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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Velorien said:
By the same token, you are only called upon to manage minute windows in Hazō's daily life: to make individual plans for individual missions or other activities. You only need specific pieces of information for that purpose, and only need to take account of a limited number of factors. Hazō does plenty of things each day that do not require your intervention, and he does them just like any other young ninja unless there's some reason he shouldn't. It's only in the segments where you take control that he gains potential for extraordinary success or extraordinary failure.
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That doesn't change the fact that it's unfeasible for us to consistently act sane in those segments where we do take control.

A mental health disorder that appears and disappears intermittently is still a mental health disorder. This is true even if we can take a shit without assistance.

Edit: I don't really have a solution for this other than you all prioritizing Hazou's sanity over player agency. I'm not even sure if I'd want you to do that. I really would just like you to acknowledge that there is a problem, and one that isn't implicitly balanced out by the fact that we don't have to micromanage Hazou every minute of the day.

You ask us for plans that minimize your level of pain while writing (as you should). I just want some indication that you notice there's an analogous dynamic in the other direction. How exactly that balance is struck should be up to you QMs, but there is a balance there.
 
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Velorien said:
By virtue of knowing this, and therefore staying absolutely silent the whole night. Even then, Hazō picked up on his attitude. I'm not sure how you think Hazō could have made the leap from "Kagome hates Minami just like we saw then they first met" to "Kagome is planning to murder her tonight". Hazō's not a Yamanaka.
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So Kagome who couldn't go through a meeting with Jiraiya without almost getting killed with his outburst can stay silent and not give anything away to someone who is intimately aware of how he acts who is trained in deception. Like that should at least get us a roll to figure something out. Give us a huge penalty or something but what's the point of levelling deception if it won't help you discover things that people are trying to hide?
 
If we go back to Leaf, Jiraiya will find out what happened. We're just not good enough to not give it away when he asks 'and what happened to your team leader?' What's more up in the air is how many other people find out about it. Kagome, as it stands, is the sort of person who'd blurt out that he killed Minami even without provocation. If we focus really hard for the rest of this mission on training Kagome basic deception, we can hopefully remove that flaw and allow Kagome to keep what he did a secret so long as he doesn't have to roll for it.

From there, we need to make sure no one rolls against Kagome to find out what happened. He's a sealmaster, so he could sequester himself away in his quarters for a good while without fuss. From there, we need a cover story to present to the rest of Leaf. If we can convince Jiraiya that we didn't just prove we can't be Leaf-nin and that Kagome and maybe all of us should be executed, he could possibly handle the cover story with the clans. But then, even if Kagome's sequestered away, the rest of us are at risk of giving away the answer if we end up rolling against anyone deception-spec (If Shikaku talks with Keiko and brings the subject up, we're toast).

However, our best chance to survive this is now, when everything's shaken up enough that standard legal procedures might not be followed. If we try to keep it secret and it gets out after Naruto's rescued and the war's over, then there's only one way this can go.

I... don't think secrecy is viable. If we go back to Leaf, we should expect for it to become public knowledge and plan around that instead of getting caught flat-footed when our attempts to cover it up fail.
 
Okay, I'm gonna try doing a slightly wider analysis.

I see two possibilities here as to what's going on.

Either we are fundamentally crippled, or Ninjas as a societal caste are fundamentally crippled.

I don't see any options other than those two. Either keeping opsec comes easily to others, for some reason, such that it's actually plausible that we have either an abnormally low trait in this regard or are genuinely disabled. Or it is in fact the case that everybody spends an absurd amount of cognitive overhead tracking who knows what, who is allowed to know what, and who will be able to take benefit of what knowledge if you release it.

This is a paramilitary where apparently, it is high treason to brief your commanding officer. I think the appropriate response to this depends on whether it's case 1 or case 2. In case 1, we are obviously not capable of leading and we need to sew our mouth shut and only communicate via written notes that are sanitized by all stakeholders in descending order of trust. In case 2, we need to go to ground, stop doing missions and dedicate our lives to developing a "geas binding jutsu" in the style of Laundry Files or Quantum Thief's Gevulot that allows people to effectively compartmentalize secrets in their heads, because it is suddenly blindingly obvious why ninja society is stuck in place.
 
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traverseda said:
I for one am mostly not looking for a retcon, and am instead trying to figure out why this sort of thing keeps happening, and how we can prevent it.

