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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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huhYeahGoodPoint said:
Best practice is to not engage them on prepared ground. If prepared, siege, and if unprepared get a whole lotta wind and lightning users, maybe some fire.
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Anything and everything that messes with the integrity of the seals. Rain, duststorms, anything that'll mess with the ink on the seals or damage the paper/wood/whatever. I dunno if misterators are enough by themselves.
 
faflec said:
Anything and everything that messes with the integrity of the seals. Rain, duststorms, anything that'll mess with the ink on the seals or damage the paper/wood/whatever. I dunno if misterators are enough by themselves.
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Does getting chakra ink on already-infused-but-not-activated seals cause issues with the seals? If so, adding chakra ink to misterators might be a way to make a sealmaster have a really bad day.
 
That...reminds me.

How does the team manage to have several thousand explosive tags on their bodies? I mean, infusing them is gonna take time and you don't want that; are they seriously able to seal the explosives in storage seals while avoiding the consequences of seal-seal interaction?
 
faflec said:
That...reminds me.

How does the team manage to have several thousand explosive tags on their bodies? I mean, infusing them is gonna take time and you don't want that; are they seriously able to seal the explosives in storage seals while avoiding the consequences of seal-seal interaction?
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Maybe explosive tags are super easy to infuse, so they can be infused mid combat?

Orrr, more likely, when our characters refer to having so many, they just mean that that's how many blanks they have written out, and that only like, 200~ or so (more than they'd possibly need mid combat) are actually infused and readily available.
 
Kylinger said:
Maybe explosive tags are super easy to infuse, so they can be infused mid combat?

Orrr, more likely, when our characters refer to having so many, they just mean that that's how many blanks they have written out, and that only like, 200~ or so (more than they'd possibly need mid combat) are actually infused and readily available.
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But the only people capable of infusing seals are Hazou and Kagome? Nobody else has that experience.
 
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail If we were to develop a fighting style for Kei that was based around her bloodline (this, understandably, would take time to develop) that gave rerolls to those she can verbally call out, what balance point would you like for it to be set to (not that I'm particularly good at statistical analysis, buuut)? Approximately Roki's level? Or something more like Youthful Fist?
 
Veedrac said:
If "Summon Realm diplomacy/spycraft" means other summoners know who and where summoners are, we have a contradiction because we would not have managed to stay missing-nin, and Jiraiya would not have gotten us a summoning scroll (or would have warned us beforehand), due to its impact on our use as deniable assets. Otherwise, keeping such information on a need-to-know basis still buys us protection. Yes, it's far from perfect protection, but we don't have that with mist drain either: a whole other clan knows the technique better than we do.
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My point is that there is a route by which Keiko's identity as the summoner can become known, and she has no ability to control that route. This is not the same as actually knowing who/where other summoners are (Keiko herself only knows the identity of the Condor Summoner, and only knew her location at a single point in time). What Keiko cannot do is say, "As long as my allies don't spill the secret, my identity as the Pangolin Summoner is safe".

Veedrac said:
Perhaps you've forgotten how many times we've directly benefitted from Hazō's seal-copying ability not being known?

If word gets around Leaf that Noburi can drain through mist, fine. All that means is we get to plan better. If someone tries to blackmail us with this information, we're like, "what you gonna' do? Tell other Leaf guys and make no meaningful impact to our lives? Tell Sand and betray the Hokage? Though telling Sand would hurt Mist more than Leaf, which probably balances in our favour anyway." If word gets around Leaf that Hazō can copy seals, we've lost an extremely attractive way of gathering new seals. I mean, that's not even that bad given, you know, Jiraiya, but it certainly actually causes a problem.
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Knowing that somebody has a way of "copying seals quickly" isn't enough for anything useful, which was my original point. In combat terms, great, you know that a certain person is likely to have a large variety/number of seals. You could get that from knowing that they're a sealmaster (which you would in this hypothetical scenario where you know about Hazō in advance, because that isn't a secret at all). In non-combat terms, ninjutsu is crazy and there is no way of knowing in advance what "copying seals quickly" means. Does it need line of sight? Physical contact? Can it be done remotely? Can he read seal knowledge from people's minds? It is very difficult to create countermeasures against an ability when you have no idea of its mechanisms and only the loosest possible theoretical description of its effect. (For all they know, it could just mean that Hazō can draw seals quickly, which was supposed to be the original limit of his bloodline).
 
HoratioVonBecker said:
In general. Also, some idea of where you learned your various writing skills would be interesting.
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Story-wise, I've been reading a lot of serial web fiction lately:

The Gods are Bastards is a sort of fantasy post-Western, in which the age of adventuring parties is ending and heroes and politicians and supernatural beings are all scrambling to get used to the idea of a world where magitech trumps individual power and everything is connected. It starts out comparatively simple, but soon comes to effortlessly juggle a vast array of characters, factions, agendas and plotlines.

