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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Inferno Vulpix said:
If even one person in Leaf can make Skywalkers, I see no problem with a single Genin being given a couple Skywalker seals specifically so she can get up to the one group who camps out a mile in the sky (in an 'oh and by the way you'll need these' sort of way). There's no reason to believe Leaf has managed to mass-produce enough Skywalkers for a large percentage of its ninja in the time we've been gone just because a courier had to use them to reach us.
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I am more worried about the fact that we know that spys have infiltrated leaf. This is the whole reason Akane wound being a missing nin. With Random Genin getting skywalkers it increases the chance of the secret leaking before hand. I'm not worried about this messanger being a spy or something nefarious. It just doesn't fit my view of the world. So trying to figure out what is wrong with what is going on or if my views need to be updated
 
Oneiros43 said:
I am more worried about the fact that we know that spys have infiltrated leaf. This is the whole reason Akane wound being a missing nin. With Random Genin getting skywalkers it increases the chance of the secret leaking before hand. I'm not worried about this messanger being a spy or something nefarious. It just doesn't fit my view of the world. So trying to figure out what is wrong with what is going on or if my views need to be updated
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Maybe this particular Todder-nin was noticed to be a genius or otherwise extremely gifted in terms of being a ninja, was trained at a young age to maximize potential growth, and is considered high enough on the "loyalty index" to be trusted with Skywalkers?
 
faflec said:
Maybe this particular Todder-nin was noticed to be a genius or otherwise extremely gifted in terms of being a ninja, was trained at a young age to maximize potential growth, and is considered high enough on the "loyalty index" to be trusted with Skywalkers?
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You mean like cousin Itachi? Or uncle Oro? Toddler-nin is going to be a missing-nin soon!
 
faflec said:
Maybe this particular Todder-nin was noticed to be a genius or otherwise extremely gifted in terms of being a ninja, was trained at a young age to maximize potential growth, and is considered high enough on the "loyalty index" to be trusted with Skywalkers?
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Maybe. It's just the chain of things that I see as unlikely that is pinging my paranoia. The speed that skywalkers came into production plus genin having them confuses me. There are reasonable explanation but it still seems more like Mari is trolling us.
 
eaglejarl said:
I am quite confident we never said that. Links or it didn't happen. :p
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Minor memory error. Here's what you said:

eaglejarl said:
That when ninja fight, quality trumps quantity. The force that Leaf took with them had an overwhelming force advantage over their expected opposition.
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Using the dread power of counting, I've observed that the Leaf took a numerically weaker force consisting primarily of ANBU (+ Naruto, jounin commander, Jiraiya, and Hiruzen) against Mist's jounin (+ Yagura and Zabuza). My understanding is that ANBU are on-par with jounin in a fight, so, loosely speaking, Hiruzen/Yagura cancel, Naruto/Zabuza cancel, each of the ANBU cancel with one of the jounin, leaving Jiraiya vs several jounin. I get that quality trumps quantity, but even Jiraiya can't favorably engage enough jounin to give all the ANBU numerically advantageous fights against each of Mist's remaining jounin. This means that some of Leaf's ANBU are engaging jounin one-on-one; since I assume that jounin and ANBU are about equally powerful, this means that half of Leaf's ANBU will die.

My analysis then went that, if Leaf could bring more forces to bear, they could give each ANBU (and Hiruzen, and Naruto) a numerically-advantageous fight; even if quality trumps quantity, since quality is close-ish, quantity becomes decisive. Doing so would prevent predictable ANBU losses. Because quality trumps quantity, ANBU are super valuable, so I concluded something along the lines of "Leaf brought everyone [relevant] they could to The Ultimate Showdown." Hence the memory error.


In finding the above quote, I updated the qm rulings, which I hadn't done for two months. Random observations:

OliWhail said:
Hazō expects to drop Goda with ANBU outside Leaf
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eaglejarl said:
You delivered Goda and the kunoichi to the gate guards and asked if you should wake them up via chakra water; the guards looked uncertain and compromised by taking a canteen full of chakra water with them
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This is almost certainly an artifact of QM communication or Hazou having incorrect expectations, but it's significant if not. e: confirmed miscommunication.

eaglejarl said:
}:>
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I am unsure whether this is supposed to be a guy with a fancy mustache or a longhorn cow.

