- Location
- Nova Scotia
Isn't Hazo already sort of doing the suicidal ideation thing then?
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
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
Now that I've had about an hour, I think I can coherently respond to the update itself, and what I think are the real reasons this bothers me.
My first issue I take is with not being able to notice Kagome's plot. Failing a roll? Fine, our fault for not investing; while it is a harsh response to a much lesser mistake, reality doesnt grade on a curve. Fail a hard, boosted DC check? Even more out of scale, but this is a rational quest, and its not like fuckups don't happen to smart, even incredibly smart, people in real life. While it may have been a mistake, and I don't fault you guys for messing up once or twice, the fact remains that in the past we have (non-edited!) examples of getting to roll vs teammates; see Kagome's chase after Kouta, where we got (and failed) a tacmove roll to prevent Kagome and were only rescued by him also failing his tacmove roll, or in the already linked update where Keiko beats us in deception. It's entirely reasonable to hold players to the standard of not making foolish assumptions, if a bit assymetrical given the information disparities, but an entirely different one to have negative consequences for mechanics oppositely from how they were displayed; from the perspective of someone who isn't a QM and doesn't have all this quest policy knowledge, with this level of consequence it seems like <I imagine I would feel> if we died because Tacmov couldn't be used to escape fights; there's no amount of work and planning that can pull that sort of information from the ether. Furthermore, if the reason we aren't "all ... happy Mari mind-slaves by now" is because we're partied up, why the hell weren't we (and everyone without social skills) mind slaves before we even got anywhere near the chance to party up; why are we even able to contemplate acting outside of the best interests of mist? I'd been assuming they just didn't work like that, but as is this seriously stretches my suspension of disbeleif.
The next issue, and I think one that's been hidden (at least from me) by the glorious prose and our general risk-averse nature, is how incredibly terrible our plans are as guiding tools. At some level, that and time have to be limitations; 200+ well educated adults and teens in time acceleration doing your planning is incredibly broken, even if only 15-20 are active at a time. At the same time, however, the response to this appears to be far in excess of that. Any action that is inadequately specified is interpreted in the worst way possible, and if it's adequately specified there's only room for maybe one action before the vote becomes too big. If we play conservative with one action votes and extreme care, you as QMs dont like writing it and we get crippled by lack of XP, while if we don't we get stuff like this. Maybe there's a perfect way to balance these as is, but thus far we have fairly solid emperical evidence that it just doesnt work. I'm not sure what the right answer is, which I suppose makes this rather less useful, but it's definitally an issue. Maybe longer voting periods will help, but I doubt it will be big enough to fix rather than ameliorate the problem. I doubt the character interpretation will be of any us either, because while I may be pessimistic every single time Hazou has disobeyed plans, such as his outburst in the library, it has been to our detriment.
Maybe what we have now really is the best we can get, but somehow , I dunno - intuitively, that seems very unlikely.
My first issue I take is with not being able to notice Kagome's plot. Failing a roll? Fine, our fault for not investing; while it is a harsh response to a much lesser mistake, reality doesnt grade on a curve. Fail a hard, boosted DC check? Even more out of scale, but this is a rational quest, and its not like fuckups don't happen to smart, even incredibly smart, people in real life. While it may have been a mistake, and I don't fault you guys for messing up once or twice, the fact remains that in the past we have (non-edited!) examples of getting to roll vs teammates; see Kagome's chase after Kouta, where we got (and failed) a tacmove roll to prevent Kagome and were only rescued by him also failing his tacmove roll, or in the already linked update where Keiko beats us in deception. It's entirely reasonable to hold players to the standard of not making foolish assumptions, if a bit assymetrical given the information disparities, but an entirely different one to have negative consequences for mechanics oppositely from how they were displayed; from the perspective of someone who isn't a QM and doesn't have all this quest policy knowledge, with this level of consequence it seems like <I imagine I would feel> if we died because Tacmov couldn't be used to escape fights; there's no amount of work and planning that can pull that sort of information from the ether. Furthermore, if the reason we aren't "all ... happy Mari mind-slaves by now" is because we're partied up, why the hell weren't we (and everyone without social skills) mind slaves before we even got anywhere near the chance to party up; why are we even able to contemplate acting outside of the best interests of mist? I'd been assuming they just didn't work like that, but as is this seriously stretches my suspension of disbeleif.
