- Location
- Australia
That works too.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- 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
I mean, we're the reason that Skywalkers exist, so that's not exactly nothing. Sure, we haven't done much since Jiraiya assigned us this mission, but that's because we've been busy and our projects require significant constant time (setting up a proper seal laboratory, for instance). Once we get back to Leaf, we should have more time to work on them. I would advise Jiraiya to, in the future, have us and Kagome focus on sealing projects inside of Leaf, since we're both crap at OPSEC and much more valuable to Leaf as sealmakers than as gophers.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I would agree, but uh... frankly that would become boring -- one of the QMs (I forget which) has, IIRC, expressed that they would not enjoy writing that.
The pressing danger is the chakra beast that slew all their livestock several days ago. What's to prevent it from coming back to an easy food source and killing the next set of farm animals that the husband and son bring back? Or going to the house and killing the whole family? Once an animal knows where food is found, it is likely to return.
It's not that the Husband and Son require immediate saving. It's that the chakra beast is a threat to the whole farm in the short to medium term.
Heleor
^_^
Wouldn't this be basically 'quest end', and if the players are lucky, 'shifting to a new perspective now'.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
*rubs head* okay, so if we assume we even took out dozen Village ninja, the bare minimum considering we are highly skilled and Mari soloed ten village ninja on their first encounter, Keiko's numbers cannot possibly be right. If Keiko's numbers are correct, that's their entire ninja force spread out over one day, with the entire ninja population showing up. The entire village, abandoning everything, including guarding the village from chakra monsters, and the elders in meeting, to watch these guys.
I reiterate; that should be tripping all your bullshit detectors.
Welcome! (or not, if you were an old time lurker)
Probably yes, there would likely be a straight epilogue, because any substantial updates would require an insane amount of effort for relatively little worth.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Wait, are you saying that Mountain lied to us about how many ninja they had???
Eh, if calling in every ninja in the village was what it took to watch Team Fuckup then I personally would be calling in every ninja in the village. If everything else needed be abandoned then so be it. The chances of a chakra monster wandering in on any given day are pretty low... plenty of remote farms survive years without ninja protection (albeit with occasional deaths). And it's not like they're "taking missions" so everyone is around. You're acting like there would be some higher priority, and no... there really wasn't.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
There kind of was - guarding the Summoning Scroll. At the time there was only six or so guards, two of them ninja on the actual location itself. If the elders had to have their own set of defenses for meeting, there's some more people that can't be loitering and watching us, and at some point, after tallying all the different tasks people have to do, including making meals so that they don't starve and doing all the work that a farmer needs to do to survive, you have to realize that 100 people is grossly lowballing the amount. If that's lowballed, what else could be?
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A few announcements before I go back and read the comments:
My sweetheart called just as I was posting the update so I wasn't paying as much attention as normal and I didn't do my standard double checks. I've now gone back and fixed several issues:
1) The title of the post is now linked to the plan.
2) The chapter number is now 143 as it should be, instead of the mistaken 142.
3) The XP has now been awarded on the character sheets.
4) More importantly, when I awarded 1 XP I was thinking (for some bizarre reason) that this had been a single scene, which it obviously was not. I've corrected that to 6 XP for the two-day period, which is what it should have been. Sorry for giving people headaches.
Commentary on the plan: It was good. Short and sweet as called for by the experimental style, covered the bases in a clear way. Because of where the plot has developed there wasn't a lot of room for agency but you selected good options from the few that were open to you.
You know what, I'll bump it to 8 XP. Partially because you did a good job in a low-agency situation and partially as an apology for miscounting it the first time. What can I say, sweetheart-voice in my ear is distracting. :>
My sweetheart called just as I was posting the update so I wasn't paying as much attention as normal and I didn't do my standard double checks. I've now gone back and fixed several issues:
1) The title of the post is now linked to the plan.
2) The chapter number is now 143 as it should be, instead of the mistaken 142.
3) The XP has now been awarded on the character sheets.
4) More importantly, when I awarded 1 XP I was thinking (for some bizarre reason) that this had been a single scene, which it obviously was not. I've corrected that to 6 XP for the two-day period, which is what it should have been. Sorry for giving people headaches.
Commentary on the plan: It was good. Short and sweet as called for by the experimental style, covered the bases in a clear way. Because of where the plot has developed there wasn't a lot of room for agency but you selected good options from the few that were open to you.