Velorien said:
All of my non-MfD creative time is going to the rewrite.
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I will again suggest we add a QM to share the load.

Velorien said:
I'd really appreciate any feedback on things that I should take advantage of the rewrite to fix, like weak sections, implausible twists and plot holes.
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Signal boosting this. Lighting Up the Dark.
 
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Matesz said:
This means that some of Leaf's ANBU are engaging jounin one-on-one; since I assume that jounin and ANBU are about equally powerful, this means that half of Leaf's ANBU will die.
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Ah, but are ANBU equipped with Skywalkers equally powerful as Mist jounin? If Skywalkers are upping the "quality" of the ANBU significantly then the math changes.
 
bayesclef said:
Using the dread power of counting, I've observed that the Leaf took a numerically weaker force consisting primarily of ANBU (+ Naruto, jounin commander, Jiraiya, and Hiruzen) against Mist's jounin (+ Yagura and Zabuza). My understanding is that ANBU are on-par with jounin in a fight, so, loosely speaking, Hiruzen/Yagura cancel, Naruto/Zabuza cancel, each of the ANBU cancel with one of the jounin, leaving Jiraiya vs several jounin. I get that quality trumps quantity, but even Jiraiya can't favorably engage enough jounin to give all the ANBU numerically advantageous fights against each of Mist's remaining jounin. This means that some of Leaf's ANBU are engaging jounin one-on-one; since I assume that jounin and ANBU are about equally powerful, this means that half of Leaf's ANBU will die.
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It's actually worse than that because mist brought Mei another S ranker to counter act Jiraiya
Briefvoice said:
Ah, but are ANBU equipped with Skywalkers equally powerful as Mist jounin? If Skywalkers are upping the "quality" of the ANBU significantly then the math changes.
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No way in hell did leaf have skywalkers one week after we gave them to them
 
Oneiros43 said:
No way in hell did leaf have skywalkers one week after we gave them to them
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Pretty sure the team had enough Kagome-produced seals on them when they arrived in Leaf to equip a group that small for one training session + one battle. Remember the team was running across the sub-continent and you have to replace them every, what, 15 minutes? They must had had plenty of spare seals.
 
Briefvoice said:
Ah, but are ANBU equipped with Skywalkers equally powerful as Mist jounin? If Skywalkers are upping the "quality" of the ANBU significantly then the math changes.
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At the time, the combat bonus of skywalkers was primarily in disengaging (+20 to TacMov) and slightly for closing distance (+5 to TacMov). My (possibly faulty) analysis is that, under that ruleset, their main benefit comes from allowing disengagement from disadvantageous fights and forcing engagement of advantageous fights. To my knowledge, there was no "high ground" bonus. Instead, Leaf had the opportunity to force a massively advantageous fight and didn't and I'm an awful person for continuing this now off-topic discussion. The point is that I made an analysis that may or may not have been correct that caused a memory error.

Also, your quote points to the wrong post.
 
bayesclef said:
At the time, the combat bonus of skywalkers was primarily in disengaging (+20 to TacMov) and slightly for closing distance (+5 to TacMov). My (possibly faulty) analysis is that, under that ruleset, their main benefit comes from allowing disengagement from disadvantageous fights and forcing engagement of advantageous fights. To my knowledge, there was no "high ground" bonus. Instead, Leaf had the opportunity to force a massively advantageous fight and didn't and I'm an awful person for continuing this now off-topic discussion. The point is that I made an analysis that may or may not have been correct that caused a memory error.

Also, your quote points to the wrong post.
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There would be a high ground bonus against melee attackers of any form though: There would simply be nothing they could do.
 
*Unsure if thread is being jokingly paranoid or actually about to do dumb things*

So, let's talk about skywalkers and strategic use.

Before the first skywalker operation, the fewer people who know about them, the better. You want to be able to surprise people with your ability to walk on air. Afterwards, if anyone survives the combat, you should assume that the information is compromised (survivors will sell the information if they're missing-nin, another village will find out if they're village-nin). While you probably want to protect the seal design, you certainly want to press your advantage.