The next issue, and I think one that's been hidden (at least from me) by the glorious prose and our general risk-averse nature, is how incredibly terrible our plans are as guiding tools. At some level, that and time have to be limitations; 200+ well educated adults and teens in time acceleration doing your planning is incredibly broken, even if only 15-20 are active at a time. At the same time, however, the response to this appears to be far in excess of that. Any action that is inadequately specified is interpreted in the worst way possible, and if it's adequately specified there's only room for maybe one action before the vote becomes too big. If we play conservative with one action votes and extreme care, you as QMs dont like writing it and we get crippled by lack of XP, while if we don't we get stuff like this. Maybe there's a perfect way to balance these as is, but thus far we have fairly solid emperical evidence that it just doesnt work. I'm not sure what the right answer is, which I suppose makes this rather less useful, but it's definitally an issue. Maybe longer voting periods will help, but I doubt it will be big enough to fix rather than ameliorate the problem. I doubt the character interpretation will be of any us either, because while I may be pessimistic every single time Hazou has disobeyed plans, such as his outburst in the library, it has been to our detriment.
Maybe what we have now really is the best we can get, but somehow , I dunno - intuitively, that seems very unlikely.
I'm not sure if inability to find them is your actual issue, but if it is it's one that I can definitally remedy. The two best examples I can think of are Ignition, although that one generally has longer plans focused around social activity rather than day to day, and Adfligo Systema
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
Not by my reading. The thread definitely is, but Hazou is just in shock.
- Location
- ...Nice try.
[x]Lore update
Seeing all the interactive decision making involved in this quest, I'm starting a reading group for Game Theory*. I've made a Google Form for anyone who's interested.
*I've read several sections and am over the moon with how good it is; it manages to mix full rigor with intuition better than any other book I've ever read. The mathematical prerequisites... given the crowd I'm addressing, I don't want to say "high", so maybe minor in math-ish? It assumes, for instance, you know what a compact set is and familiarity with some linear algebra and graph theory (at least) is necessary to keep up with what's going on. It's absolutely a math book. My background is primarily in pure mathematics, so I love it. I anticipate the mileage of anyone whose background is "Mathematics for X" or less to vary significantly.
Seeing all the interactive decision making involved in this quest, I'm starting a reading group for Game Theory*. I've made a Google Form for anyone who's interested.
*I've read several sections and am over the moon with how good it is; it manages to mix full rigor with intuition better than any other book I've ever read. The mathematical prerequisites... given the crowd I'm addressing, I don't want to say "high", so maybe minor in math-ish? It assumes, for instance, you know what a compact set is and familiarity with some linear algebra and graph theory (at least) is necessary to keep up with what's going on. It's absolutely a math book. My background is primarily in pure mathematics, so I love it. I anticipate the mileage of anyone whose background is "Mathematics for X" or less to vary significantly.
- Location
- Australia
The thread is supposed to be Hazou's subconscious
- Location
- Yes.
...
...
Jesus, no wonder Hazou's a fucking wreck.
hehhehehehhahhHHAHAHAHAHHAHHHAHAHAHHAHAH
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
While I agree with some of what you've said here, I think that I should point out that you're suffering from survivorship bias with respect to the portion highlighted in orange.
You can see EagleJarl's patreon for a list of some of what he's worked on and his fanfiction.net profile for more of it. I think there's more out there but I can't remember where right now.
You can see Velorien's fanfiction.net profile for some of what he's written and also his patreon.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of anything written by OliWhail other than this. If someone can correct me, I will be eternally (or at least for a couple of hours) grateful.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Me: Hm. The players are correct that they didn't have information that Hazō did and that the information would have been material to their decisions. I'm not convinced that there's a big enough issue here to justify a retcon (or anything else) but it's at least worth considering. Maybe I should get their input about what a fix might look like IFF we decided to change anything.
Me: [comes to the thread]
Various people: Everything that we don't overspecify is interpreted as negatively as possible, the QMs are punishing us, this wasn't fair, I'm ragequitting.
Me: [closes thread]
Me: [comes to the thread]
Various people: Everything that we don't overspecify is interpreted as negatively as possible, the QMs are punishing us, this wasn't fair, I'm ragequitting.
Me: [closes thread]
Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
OR!
