- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
And then wiped our minds, so we have no idea.
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 open voting
Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
I thought she just did that once, shortly after the Swamp of Death?
There was another time she admitted it, wasn't there? Her breakdown around the time of Snow?
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Yep, she told us during the beach episode, then wiped us. She also told us while we were in Iron, and didn't wipe us.
Yes. It's just with all this, "Everyone hates and despises missing-nin," that we've been getting lately, I'm starting to think about how that should make the three genin feel.
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
I can see that. They thought they'd finally have back the village they were missing, and now they find out they really don't. Plenty of suffering there.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
We have access to a technique for removing memories. Now obviously we don't want to outright state that we have in our clan reliable mind-reading techniques, but it is one way to protect the clan secrets in this case.
We need to explain to Jiraya what's going on sooner or later, and I think sooner would be better.
Can we figure out some way to put that option to the table, without violating opsec?
We need to explain to Jiraya what's going on sooner or later, and I think sooner would be better.
Can we figure out some way to put that option to the table, without violating opsec?
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Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
I suspect a limitation of the memory hidden in the fog technique is that it only works on information obtained while within the genjutsu.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
Ahh, well better to just not bring it up.
I recommend changing friend to comrade. Minami will absolutely not be receptive to overtures of outright friendship in her current headspace.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
Yeah, the ninja opsec as outlined seems pretty harmful/weird/unrealistic, and we need to have a clan meeting about clan secrets at some point. Because that kind of opsec looks like it will get us killed.
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- Location
- UK
When somebody is harassed, telling them to have thicker skins is unkind and disrespectful. Their treatment was unacceptable, and any excuses or distractions from that legitimize it. If this state of affairs is the best you can envision, I suggest you visit some healthier sites. The QMs are not wrong to ask for it to change.
@eaglejarl As far as I can tell, your clarification only serves to make my previous objections to Keiko's claims stronger. It doesn't feel very simulationist; more "this is how I want the world to look, ergo these things are true". This isn't actually how people would act in a militaristic society.
Or five generations of ninja. 100 years is a long time. How many young'uns today care about the cold war?
The mechanics you've given all make this infeasible, and I'm pretty sure this makes no sense from a resource perspective either. When odds are stacked so heavily, you should act to only take bets where you have an above average chance of winning, which means you only fight strong people on home ground. That way you end up with the Jōnin and S-rankers, rather than a bunch of dead genin.
Note that if it were true, Jiraiya wouldn't have acted around unknowns like us the way he did.
Going by what you said, most ninja have PTSD from being sent on suicide missions. Note that as far as we are aware, this doesn't apply to Kagome, because he's a sealsmaster. Exceptionally few ninja have PTSD from assassinations against them, and this certainly doesn't apply to our team.
Note that this doesn't apply to mist drain, which is useless in an unprepared defensive situation.
I don't believe it was ever implied we ever gave away anything more than the surface details to mist drain. Inference suggests she knows Noburi can take out civilians.
Honestly this seems basically irrelevant to the issue of mist drain, and seems to serve as more of an excuse for those cases you've broken internal consistency. The only person on our team now who cares about reputation significantly is Noburi, and this certainly doesn't factor into Kagome's decision about risk, so it doesn't explain why he was OK with us sharing Keiko's pangolin summon, Skywalkers, Hazō's mysterious seal magic, etc., which are all from her perspective far more interesting.
All the more reason it's important to make public the other enemies' clan secrets.
This seems pretty reasonable.
Doesn't "ninja from our village don't kill ninja from our village" contradict "Every time two ninja come together, even the best of friends, there is an ingrained sense of "if I had to kill him, how would I do it?""
On a less point-by-point breakdown, this fundamentally isn't how ninjas would work. Optimizing for a case that clearly cannot be common in a way that makes you far more likely to die in everyday combat in a world where most people die extremely young from everyday combat just literally doesn't make sense. These conventions just aren't relevant to Kagome! If he was one to follow stupid traditions that make people far more likely to die, he'd be dead along with the rest of his sealing troop. Even if these traditions were a consequence of the world you've built, it wouldn't explain the recent controversy.