A Practical Guide to Evil follows the life of a young recruit to the Dark Side in a fantasy world where Good and Evil are formalised sides, and narrative concepts (like the Rule of Three) and unique titles such as the Squire or the Black Knight are both sources of supernatural power and influences on one's destiny. The most powerful people are either those who play their roles to the hilt and therefore draw on their full power, or those who ruthlessly exploit the system by invoking, subverting and deconstructing every trope they encounter, and indeed the conflict between these two ideologies is one of the story's central themes.

How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis isn't quite in the same league as those first two, but I still enjoy it. It's a "random people stranded in another world" story which, despite the cliched premise, cheerfully subverts trope after trope in the subgenre, starting with a protagonist who always thinks about what a real hero would do and then survives by doing the opposite.

Shadows of the Limelight is good too, but unfortunately short and now finished. It's about a world in which superhero powers derive directly from one's fame, and puts thought into exploring the mechanics and social dynamics this would involve.

As for writing, I don't actually have any formal training. I've attended a couple of creative writing workshops in the past, but not for long. Mostly I get better by writing things, by finding new ways to improve in articles etc., and by looking analytically at stories I like and noting techniques, style points etc. that I like and wish to learn to use myself.

For example, LUD features a lot of what writers call "head-hopping", where the perspective changes repeatedly in a chapter so that you get different characters' viewpoints during the same sequence of events. I learned not that long ago that this is supposed to be a terrible writing taboo, and in the LUD rewrite, I've found that greater viewpoint consistency can let me explore the insides of characters' heads in greater depth. At the same time, I've recently been re-reading Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky, top-tier published fantasy which features head-hopping all over the place and does not seem to suffer for it. So I hope that by paying attention to the author's technique, I can figure out how he gets the balance right so I can do the same in LUD.
 
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On the note of ninjutsu being crazy we need to make some quick and easy one-shot utility techniques once we get TH. The kind of stuff you needn't level more than once. I could imagine that the hokage would love a technique that let him read (and understand) things superfast.

e: Or what about developing a technique that ninja could use to acquaint civilians with how their chakra feels?
 
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I think that ninjas already have a number of ways to acquaint civilians with how their chakra feels.

"Your chakra feels like burning, and punching".

Why you'd want to acquaint a civilian with what your chakra like feels is beyond me.
 
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Oh holy shit. I just realized something Noburi (and the Wakahisa in general) may not have realized. So you know how you have to use chakra to build up your reserves?

Do you think that the Wakahisa might be able to simulate that by draining someone? This should be easy enough to test personally when we get the time.
 
Cariyaga said:
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail If we were to develop a fighting style for Kei that was based around her bloodline (this, understandably, would take time to develop) that gave rerolls to those she can verbally call out, what balance point would you like for it to be set to (not that I'm particularly good at statistical analysis, buuut)? Approximately Roki's level? Or something more like Youthful Fist?
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Are you thinking that Roki is stronger or Youthful Fist of the Mythological Beast That Is Really Strong and Tough is stronger?

(I think it's Roki but I'm honestly not clear myself.)
 
eaglejarl said:
Are you thinking that Roki is stronger or Youthful Fist of the Mythological Beast That Is Really Strong and Tough is stronger?

(I think it's Roki but I'm honestly not clear myself.)
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I'm fairly certain Youthful Fist is way stronger in the long run -- though in large part because of the Pangolin Training Jutsu. If she put her focus solely into working on her fighting style, in 300 XP she'll be able to match a taijutsu jounin's (estimate: 60 dice in taijutsu alone, at 15 stam/strength) attributes; from that point forward, every additional level of the two will cost her relatively miniscule amounts compared to the gains she'd get: another 300 XP would get her 12 dice which would cost her 630 XP to get through Taijutsu alone -- only, 120 of that XP would be conditioning XP if she earned 600, which means that she'll have spent 480 XP. And that's when fighting the type of enemy she's worst against -- she's a mage killer with that fighting style, and one hell of one at that.

As regards the balance of such a fighting style, I asked the kind folks at the maths channel in the discord about doing the math on how much rerolling would increase one's result. Turns out, it's very difficult to do and requires sigmas and all sorts of nonsense that's out of my pay grade but I did get a relatively simple equation that can be used in concert with the Bingo Book to approximate how much such a technique would increase one's odds of success:

1-(1-P)^N where P is the probability and N is the number of rerolls.

For a fight 5 dice apart (55 versus 60), it would normally be a 20.8% chance of victory for the 55 dicer. A single reroll bumps that up to 37.3%

For a fight 10 dice apart, (50 versus 60), it would normally be a 4.7% chance of victory; a single reroll bumps that up to 9.2%.

