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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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@Radvic Finding out who's caravanning chocolate doesn't seem too difficult: just shadow Willy Wonka and find out who bought from him in bulk, ask for merchant caravans, then cross-reference the lists.

I was also thinking of luring chakra monsters and stealing while the ninjas/bodyguards are busy fighting them. If we found enemies like the monstercrabs and brought them over it would be, at the least, a good distraction for a Chunin-level ninja (at Hazou's level). I'm just putting the plan out there in case stealing does become necessary.
 
faflec said:
@Radvic Finding out who's caravanning chocolate doesn't seem too difficult: just shadow Willy Wonka and find out who bought from him in bulk, ask for merchant caravans, then cross-reference the lists.

I was also thinking of luring chakra monsters and stealing while the ninjas/bodyguards are busy fighting them. If we found enemies like the monstercrabs and brought them over it would be, at the least, a good distraction for a Chunin-level ninja (at Hazou's level). I'm just putting the plan out there in case stealing does become necessary.
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Yeah, but that process of finding out stuff takes time. My guess would be ~4 hours of time. Time we aren't getting paid for. That costs us up to
4 hours X 3 people X ~200 ryo/hour/person = 2,400 ryo
if we could have had the three of us working as body guards during that time, more likely around 500 ryo (by only sending one person, and being less optimistic about our earning potential)

On attacking the caravan, the ninja will not likely leave their guard position, i.e. they'll keep the caravan in sight. While adding chakra monsters to the fight will be a distraction (for both of us), it'll also put them on high alert, and may hurt us just as much (if we wind up in a three-way melee), and would require a plan for luring chakra monsters while not using one of us to do so (or losing combat potential for an actual fight). I also find it unlikely we can be stealthy enough to sneak past ninjas on high alert doing combat with chakra monsters that we lured to the caravan, find the chocolate, get through whatever locks/traps they've got on it, and leave before the ninja have dealt with the chakra monsters (maybe 10 seconds?).
 
faflec said:
If canon!Tsunade was rusty enough that she struggled against friggin Kabuto I wouldn't be surprised if her Stealth/Disguise roll was so bad. Especially if she didn't especially care to be stealthy, which speaks wonders as to how good she really is.
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Remember that Kabuto was jobbing so damn hard until that fight. He's on Kakashi's level, and he was Orochimaru's aprentice. Also he knew that Tsunade was haemophobic and made sure she saw blood soon in the fight to throw her off her game.
 
@MadScientist He was on P1 Kakashi's level, right after his wake-up call after being so rusty from leaving ANBU and related bullshit. I do not rate this version of Kabuto highly, especially considering his fight against Naruto immediately after.
 
@Velorien @eaglejarl how much time remains until our time limit for meeting Kagome? Are we 6 days away, 5 days away, or 4 days away? I'm hoping to write a plan which uses low risk methods to get 30,000 ryo but it's hard when it's a little unclear if we're currently in the day we met Kagome, the day after, or two days after.
 
Getting 28000 ryo for chocolate seems stupid.

I'm not sure it's even possible in our timeframe.

We should just burgle the chocolate merchant and set his shop on fire to cover our tracks.

Evil Plan Counter: "Ding!"
 
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MadScientist said:
Evil Plan Counter: "Ding!"
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"Wait a second, this thing's only supposed to ring for Gratuitously Evil Plans."

"Well we can either fix the counter, or change the plan."

"Fuck the counter, it took me three weeks crawling in the ducts to fix it last time."

"Alright, we gas the town, then set it on fire, then blow the school up, then salt the ashes."

"Ding!"

"Efficiency at work."
 
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Hm. If we decide to steal merchandise from the chocolate vendor i heavily suggest investing 6 of Hazous XP to get to Mechanical Aptitude 4. According to the system rules it is the skill required for lockpicking. We absolutely need that at a decent level to break into the shop silently, and Hazou gets a bonus to the skill from his bloodline.

It would really be embarrassing if our attempt to break into a candy shop was foiled by a civilian grade lock.

I dont think we could call ourselves ninja after that.
 