As a side note, remember that militaristic societies are hierarchical. Hierarchies don't work when every single subordinate has a secret technique.
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I don't know what her headspace will be at the end of that speech, but I'm happy enough to change it (and I did).
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That is not correct. Let's run the numbers for how things stand right now:
Keiko: 33 dice Weapons
Noburi: 40 dice (34 Water Whip + 6 from Hozuki's Mantle) Also -18 to enemy multiple combatant bonuses against Noburi, but that's not relevant
Hazō: 35 or 44 dice (29 base + 3 Iron Nerve + 3 clawed gauntlets. +9 if he wins his Roki roll. He rolls 24 + 9 = 32 dice for Roki.)
Akane: 35 (36 -1 for the pangolin jutsu), ignores 2 wound classes, may get bonuses from Youthful Fist depending on relative stats. Strength 9, Stamina 9
Let's try some competitions assuming average rolls. Assumptions:
- I'm truncating 0.5s for convenience.
- I'm assuming that Hazō wins the Deception roll against anyone with fewer dice and loses it against anyone with equal or higher.
- I'm ignoring the bonuses from the Youthful Fist because they probably don't work against significantly more skilled opponents. (Who by necessity have higher attributes.)
- Embarrassingly, I don't recall whether the denominator in the (roll - roll) / (dice + dice)^0.65 formula is based on base dice or total dice. I can't find the answer so for now I'll use base dice.
I'm ignoring range, which makes this a little unrealistic, but it keeps it simple and I don't think it will make that much difference overall.
Enemy (40 dice Taijutsu, 25 deception): 2020
The team each get +14 dice from multicombatant bonuses. (+5 from N, +3 from the rest) Let's check their totals:
K: 2373
N: 2727
H: 2929
A: 2525
Outcome: The team wins on the first round. Against a Weapons ninja they would win even harder since Akane would get YF dice against someone at that level.
Enemy (50 dice Taijutsu, 30 deception): 2525
The team each get +12 dice from multicombatant bonuses. (+3 from each) Let's check their totals:
K: 2272 - Takes an A-class wound
N: 2626 - Deals an A-class wound
H: 2828 - Deals an A-class wound, meaning enemy now has a B-class wound
A: 2373 - Would take an A-class wound but she ignores it
The opponent is now under a -6 malus. Keiko is at -3. If anyone lands even an A-class wound on the enemy in the next round then he dies.
Enemy (60 dice Taijutsu, 35 dice Deception): 3030
The team each get +6 dice from multicombatant bonuses. (+3 from Noburi, +1 from the others)
First scenario: "Holy crap, that guy looks like a jōnin, let's get out of here!"
The team sprints straight up on their skywalkers, tossing explosives in the general direction of their opponent to buy themselves a few seconds. I'm not sure how I would model that, but it seems plausible that they escape.
Second scenario: The team all charge straight in with no effort to do anything tricky.
K: 1969 - Dead
N: 2323 - B-class wound, probably dies on the next round if he keeps fighting.
H: 2070 - Does not get Roki. Dead.
A: 2070 - Takes an A-class wound. (It was C-class but her jutsu reduced it to A-class.) Loses her protection.
Next round: Noburi and Akane run straight up on their skywalkers, throwing explosive tags behind them. The enemy is forced to dodge and they probably escape. Very bad outcome, but not a TPK.
A few things of importance:
- I've left Kagome out of the picture so as not to reveal metainformation. He would be adding multicombatant dice as well, which would be the difference between Hazō dying or being wounded in that last scenario. Also, his explosive punching technique is an explosion, so it's defended with TacMov, not Taijutsu or Weapons. Basically every ninja you'll ever face will have TacMov lower than their primary combat stat and you guys get a massive TacMov bonus from the skywalkers.
- Akane also has the explosive punching style, so the rolls you see here are not necessarily the ones she'd be using.
- Neither Minami or Mari are factored in.