The obvious issue is that there's a gap between what we expect to happen and what will happen. We've tried to compensate for that in the past, but the fact that we the players weren't raised in this world is going to keep on causing that kind of friction. If we can't rely on Hazo having common sense, we need to account for that by either putting in a whole lot of extra work (which will make work for the QM's), relying on our team mates more, or forming habits that compensate for it.
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I don't think it can be prevented, barring us having Hazou run his every possible action past Keiko, which wouldn't be possible or fun. This is going to continue to happen because we as the hivemind don't have the same training or thinking that a ninja would actually have, and unless we want Hazou to have more agency in rejecting portions of our plans based on his own training and memories (which I'm perfectly fine with) it's going to continue to happen. Some piece of minutia that we haven't entirely considered or remembered will fuck us over again, and it'll happen again after that. There's no way it's not going to happen again. And if we're constantly trying to plan around every minute detail then plans themselves are going to be huge walls of text that the GMs hate, and we're going to hate making them because it becomes too much like work and not like playing a fun game.

Given this, the only sane thing to do is have Hazou go live in the woods or some far off island with Kagome and never bother anyone again, because eventually some minute detail like this that a properly trained ninja would actually considered but we won't is going to get everyone killed.
 
I used to love this quest. It had its horrible April first posts, and moments where the QMs punched us in the face at really bad moments (I'm thinking of Keiko's wrecking team cohesion by declaring her undying love for Inoue-sensei in the middle of a life-or-death situation), but I stuck with it. However, this is just too much.

Ugh.

If this were a tabletop RPG, this is where my character would commit ritualistic suicide instead of having to choose between his friends, and I'd quit the table (and GM).

Seriously, this seems massively OOC. Good objections have been raised in the last few pages (and bad ones too), so I'll avoid ranting too much.

[X] Plan: A fate worse than death.
Refusing to choose between his friends, our dear (and slightly neurotic) character dispels frantically and commits hara-kiri. Just like Kakashi's dear father.
 
This is the second time that very minor details of a plan that were basically background noise OOC, but were major always-in-the-back-of-your-mind concerns IC, have resulted in a horrifying situation. I think, the way plans are interpreted (by which I mean "with no input from Hazou-the-character and his IC perspective and common sense") is just going to result in repeats of this again and again and again, with nothing we can do to stop it because there'll always be something we miss.

This realisation makes the quest significantly less fun for me, to the point where I'm not sure whether I want to keep playing. And sure, it would be really ego-centric of me to claim that my having fun and continuing to play is somehow important. But it is making the quest less fun for others as well, and that is important.
 
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Oneiros43 said:
So Kagome who couldn't go through a meeting with Jiraiya without almost getting killed with his outburst can stay silent and not give anything away to someone who is intimately aware of how he acts who is trained in deception. Like that should at least get us a roll to figure something out. Give us a huge penalty or something but what's the point of levelling deception if it won't help you discover things that people are trying to hide?
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I should probably have brought this up first, but MfD deliberately doesn't feature intra-party social combat and never has.

Jello_Raptor said:
That doesn't change the fact that it's unfeasible for us to consistently act sane in those segments where we do take control.

A mental health disorder that appears and disappears intermittently is still a mental health disorder. This is true even if we can take a shit without assistance.
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I don't think I'm seeing this panoply of mental health symptoms you describe. Can you give some examples?
 
Enjou said:
I don't think it can be prevented, barring us having Hazou run his every possible action past Keiko, which wouldn't be possible or fun. This is going to continue to happen because we as the hivemind don't have the same training or thinking that a ninja would actually have, and unless we want Hazou to have more agency in rejecting portions of our plans based on his own training and memories (which I'm perfectly fine with) it's going to continue to happen. Some piece of minutia that we haven't entirely considered or remembered will fuck us over again, and it'll happen again after that. There's no way it's not going to happen again. And if we're constantly trying to plan around every minute detail then plans themselves are going to be huge walls of text that the GMs hate, and we're going to hate making them because it becomes too much like work and not like playing a fun game.

Given this, the only sane thing to do is have Hazou go live in the woods or some far off island with Kagome and never bother anyone again, because eventually some minute detail like this that a properly trained ninja would actually considered but we won't is going to get everyone killed.
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No, the QM's hate watchtower scenarios, and we'd just be a huge information liability for Leaf. I think we should take the advice we were given after inventing skywalkers and commit suicide with an explosive tag.
 
I mean, there's a fundamentally unfair trilemma here.

  • It's a basic part of ninja life to check everything you do or say through a huge checklist of "basic ninja sanity".
  • We must explicitly specify everything Hazo does when we have control.
  • We're explicitly not supposed to make huge checklists.

Like. I don't want to say this was a setup, but seeing it like that it seems ... entirely predictable?