We could just give away our most prized possession because someone will have more use for it than us, and shave our hair. Also, we should definitely make sure to tell everyone in our team how much we love them.
I struggled through Gödel, Escher, Bach, but that sounds fun.
I'll give it a go when I've gotten through most of items on my to-do list and managed to do it with some spoons left over.
Rihaku
The Internet
I don't think this was anyone's "fault" per se. I roughly concur with previous posts that diagnose the problem as one of how the player-Hazou-world interface was structured. There were similar mumblings after the killbox but insufficient uproar to get the system changed. I sympathize with the player who noted that "heroic responsibility is... [often] too high a responsibility to rise to for a game." To a large extent I agree with @Jello_Raptor 's posts on the subject.
I agree with @Veedrac's analysis that the circumstances which transpired did not seem like the correct outcome of the world simulation. I had similar thoughts when reading the update myself. My impression is that analysis post was actually extremely important and did not receive enough attention.
From my perspective, those above-mentioned points distill the takeaway insights from this incident.
To @eaglejarl, I understand completely how it feels to work for 20-30-40 hours a week and yet receive outlandish and improbable criticism. "I have already gone so far above and beyond for so long, I do not owe these people anything." However, we also well understand that the world does not owe us anything for our efforts. If the result you desire is the highest-probability chance that this quest continues with a vibrant and invested playerbase, I would leave no option unconsidered. The modest legitimacy loss of a retcon (the Youthsuit was already retconned) in light of the problematic player-Hazou interface could well be the lesser evil.
As an aside - I understand that you did not do so with unseemly intentions, but repeatedly quoting those readers who voiced support in order to thank them is not a good look, nor is the particular wording on the last two sentences of the "Agency: Yes" Poll option. Expression like this can be an emotional buttress in the moment, but it strongly reinforces the negative stereotypes that people in a situation like this are just waiting to bring to bear against you. No one will say anything, they will just become more biased against the GMs, the situation will become more chaotic, more dominated by the unspoken dynamics that dictate which portion of the audience is actually bothering to speak up at the moment, etc...
There are many times I've looked at stuff written while even moderately influenced by "the heat of the moment" and cringed at how unnecessary it turned out to be. Being a GM, especially on the internet, sometimes feels like being a politician because of how circumspect you have to be. You have to be that way because of how much weight your words carry. It's unfortunate because you don't get paid enough for that shit. But paid or not, that is how internet communities often turn out.
I agree with @Veedrac's analysis that the circumstances which transpired did not seem like the correct outcome of the world simulation. I had similar thoughts when reading the update myself. My impression is that analysis post was actually extremely important and did not receive enough attention.
From my perspective, those above-mentioned points distill the takeaway insights from this incident.
To @eaglejarl, I understand completely how it feels to work for 20-30-40 hours a week and yet receive outlandish and improbable criticism. "I have already gone so far above and beyond for so long, I do not owe these people anything." However, we also well understand that the world does not owe us anything for our efforts. If the result you desire is the highest-probability chance that this quest continues with a vibrant and invested playerbase, I would leave no option unconsidered. The modest legitimacy loss of a retcon (the Youthsuit was already retconned) in light of the problematic player-Hazou interface could well be the lesser evil.
As an aside - I understand that you did not do so with unseemly intentions, but repeatedly quoting those readers who voiced support in order to thank them is not a good look, nor is the particular wording on the last two sentences of the "Agency: Yes" Poll option. Expression like this can be an emotional buttress in the moment, but it strongly reinforces the negative stereotypes that people in a situation like this are just waiting to bring to bear against you. No one will say anything, they will just become more biased against the GMs, the situation will become more chaotic, more dominated by the unspoken dynamics that dictate which portion of the audience is actually bothering to speak up at the moment, etc...
There are many times I've looked at stuff written while even moderately influenced by "the heat of the moment" and cringed at how unnecessary it turned out to be. Being a GM, especially on the internet, sometimes feels like being a politician because of how circumspect you have to be. You have to be that way because of how much weight your words carry. It's unfortunate because you don't get paid enough for that shit. But paid or not, that is how internet communities often turn out.
- Location
- Maybe?
Switching to
[x] Action Plan: Lore Update
because I don't want to ruin it for those who want to keep playing.