You know what, I'll bump it to 8 XP. Partially because you did a good job in a low-agency situation and partially as an apology for miscounting it the first time. What can I say, sweetheart-voice in my ear is distracting. :>
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I'd like to point something out. The chapter Time to Leaf is chapter 116, and the most recent chapter was chapter 142. In another perspective, Time to Leaf was posted in early April, and we're mid July, over three months later. Time to Leaf is the chapter where we decided it's in our best interest to throw our lot in with Leaf, under the pressure of the time-sensitive Capybara situation. Since then, we haven't made very many meaningful choices or had much free time. That's not to say nothing absolutely excellent happened, like Kagome spilling most of his conspiracy theories or the glorious audacity of us going from missing-nin to the family of the Hokage, but since we got to Leaf 26 chapters ago we've been in a kind of go-with-the-flow context where the best thing to do is wait for Jiraiya to tell us what the best thing for us to do right now is.
Again, I can't begrudge this, because given the context what's happening is only what makes sense. We're a political liability in Leaf right now and Jiraiya's spy network needs to know the geopolitical situation, so instead of letting us make connections in Leaf and try our hand at fancy new seals we're spending weeks running around the Elemental Nations. But as much as it makes sense, it's been 26 chapters and over three months and it's only natural to want to get back to our sealing projects or social ambitions, which we haven't had the chance to touch for forever.
Last update's plan was basically DO THE MISSION, and there was little else in there because there was little else to do. By any in-universe metric, the only sane thing to do is go back to the mission and do exactly as we're told, and no amount of desire to go research new fancy seals or punch someone in the face is going to make it less irresponsible to do anything but the mission and only the mission. So here's what I suggest we do this time:
DO THE MISSION. All of it. Levels of patience may vary across the hivemind but it's clear that they're starting to run out, so this plotline has to wrap up. Unless some interesting event happens again like what happened in Ise, we could probably skip past most of the rest of the mission with little preamble. That means for this plan we can finally start thinking about what to do when we get back to Leaf. We need to meet with Jiraiya again, give our final debriefing, maybe let him destress some more, and see if he still wants us out of Leaf for a while, and if so we can ask to be allowed to build a sealing research facility in the middle of the woods for a few weeks and see what happens, while if he lets us stay in Leaf we can go meet people like Ino or Lee again.
Again, I can't begrudge this, because given the context what's happening is only what makes sense. We're a political liability in Leaf right now and Jiraiya's spy network needs to know the geopolitical situation, so instead of letting us make connections in Leaf and try our hand at fancy new seals we're spending weeks running around the Elemental Nations. But as much as it makes sense, it's been 26 chapters and over three months and it's only natural to want to get back to our sealing projects or social ambitions, which we haven't had the chance to touch for forever.
Last update's plan was basically DO THE MISSION, and there was little else in there because there was little else to do. By any in-universe metric, the only sane thing to do is go back to the mission and do exactly as we're told, and no amount of desire to go research new fancy seals or punch someone in the face is going to make it less irresponsible to do anything but the mission and only the mission. So here's what I suggest we do this time:
DO THE MISSION. All of it. Levels of patience may vary across the hivemind but it's clear that they're starting to run out, so this plotline has to wrap up. Unless some interesting event happens again like what happened in Ise, we could probably skip past most of the rest of the mission with little preamble. That means for this plan we can finally start thinking about what to do when we get back to Leaf. We need to meet with Jiraiya again, give our final debriefing, maybe let him destress some more, and see if he still wants us out of Leaf for a while, and if so we can ask to be allowed to build a sealing research facility in the middle of the woods for a few weeks and see what happens, while if he lets us stay in Leaf we can go meet people like Ino or Lee again.
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- Location
- Yes.
- We fought 16 village ninja, plus some tapirs, during A Bonfire of Tapirs (when Keiko got the scroll).
- The GMs revealed that if Mari had actually fought those village nin under the (then-new) rules she would have lost. It's an unlisted retcon.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
@faflec I apologize. I had thought that this plan was rated much worse than it actually was, and unfairly insulted your plan and by proxy you. I should not have done that, and especially not so soon after I ranted about how I noticed something was wrong.
I failed to ask the right question and in so doing insulted you.
I will try to avoid doing this in future.
I reiterate: I am sorry for insulting your plan and you by proxy.
also: huh, I'll trust your word on it. In which case, the Mountain leadup is probably invalid but I think that the "Warring States never actually ended" is still pretty accurate.
