? We did fail to specify what Hazou wants to express toward Akane, but I trust him to be sufficiently youthful in that department.
 
OliWhail said:
I thought it was pretty clear we weren't trying to express anything in particular towards either of them, and just wanted to giggle at their confusion? We did fail to specify what Hazou wants to express toward Akane, but I trust him to be sufficiently youthful in that department.
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Wait. We voted for a plan which intends to confuse Ino and make her think we're acting randomly... again? Sigh. I guess I ought to have read the flower plans.
 
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