- The party does nothing clever with fast-deploy Air Domes, does not use clones (which add additional combat dice but not straightforward multicombatant bonuses), does not use macerators as ranged weapons, does not use explosives or implosion seals, is not fighting on prepared ground, does not try to PMYF away or Vacuum Step....
- If Hazō sank 33 XP into Roki he would be getting +12 on all these rolls instead of +9. He would have beaten that 60-dice jōnin on the deception roll and would therefore have been rolling 50 dice in that last scenario, meaning he would have survived the first round.
Point is, saying "One roll against a jōnin would be an instant TPK" is alarmist and simply wrong.
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I understand the points you are making but I disagree with them. We've laid out what the world of MfD looks like and we aren't going to redo all the backstory and cultural context that we've created. Our model is not slapped together, it's based on months of discussion and debate, using canon as a starting point and diverging where necessary, and I feel that it holds together fine.
Honestly, I wish you were correct. I strongly dislike the culture that we've created and I wish I had a good reason for it to not be like this.
- Location
- UK
Yeah, the TPK thing is a holdover from pre-Skywalker days. Not sure I'd call it alarmist, but certainly out of date.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
CounterBot, version 2.1
Plan name: Best of a Bad Situation
Voters: @Inferno Vulpix, @Traiden
Num votes: 2
Plan name: Deescalate, explain, deescalate
Voters: @Briefvoice, @Traiden
Num votes: 2
Plan name: Lore Update
Voters: @ContextBot, @Enjou
Num votes: 2
Plan name: Hiatus
Voters: @huhYeahGoodPoint
Num votes: 1
Plan name: Research: A different kind of invisible ink.
Voters: @Dissonance
Num votes: 1
Number of voters: 7
Note that Sunday will definitely be a lore update, so this vote is going to close Wednesday May 24 at 12pm London time.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Thank you for this.
Could you be more specific?
What makes you think you were unknowns to him at the point when he first interacted with you?
I doubt there are many ninja who get sent on a suicide mission and survive to get PTSD, more or less by definition.
You assume. Noburi reinvented it on his own and knows nothing about what his clan can do with it. For all he knows, he might just have unlocked the first step of what is actually a whole mist drain tech tree.
Also, a trump card's value can't be measured solely by its use in a specific type of ambush situation.
The plan didn't specify what you did and didn't give away. It certainly gave no indication that you meant to hold anything back, so you can't make retroactive claims about it.
Nobody claimed that this point was specifically relevant to mist drain. It was a general OPSEC document to help address the fact that the players knew less than Hazō did about OPSEC.
Pandā has no particular tactical value (sorry, little guy), skywalkers were shared with the entirety of Leaf as a political move, Hazō's mysterious seal magic was never shared with anyone.
You're giving away restricted and valuable knowledge. You could use it for blackmail. You could sell it. You could use it to devise new techniques etc. of your own. You could find that your enemies are allies in the next war and you shouldn't have screwed them over. Etc.
Not if betrayal is always a possibility. Ninja loathe missing-nin for a reason.
The people who die extremely young from everyday combat aren't relevant, as they won't have secret techniques. The ones that do will also have superior clan training etc., so their concern won't be their die-extremely-young peers but unexpectedly strong opponents against whom they'll need a trump card in order to survive.
Why not?
Rihaku
The Internet
Would not everyone be chakra boosting and using their special techniques in such a mortal-combat scenario? Hazou & Co are using their direct special techniques (though not indirect ones like macerator bombs as noted), so I imagine the jounin would be using their direct special techs and max chakra boosting as well.
That said, the 60 dice outcome does seem extremely bad, pretty much equivalent to a TPK for our purposes, so it does not look to me like the team has justification to behave so self-assuredly in matters of physical safety. And given the postulated XP totals from the rebalancing, 60 baseline combat dice does seem on the low side for an above-average decade+ survivor of the ninja career.
Basically, you may be correct in that only 2 of 4 party members died, but I do not see how this simulated outcome does anything except reinforce my point: it does not seem plausible from a pragmatic or in-character standpoint for the teammates to be so unconcerned with physical safety that they would rate a medium-term political question over their short-term survival, especially when they are carrying extremely sensitive strategic assets (skywalkers) that absolutely must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, while traveling vast distances in an Elemental Nations on the brink of war.