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I've brainstormed a few more options.
  • Borrow the (remaining) Money from Inoue-Sensei.
  • Do not buy the chocolate
    • Cuts costs in half
    • Get Inoue (With her super-high Diplomacy) to help us write to note to Twitch asking him to accept more Tea and Bread instead.
      • We will likely face challenge dice, but with the rest of the supplies, some extra, a good explanation and an overwhelming Diplomacy advantage, the worst that should happen is that we have to go back and earn more money.
      • Price out some more camping gear. If Twitch is missing a kettle, he might appreciate some other basic supplies as well.
  • Get Inoue or Wakahisa (preserves his feelings) to negotiate again for Chocolate at another store.
    • If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
    • Going to every Chocolate store and checking out the price would be something a normal person did for something that expensive
    • Even if it takes a day, still probably worth the ROI
    • The QMs might have already factored this into the roll @eaglejarl ?
@eaglejarl Did we get a good enough look at those seals on the roof and tables of the casino to replicate them? If not, how much time do we think we would need to spend staring at them to learn them? A minute? an Hour? I am aware that we would not know what they do, but it still seems knowing the designs come in handy.

Can we get a list of all the seals that we can copy added to the Character Sheet?
 
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[X] Bodyguard work.
- [X] Do not try getting fake references under henge.
Something like this will fall apart and draw attention with even a bit of digging.
[X] Gamble for low stakes in mundane disguises.
- [X] Lose our own stake, as Nobby suggested.
- [X] Work out signals we can use to coordinate with the others.
- [X] Practice beforehand so that the others understand how to play.
[X] Stay away from the Yak until Inoue can advise us/negotiate for us.
- [X] If confronted, try to be nonthreatening.
-- [X] Agree to nothing.
 
Am I misunderstanding something, or can we just easily make all the money we need by playing small craps games? When Hazou says that the games are low stakes (50 ryo a bet). I'd expect that to mean an individual could come out net +100 ryo without seeming suspicious, maybe even 200. If three people do this, then we are net +300 or 600 ryo from a single visit to a gambling area. If we visit just the 12 places Hazou found once each day, that's net +3,600-7,200 ryo per day. If we spend an additional, say, 5 hours looking, we could potentially expand that to 30 rings, which may add additional levels of safety. If we each win about 100 ryo per visit to a place, and spend about a half hour a visit (or average +200 ryo per hour visit), that nets us +600 ryo/hour, for however long we want to work. If we assume we have 4 days, and can work 12 hours a day, that equals +7,200 ryo/day = +28,800 ryo over four days.

LaTeX:
\[\frac{200 \text{ ryo}}{\text{person}\times\text{visit}} \times 3 \text{ people} \times \frac{12\text{ visits}}{\text{day}}\times 4\text{ days} = 28800\text{ ryo}\]

Help me find reasons the above doesn't just solve our money problems.
 
The one risk I see, @Radvic, is if the ninjas/owners/Yakuza minions keep track of who shows up. Obviously this is mitigated by having different Henge on but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out when we would put it on without risking notice from someone (e.g., if we use Henge in the inn the innkeepers would wonder what we're doing in the place without permission).

Also a bit worried about going to the high-end places because I suspect those high-end seals are designed to fuck us out of our money; make us fail a roll or something. Either that or anti-Henge shockers.
 
faflec said:
The one risk I see, @Radvic, is if the ninjas/owners/Yakuza minions keep track of who shows up. Obviously this is mitigated by having different Henge on but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out when we would put it on without risking notice from someone (e.g., if we use Henge in the inn the innkeepers would wonder what we're doing in the place without permission).

Also a bit worried about going to the high-end places because I suspect those high-end seals are designed to fuck us out of our money; make us fail a roll or something. Either that or anti-Henge shockers.
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The math I posted assumes only going to low-stakes places, so no worries on ninja guards or nasty seals. From how I read the update, it seems like there's gambling happening outside the casinos, likely in bars and stuff. Relevant text bolded below.

eaglejarl said:
Hazou hurried to fill the awkward silence. "Wakahisa, great job with the prices. I think I've got some good news; there's a lot of craps games in this town, which is something I'm pretty good at. Most of them are low stakes--say, fifty ryo a bet--but I found twelve just in a couple of hours. There's also a couple of casinos with higher stakes; I didn't do any betting, but I saw some craps games with a hundred ryo minimums and five hundred table max."
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This means it won't be highly regulated, but is just casual games happening at bars or something.