But: I feel the real story of the quest now is: SI goes into Naruto, fucks up once and dies, world apathetic and unsurprised.
We are not Ninja. Hazo is, except apparently when we take control. This was as predictable as a ninja winning against a civvy.
[edit]
Sorry about that. I used time travel to insert the vote before your post to avoid double posting. I removed it now.
[edit]
Shit sorry.
[x] Action Plan: Lore Update
because I don't want to ruin it for those who want to keep playing.
But: I feel the real story of the quest now is: SI goes into Naruto, fucks up once and dies, world apathetic and unsurprised.
We are not Ninja. Hazo is, except apparently when we take control. This was as predictable as a ninja winning against a civvy.
[edit]
Sorry about that. I used time travel to insert the vote before your post to avoid double posting. I removed it now.
[edit]
Shit sorry.
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Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
Relevant. I wish it weren't so.
There's nuanced positions on both sides, but the strawman/knee-jerk reaction is too easy.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I disagree with this. While it may be the case that some might interpret it poorly, I think that offering gratitude to those that are gracious is not something to be looked down upon.
Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
I have my own personal fights with ideation and this is one of the biggest fucking reasons. You're not entirely wrong. But watching your words and actions constantly like that fucking sucks.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
First of all, thank you @eaglejarl, @Velorien, @OliWhail for making such a fun ride. Likely the easiest fix would be add in a scene two chapters ago about the team's reaction to our specific advice, and then add one more scene onto this chapter while removing the whole Minami-is-paste issue. We'll want to handle the interface by throwing in a lore update and then figuring out the best way forward from there, so we can get it worked out over the weekend which just so happens to let you guys do Sunday updates and maybe not lighting all your spoons fire doing 20 hours a week trying to get everything working post TGR.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
It does.
I used to have a really hard time with watching everything I say myself, but eventually I just got used to it.
- Location
- Yes.
Had the same problem. Then I decided to stop giving a fuck and PUT A SMILE ON MY FACE.
That and the braindead comments. They really help.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
That really isn't my reading of this @eaglejarl . I think we've been pretty consistent with complaining about how the system, the interface, causes these problems. Some people definitely did whine, but stuff like what you just posted makes me feel like you're ignoring legitimate criticism and not taking any of the responsibility for the mistakes that caused this, that keeps causing this.
There is a lot of legitimate criticism, and when you pithily ignore criticism like this, well that's not something I appreciate at least. Yes some people are really upset by this, and yes you are doing the entirely as a volunteer, but I think a lot of the criticism here is legitimate. I don't think that kind of dismissive attitude is really helpful.
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- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I only see one truly negative post in the past 100 post.
Rihaku
The Internet
It is not a matter of "should" - I agree he did not have any unseemly intentions - but simply the empirical result of "how this will be interpreted?" There are some who will be as charitable as you, but most humans are not that kind, especially in the safety of their own heads.
Yes, it does suck. There is a reason most internet and RL celebrities are in therapy and/or extremely fucked up psychologically: it takes a lot of experience and/or luck to consistently wield authority and withstand public scrutiny without occasionally fucking up or becoming fucked up. No one will give you any points for doing it well, unless you do spectacularly well. But even a minor slip up will cause instant judgement.
A player goes on a temper tantrum, by the next page most people don't even remember. A GM lets slip something even slightly heated, everyone will remember - even if no one says anything.
Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
At first I was about to snark at you and then I realized this was probably a reference to your avatar.
Well played.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
I think that this post is a good explanation for why this seems at least dubious from a simulationanist perspective. I bring it up because while there are plenty of people talking about the meta-level issues with how the QM'ing is being done, that's the only real legitimate simulationist complaint I've seen, and I think it's pretty compelling.
I don't have access to the worldbuilding info, but it seems like the simulationist aspects may have been gotten wrong as well. It's certainly pretty far from what I'd expect in these cases.
I don't have access to the worldbuilding info, but it seems like the simulationist aspects may have been gotten wrong as well. It's certainly pretty far from what I'd expect in these cases.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I feel that both of you are... forgetting, maybe? Dunno what the best word would be -- that the QMs are quite invested in this too. They'd have to be to deal with us every day
That they are affected by perceived-negative comments (such as the one at the top of the page) is a certainty. Comments do not have to be wholly negative to be tinged with enough for it to bleed through in the tone of writing.