[edit]

[vote removed, because changing it later and it broke the bot with time travel]

No fucking way we're leaving Kagome.

Erwing said:
No, the QM's hate watchtower scenarios
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Yeah well the players ain't happy either.
 
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What about from the start of Chapter 126 where we outlined the abilities of the team while paying attention to OPSEC concerns, did we not stay at that same level of secrecy or was the assumption for the planning phase that we did not care anymore about Opsec?
 
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide

Goals:
1. End this continual misery of fuck-up after fuck-up due to the thread not recalling some key fact.
2. Renegotiate any future games (if they happen) based on the premise that the QMs will intervene and change plans to have the PC act "in character" and recall key in-universe facts even if it does not strictly match the exact plan voted for and even if this results in worse outcomes occasionally.
3. Do not survive.
  • "Kai" and make absolutely sure this is not a genjutsu.
  • Hazou will make some excuse to gain some distance from the others to think things over.
  • Hazou will pull out an explosive seal and place it in his mouth.
  • Hazou will activate the explosive seal and end the misery.
 
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[X] Action Plan: The Watchtower

Dispel.

Split off from the group, taking kagome with you. Spend the next 10 years quietly doing seal research in the woods. It's not fast, but it should get us where we want to go eventually and keeps our team relatively safe.

Mass produce simple seals and try to anonymously trade them with leaf for creature comforts, books, and sealing supplies.
 
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Briefvoice said:
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide

Goals:
1. End this continual misery of fuck-up after fuck-up due to the thread not recalling some key fact.
2. Renegotiate any future games (if they happen) based on the premise that the QMs will intervene and change plans to have the PC act "in character" and recall key in-universe facts even if it does not strictly match the exact plan voted for and even if this results in worse outcomes occasionally.
3. Do not survive.
  • Hazou will make some excuse to gain some distance from the others to think things over.
  • Hazou will pull out an explosive seal and place it in his mouth.
  • Hazou will activate the explosive seal and end the misery.
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Can you add a 'dispel' in there on the off-chance this is a genjutsu loyalty test or something?
 
I am upset with the people in the thread saying that we should end the quest. Please do not vote or plan angry or while upset. Give at least an hour or two to calm down from the highly upsetting events which have taken place.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
[X] Plan: A fate worse than death.
Refusing to choose between his friends, our dear (and slightly neurotic) character dispels frantically and commits hara-kiri. Just like Kakashi's dear father.
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Kiba said:
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide
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Erwing said:
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide
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notanautomaton said:
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide
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Briefvoice said:
[X] Action Plan: Commit Suicide

Goals:
1. End this continual misery of fuck-up after fuck-up due to the thread not recalling some key fact.
2. Renegotiate any future games (if they happen) based on the premise that the QMs will intervene and change plans to have the PC act "in character" and recall key in-universe facts even if it does not strictly match the exact plan voted for and even if this results in worse outcomes occasionally.
3. Do not survive.
  • Hazou will make some excuse to gain some distance from the others to think things over.
  • Hazou will pull out an explosive seal and place it in his mouth.
  • Hazou will activate the explosive seal and end the misery.
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Wow there, it's fine that you no longer find the story interesting and don't want to play anymore, but could you quit in an either less or more destructive way? Like, don't just commit suicide, murder our teammates in their sleep then go on a suicidal rampage across the EN stopping when the entire world is destroyed. Or roll with the punches and plan around our last mess. Or just stop reading and posting.
 
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I don't really like this quest at the moment. Maybe I'll unvote later.

[X] Action Plan: Leave Hazou

Our plans keep fucking up Hazou's life, and they will continue to do so with no way out, because he can't use his IC perspective to filter our plans through his own judgement. But that is no reason to kill him with our final plan. Let's just... leave the poor child be.
 
A question for everyone.

The 'spirit of the quest', as described by the QMs, gives us total control over Hazou. What we say, he does. And that opens up doors for us, letting us tell Hazou to do unintuitive things because we know we'll get something good out of them. But it also causes this.

So, my question is this: Should the spirit of the quest be changed?

Clearly, the spirit of the quest exists to serve the enjoyment of the playerbase and the QMs. If we collectively feel that we'd enjoy the quest more by giving Hazou's common sense more power, I think that the spirit of the quest should then change to accommodate that.

Personally, I feel much more frustrated by Hazou messing up like this than I would be if Hazou was less receptive to our plans, so I vote to update the spirit of the quest.

[X] Poll: Change it (Spirit of the quest)
[] Poll: Don't change it (Spirit of the quest)
 
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