Also, I think it's unlikely that someone would trace this type of a scheme. It would require number crunching at a scale almost certainly requiring computers (to determine the difference between this and just bad luck), especially if it's just over four days. Unless the random strangers gambling in bars are all owned by the Yakuza, daily report earnings, know precisely how much they get within a 300-600 ryo margin, and care enough about a streak of bad luck over four days to spend valuable resources investigating it. Whoever runs the business is more likely to chalk it up to bad luck than anything else (especially if it doesn't last more than 4 days). Based on the money amounts listed as gambled at the actual casinos (1000+ ryo), and the price of bodyguards (800 ryo for a respected one for an hour), it seems unlikely that someone will care enough about just 28,800 ryo, even if it is all owned by the Yakuza.

We'd need somewhere between 12-48 different henges, but that seems doable. As for where we could transform, pretty much any alley, definitely not the inn (though we'd practice there). We've got enough awareness and stealth we should be able to reliably find a half a minute to change, and I think we can mechanically henge into something we've practiced before in under thirty seconds (yay henge 2).
 
Oh, I'd assumed the casinos were approximately the same quality, and expected ninjas in most of them. My mistake.
 
We could probably also use this as an opportunity to increase our henge and deception skills if we wanted (seeing as we're getting quite a bit of XP)
 
@Radvic, I am very much in favor of raising the money we need to get by small-stakes gambling.
It is moderately risky, but much better than the alternatives.

Other options (bodyguard job, pit fighting, high-class casinos with security and seals, contacting Yakuza and/or ninjas) can unmask us. We don't want that, so let's not do it.

Let's also suggest training to our teammates, and improve team cohesion some more. Now that Noburi is probably placated, at least temporarily, we can start dealing with Keiko. She seems to dislike Noburi for some reason.

It's also a good time to spend some of our XP (but let's keep enough to level sealing to 4)

@Sigil, I agree that chocolate is too damn expensive, renegotiating the price or stealing it is probably the way to go. I also like the suggestion of leveling up mechanical aptitude.

@eaglejarl @Velorien @AugSphere @Jackercracks can we use mechanical aptitude combined with sealing to make traps?
 
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They've said we could increase social skills and stealth. I'm guessing that if the plan we decide on involves henging 12 times a day, they could be convinced to count that as training for henge to increase our henge. Especially if we explicitly had a period of time in whatever plan we vote for which includes practicing henging at the inn before going out and using henges. Also especially since we just got control over Noburi and Keiko and didn't really have enough time to vote for their builds (at least, I wasn't online from the time we found out we could do that and when the vote ended, and my plan wound up winning :p).

I'll be back tomorrow morning and can write-up a small-stakes gambling and training plan based on what people debate tonight (or will just vote for a plan if someone else makes a good one - e.g. has contingencies, reasonably low risk, includes spending XP in a reasonable manner).

Also, keep in mind everything changes when the fire nation attacks Inoue returns.
 
The level of henge mostly determines the ability to use different forms freely and also the cast time. At level one all you can manage is a human, and even in a human from fighting with longer or shorter limbs and different centre of mass/inertia cripples combat effectiveness. As you level up the skill, you'll be able to move better in the changed forms. You'd probably be able to change into a bird and start flying about level 15, around level 25 you'd be able to change into and freely move in arbitrary forms (although still subject to some restrictions). As for Taijutsu bonus, sure, as long as you're prepared for your form to pop every time you deliver a strike. At higher levels you'd be able to recast it in the middle of the combat with no problem, so it'd still be useful.
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tl;dr Henge doesn't give us the ability to disguise ourselves better, only cast time and ability to turn into non-human/inhuman forms. We probably shouldn't level Henge as much as diplomacy/deception for this reason, at least for this mission.
 
Actually you guys bring up a good idea. What stops Wakahisa from re-disguising himself as someone else, with a different backstory, and renegotiate with the shopkeeper for chocolate? At the worst we fail another die roll, whoop de doop.
 
Because it would be really odd for a bunch of people one after another to come in and negotiate just for chocolate. We would probably be better off varying out haggling a bit. But yeah haggling a couple more times at most 4 more would likely be fine if its spread out over the next few days and depending on how often that luxury merchant gets clients...
 
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