After that, you want the specifics of creating them to be secret, and you'd prefer to not have them be stolen, but you mostly want to press your advantage while you have skywalkers and others do not. At this point, you'd want "how they're made" to be secret, but you'd also want to have all your ninja know how to use them, and create enough of them to supply every operation. This means that you'd probably come up with some coverstory on how you make them, but you'd want to train everyone, including academy students in their use. As anyone who can buy information will know about skywalkers, people merely knowing they exist doesn't really matter.

Finally, let's talk about the situation we're actually in: not only was Leaf's ability to skywalk witnessed by enemies (Akatsuki & Mist if any of them survived), Akatsuki took at least Naruto hostage, which means they have his skywalkers, along with any other captives or evidence they may have taken. This means they can sell the seal design if they wish, the only secret of it is the infusion, though the fact that seals are non-standard (every sealmaster has their own language) means the design will only tell people a little. Likely "this is similar to or derived from air dome." Unless Jiraiya and the Leaf sealmasters took some other OpSec steps to destroy skywalkers after use.

So, this brings us to now, ~3 weeks after the Akatsuki incident. Leaf should definitely assume that their seal design is known by anyone with sufficient connections. This means that they should press the fact that they have sealmasters who already know how to infuse them and press their first-mover advantage, not avoid using it. So, the fact that a genin is using skywalkers makes sense if Leaf is pressing their advantage. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it's Mari.
 
Oh. I've spent all this time lamenting how much XP affinities cost, combined with the fact that you need all five to counter all five.

But we don't need any more affinities because we can just do the whole thing with really basic seals, and not need to sink tons of chakra into a bunch of affinities and jutsu.

We make seals that shoot a jet of elemental chakra. Like, a seal that, when activated, beams out a bit of katon chakra. Not very damaging, but if that beam hits a wind ninjutsu then it counters it because katon counters futon. Done. Doesn't seem harder than an explosive seal (although seal-difficulty estimation is finicky, so table spoon of salt). Definitely something J could research in an afternoon and share notes on, though.

The hard part is getting Elemental Disruptor Seals to act as an automated point-defence, and we might need to muck around with IFF Beacon Seals to make it work, but never mind - we can make the manual version easily enough.
 
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faflec said:
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail Were training plans done for this update? I assume no since the sheets weren't updated but hey what do I know.
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In general terms, training plans require a number of days of continuous training to be implemented. It depends on a variety of factors, of course, but my personal rule of thumb is a couple of weeks for a respectable skill-up. So I wouldn't expect any training plans to go through while you're doing day-by-day plans and each of those days is filled with mission-related or otherwise demanding activities.
 
MadScientist said:
But we don't need any more affinities because we can just do the whole thing with really basic seals, and not need to sink tons of chakra into a bunch of affinities and jutsu.
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Velorien said:
"Here, as promised. Now, I felt like picking you a theme. See, when I was young and foolish, I thought it was acceptable for an elite shinobi to master less than all five basic elements, so I tried to make up for my lack of Wind with air-type seals. And that's what you're getting, complete with a few design notes I managed to scrounge up."
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Yeah, but none of those seals were designed to counter lightning. They were just designed to do wind-jutsu-like effects.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm talking about making a seal that actually performs a nature transformation and outputs "beam of fūton chakra" with all the raiton-countering properties that come along with that (which I think is J's objection), instead of just a seal that outputs "beam of pressurised air".
 
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MadScientist said:
Not very damaging, but if that beam hits a wind ninjutsu then it counters it because katon counters futon.
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This is actually a minor plot point of sorts in canon - at one point in Shippūden, someone (Kakashi?) comments that it's a good matchup for Naruto's Wind to beat Sasuke's Lightning. Naruto disagrees and says that what he wants is to use his Wind to fan Sasuke's Fire back to life (Fire symbolising Great Fireball and the other Fire techniques Sasuke used as a member of Team Seven, and Lightning symbolising all the Chidori derivatives he specialises in as a missing-nin).

(disclaimer: going off memory of things I watched a very long time ago and quite possibly wrong)
 
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