I failed to ask the right question and in so doing insulted you.
I will try to avoid doing this in future.
I reiterate: I am sorry for insulting your plan and you by proxy.
also: huh, I'll trust your word on it. In which case, the Mountain leadup is probably invalid but I think that the "Warring States never actually ended" is still pretty accurate.
- Location
- Yes.
You know I just copied the plan from @Radvic and added a line, right? I literally did nothing else to contribute. Your comments are wholly justified.
Also, the relevant chapter (A Bonfire Of Tapirs) is here, and the intel on Mountain is in the spoilered section.
- Location
- Freiburg
I am also in favor of DO THE MISSION in principle.
There's one issue with it, though; which is that plans where we just go with the flow somewhat passively don't give us a whole lot of XP/day. Having plans cover shorter time periods allows us to pack more interesting things into them without blowing up their size to an unreadable mess.
That being said, as I understand it TGR also brought with it a change in how XP rewards are addressed; instead of "your plan results in this much XP" we get "your plan results in this much XP/day", which is then multiplied with the length of time covered by the update. So a modus operandi consisting of "fast-forward the mission until something interesting happens, then end update there", then deal with the interesting-thing-that-happened over the next few updates, then return to fast-forward etc would probably not gimp our XP/day.
Ah, fuck it.
[] Proto-Plan: Fast-Forward Simple
There's one issue with it, though; which is that plans where we just go with the flow somewhat passively don't give us a whole lot of XP/day. Having plans cover shorter time periods allows us to pack more interesting things into them without blowing up their size to an unreadable mess.
That being said, as I understand it TGR also brought with it a change in how XP rewards are addressed; instead of "your plan results in this much XP" we get "your plan results in this much XP/day", which is then multiplied with the length of time covered by the update. So a modus operandi consisting of "fast-forward the mission until something interesting happens, then end update there", then deal with the interesting-thing-that-happened over the next few updates, then return to fast-forward etc would probably not gimp our XP/day.
Ah, fuck it.
[] Proto-Plan: Fast-Forward Simple
- Continue the mission until something interesting happens.
- Something Interesting: e.g. River contact mission, Goda tip
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I didn't manage to get to the AAR. @Velorien may choose to write it next time or it may be assumed to have happened in the background.
If you take a look at the map, you'll see that there's an extremely narrow strip of water between Nagi and O'uzu. I'm going to say that there's a ferry there that is used to move food and finished goods back and forth from Nagi and the city.
The QMs would talk about it but yes, quite possibly.
This is something we've discussed in QM chat. Up until very recently we could have wrapped it up immediately but some recent events have occurred in-universe that require us to play it out a bit longer. Please bear with us.
- Location
- Yes.
I see. So the contact's family intends to bring the wagon along with them?
Actually, wait. Why did they bring the wagon? Didn't their horses all get killed?
I don't want to research forever, but I do want us to have a period between missions where we can cook up a few new seals (and I mean useful seals, not just the cantrips from the textbook).
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
oh god we're playing the debasement game -ahem-
That plan stole from your previous plan, so no, the comments really weren't justified.
As for what we actually do: Countermanding our team leader is a really bad idea, but once we leave, we can probably take advantage of a few things:
1: It's dark and rainy as fuck outside. Nobody can see shit, and all the times and places seem the same.
2: Overland travel for ninja is twenty miles an hour.
3: They haven't picked up the horses yet, so we can seal their shit.
4: The direction they're going in matches our direction of travel.
I propose we ambush our contact's family in the rain, ensuring they remain unconscious without killing them, and deposit them with their cargo, which we will have sealed, some distance away from the ferry, but truncating several days travel. When pressed later, her family will remark it was a miracle, and if we drop a hint that shinobi are renowned for miracles, well.
read: Jiraiya freaked out about the Mist Drain Incident and doubled the mission time so that he could have more time to wrap the Minami clan around his pinky and make them beg for more.
- Location
- Yes.
Or figure out whether or not he has to kill Minami.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I will point out that the capture of Goda might perhaps seem just a wee bit more relevant on the grand stage of events. ;P
EDIT:
Interesting question. Do you ask?
- Location
- Yes.
Probably? I mean, if their transport beasts were killed I don't see how they were supposed to bring the wagon with them.
...
...
Oh god did the contract get turned fuck fuck fuck
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Makes sense to me