Even if the mission is supposed to be plush and relatively safe, the team's own experiences in carrying out "safe" missions (Hot Springs itself...) should have them strongly optimizing for physical safety and proactively widening their error bars.
I can see perhaps that Keiko & Noburi were so relieved of escaping "missing-nin mindset" that they defaulted to "safe clan village-nin mode," but in that case Hazou's "I'm optimizing safety over all else, if Jiraiya succeeds we're the Hokage's clan and can afford to pay political prices, but only if we all live" argument should be fairly compelling. Treating Minami as a barely-trusted outsider risks a direct decrease in the team's combat effectiveness should anything go wrong.
That said, the 60 dice outcome does seem extremely bad, pretty much equivalent to a TPK for our purposes, so it does not look to me like the team has justification to behave so self-assuredly in matters of physical safety. And given the postulated XP totals from the rebalancing, 60 baseline combat dice does seem on the low side for an above-average decade+ survivor of the ninja career.
Basically, you may be correct in that only 2 of 4 party members died, but I do not see how this simulated outcome does anything except reinforce my point: it does not seem plausible from a pragmatic or in-character standpoint for the teammates to be so unconcerned with physical safety that they would rate a medium-term political question over their short-term survival, especially when they are carrying extremely sensitive strategic assets (skywalkers) that absolutely must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, while traveling vast distances in an Elemental Nations on the brink of war.
Even if the mission is supposed to be plush and relatively safe, the team's own experiences in carrying out "safe" missions (Hot Springs itself...) should have them strongly optimizing for physical safety and proactively widening their error bars.
I can see perhaps that Keiko & Noburi were so relieved of escaping "missing-nin mindset" that they defaulted to "safe clan village-nin mode," but in that case Hazou's "I'm optimizing safety over all else, if Jiraiya succeeds we're the Hokage's clan and can afford to pay political prices, but only if we all live" argument should be fairly compelling. Treating Minami as a barely-trusted outsider risks a direct decrease in the team's combat effectiveness should anything go wrong.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
All kinds of cultures have weird irrational beliefs. Maybe that kind of opsec is one of them, something carried over from a time when it made sense. Maybe it does make sense, but only for clans, which tend to use the same set of secrets repeatedly. Maybe it makes sense for us and we don't know it yet.
Either way, that's a discussion we should have with our clan, in character.
Either way, that's a discussion we should have with our clan, in character.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
I agree with this analysis. I think that Hazou should attempt to convey it to the rest of the team in our next story update.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't actually disagree with you, but the options are pretty limited. "God damnit!" doesn't work because there is no singular 'God' in the Narutoverse. We've seen characters use 'fuck', 'shit', etc, but the phatic intensifiers don't fit the culture.
Are you saying that you think the team should be using mist as smoke cover more often, or are you saying that Hazō did not give away the mist drain secret because Minami should have naturally assumed that the mist was just for concealment?
If we have Hazō disregard (part of) a plan then we will definitely tell you what the problem was. For that matter, if we happen to spot the issue during the voting period we'll tell you -- we aren't concealing anything here. We simply can't promise that we'll see the issue before we start writing the update and we're setting expectations. To repeat: We'll always tell you what the issue was, but we most likely won't be able to tell you before the update drops.
There's way too many possibilities in ninja combat for me to model it all out in one example post. I simply wanted to make the point that no, fighting a jōnin is not an instant TPK. As to the deaths in the final scenario: note that if the team is fighting a taijutsu jōnin then Keiko will probably be at range and therefore can't be harmed on the first round. That means that yes, Hazō dies if he's stupid enough to try to punch a jōnin, but everyone else would probably survive.
Oh, one other thing:
- Embarrassingly, I don't recall whether the denominator in the (roll - roll) / (dice + dice)^0.65 formula is based on base dice or total dice.
If anyone can find an answer to this, either in the rules docs or in a GM post, I will happily award 10 XP to the entire party. It's an important question and I would gladly pay XP to not have to find the answer.