I'm not certain this is a method that we should pursue for a fighting style tbh.

e:

Oh, I forgot to do Roki calculations, and completely forgot to account for the fact that Hazou already has the stats for 12 in it already. Gonna need a bit for that.

e2:

Getting Roki to 12 (and all stats required for it) cost approximately 670 XP (too lazy to check my math but that's in the ballpark for it), but it's true that until Akane gets the chance to earn around 600 more XP she'll be pretty fucked against Taijutsu jounin whereas Hazou still has a chance of pulling off Roki on them.

e3:

Getting another +12 to Roki would cost Hazou somewhere around 2000 XP to raise Deception to 48 and Roki to 24.

Getting another +12 to Youthful Fist (against a Taijutsu jounin) would cost Akane... 340 XP to get from 19 (+12 against a 15 Stam/Strength jounin) to 23 (+24). And that would cap her out on Youthful Fist bonuses at 24 -- though she'd probably want to raise that significantly before then to better suit her preferred opponents: ninjutsu and weapons experts.

e4:

I realize those numbers are kind of ridiculous: You can qualify them under the fact that Akane trained under Konoha's premier taijutsu master and said master's fighting style (Strong Fist) is very similar to the one Akane came up with, so he'd be better able to help her improve it.
 
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Velorien said:
The Gods are Bastards is a sort of fantasy post-Western, in which the age of adventuring parties is ending and heroes and politicians and supernatural beings are all scrambling to get used to the idea of a world where magitech trumps individual power and everything is connected. It starts out comparatively simple, but soon comes to effortlessly juggle a vast array of characters, factions, agendas and plotlines.
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Ooh, interesting. I've heard about it, but never heard a good description - I'll probably start it soon.
Velorien said:
A Practical Guide to Evil follows the life of a young recruit to the Dark Side in a fantasy world where Good and Evil are formalised sides, and narrative concepts (like the Rule of Three) and unique titles such as the Squire or the Black Knight are both sources of supernatural power and influences on one's destiny. The most powerful people are either those who play their roles to the hilt and therefore draw on their full power, or those who ruthlessly exploit the system by invoking, subverting and deconstructing every trope they encounter, and indeed the conflict between these two ideologies is one of the story's central themes.
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Already reading it, just got distracted some months ago. It is pretty great.
Velorien said:
How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis isn't quite in the same league as those first two, but I still enjoy it. It's a "random people stranded in another world" story which, despite the cliched premise, cheerfully subverts trope after trope in the subgenre, starting with a protagonist who always thinks about what a real hero would do and then survives by doing the opposite.
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Interesting. Good cover art, too, which speaks to either a broad range of skills or access to skilled labor, either of which implies better-than-standard writing ability..
Velorien said:
Shadows of the Limelight is good too, but unfortunately short and now finished. It's about a world in which superhero powers derive directly from one's fame, and puts thought into exploring the mechanics and social dynamics this would involve.
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I've read a lot of stuff by alexanderwales, and haven't exactly liked most of it. I assume he's grown as a writer?
Velorien said:
As for writing, I don't actually have any formal training. I've attended a couple of creative writing workshops in the past, but not for long. Mostly I get better by writing things, by finding new ways to improve in articles etc., and by looking analytically at stories I like and noting techniques, style points etc. that I like and wish to learn to use myself.

For example, LUD features a lot of what writers call "head-hopping", where the perspective changes repeatedly in a chapter so that you get different characters' viewpoints during the same sequence of events. I learned not that long ago that this is supposed to be a terrible writing taboo, and in the LUD rewrite, I've found that greater viewpoint consistency can let me explore the insides of characters' heads in greater depth. At the same time, I've recently been re-reading Shadows of the Apt by Adrian Tchaikovsky, top-tier published fantasy which features head-hopping all over the place and does not seem to suffer for it. So I hope that by paying attention to the author's technique, I can figure out how he gets the balance right so I can do the same in LUD.
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Yay, more evidence for my theory! (Which boils down to "all the best artists develop an internal metric for their art, based on lots of data points, so they're almost exclusively autodidacts".)
Any particular stories you think helped? I credit Erfworld for a surprisingly large fraction of my thinking skills (mostly how social stuff works), a few blog posts I read some time ago for most of my understanding of game design, and my religion's scriptures for resolving at least a couple fallacies before I knew said fallacies existed. Also MfD, for helping me understand 'high level social' (mostly that Interlude with Hazō's aunt), and finally giving me a satisfying model of medieval-ish societies.
EDIT: Oh, right, Twig has been more formative for my social skills, Erfworld (Book 3) just got to me first, and got me to think about Signamancy (and Fate, and more recently, Turnamancy). Worm redefined how I think about powers, Twig expanded that to how I think about combat in general, and The Humor Code let me understand jokes a lot better.
FURTHER EDIT: If The Ring Fits, which @eaglejarl recommended earlier in this Quest, helped me think about mental superpowers and sort of counts.
 
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