Kinda need a rinnegan to use the paths.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- 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
Kinda need a rinnegan to use the paths.
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
There are many large and dangerous animals in the world, they can use chakra to passively strengthen themselves in order to do things like grow to sizes that would otherwise be physically impossible. For example, giant tigers and such. Some animals are just really weird, as well. Civilians generally do not disappear unless their jobs happen to involve hunting or being near areas that wild animals roam, seeing as ninja tend to kill such animals whenever they come close to civilisation. Whole (civilian) villages are generally are not eaten, except for extremely rare cases.
You know that Mist has at least the standard chakra-improved tracking abilities. The Jounin in your group are hoping that you were not followed into Leaf because of political considerations, but they could be wrong. You are worried that the famous Hyuuga, Inuzuka or Aburame clans might detect you from some distance away, but don't know the details of their abilities. You hope that diplomatic considerations between Mist and Leaf will prevent Mist from properly hunting you down, but that doesn't stop Mist from simply telling Leaf about you and you could be wrong.
As ninja you are theoretically capable of bringing in many times the income of for example a farmer, so starvation should not be an issue so long as missions are being completed. Hiding and living off the land would feed you as you are essentially an apex predator that has trained its entire life to kill things, but it would be possible that your thefts or foraging would be noted.
You know that theoretically such a market should exist in any land, but personally lack any specific contacts in Fire country. Define basic tools. You've got plenty of knives.
Disguising yourselves in rural areas would require a good reason for 30 or so farmers to suddenly appear into insular communities where everyone knows everyone else. In cities you would find it easier to excuse your presence, but you do not know how Leaf ninja monitor their cities or how effective they are at it.
You would be getting missions from your jounin, who in turn would get theirs from whoever they know locally that might want to give out missions. A lifetime of experience may well give them local contacts who need jobs done, or it might not.
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Rihaku
The Internet
Interesting that Kakashi would show up as not just relevant, but notable in a world that still has Uchiha jounin. Is a thousand jutsu particularly special among even the Uchiha? Are they just not very diligent?
I'm surprised Kakashi would predominate the bingo book and the likes of, say, Itachi wouldn't. Kakashi being a genius might explain his superior positioning over the other Uchiha despite lacking binocular vision, but Itachi is a scarier genius.
Is Akatsuki in the bingo book? Is the membership different from canon? (IC the form of this question would be - What is the membership of Akatsuki in the bingo book, but I figured this way is easier and faster to answer).
Have our jounin extracted the ninjutsu and other secrets from our dead commander's corpse yet? Anything suspicious / unusual in there?
OOC, what is the mechanism by which we gain XP? How long a period of downtime is necessary to train Skills?
I'm surprised Kakashi would predominate the bingo book and the likes of, say, Itachi wouldn't. Kakashi being a genius might explain his superior positioning over the other Uchiha despite lacking binocular vision, but Itachi is a scarier genius.
Is Akatsuki in the bingo book? Is the membership different from canon? (IC the form of this question would be - What is the membership of Akatsuki in the bingo book, but I figured this way is easier and faster to answer).
Have our jounin extracted the ninjutsu and other secrets from our dead commander's corpse yet? Anything suspicious / unusual in there?
OOC, what is the mechanism by which we gain XP? How long a period of downtime is necessary to train Skills?
- Location
- Norway
IIRC we haven't actually gotten confirmation one way or the other that the Uchiha are dead or alive.
Hopefully your question will clear this up.
Otherwise here are some that should elucidate the matter:
1) Have we heard about anything like an Uchiha massacre in Konoha?
2) Have we seen any Bingo-books from Konoha lately? Is there any Uchiha in them or ours?
3) What briefings did the jounin give us about Konoha-nin we could meet and what to watch out for?
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Rihaku
The Internet
Finally, some good news. The existence of constant high-level wildlife, while concerning, means that demand for ninja services will always outstrip supply, as land must remain functionally unexploited until ninja clear it. I'm surprised the Fire Lord hasn't hired the Leaf to kill or contain all such beasts in Fire Country already. Unexploited fertile land is a direct unrealized gain and his economy would benefit massively from such expansion, especially in combination with fertility programs among the populace.
A land-lottery system could also be used as one part economic development, one part bread and circuses. Even if there exist incentives to stop people from desiring plots of their own, winners of the land lotto can at least sell their plots to the highest bidder - lords or collectives capable of efficiently using the land - which would at least serve as a mechanism of wealth transfer, tremendously productive in high-Gini coefficient countries like any medieval feudal society. Or at the very least he could take the land for himself, for our purposes it only matters that there is a huge effective undersupply of ninja labor even outside the normal force-building required for defense, which itself is a huge demand attractor.
It's easy enough to keep some percentage of trees around for ninja travel, so maybe he just didn't do the math and thought the beasts were nice for national defense? But in that case, capture and domestication into mass production would be orders and orders of magnitude better. Maybe he can't afford it? But in a medieval society, the economic productivity of land is the primary investment mechanism. The opportunity to reclaim massive swaths should suck up virtually all of his excess income, which means enormous demand for more ninja labor - and moreover, ninja labor capable of consistently taking on giant monsters, which probably requires at least high-level genin.
Velerion's post mentioned that people were surprised they gave a sharigan to a non-Uchiha jounin, would implies the existence of Uchiha jounin. Maybe they're all dead as of present, which would be nice. Should be easy enough to confirm since a Bingo Book would almost certainly have one loyal Uchiha if they maintain a population in Konoha.
Oh, so the Massacre did happen. That is good to know! Are you able to give a rough estimate of the ninja populations in a major country? Are they in the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? Of those, what percentage are jounin?
Has it been defined which nation we were supposed to be sent against on our original suicide mission. Saying "we were supposed to attack you in a massive suicide mission, inflicting horrifying damage, but we're willing to defect to you given even remotely reasonable terms," where "defect" does not require them to integrate us into their village, only to keep us in an easily-surveyed location with some method of tracking, is pretty low-risk for the accepting village. They can assign one sentry jounin to gain net two jounin plus bonus. The sentry jounin can even be injured staff, which makes the cost almost zero.
Guys, please vote for a name and gender if you haven't already.
- Location
- how about no
So... is this all ret-con'd already? That was fast.
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
Itachi is in your bingo book, though he is only listed as a traitor and his crimes are not listed. Presumably Konoha doesn't like advertising that one of their own decapitated one of their most famous clans. Supposedly he killed every battle-worthy ninja in his clan in a single night and then left. The rumours are divided as to why. Some say that his father killed Itachi's forbidden star crossed lover and he snapped, others that he wanted worthy opponents and considered only other Sharingan users to be his equal. The rumours do not seem particularly trustworthy.
The clan has still not recovered. You were shocked when you heard, but were comforted by the fact that such a thing could never happen in Mist. After all, who would be crazy enough to attack a clan?
You have not seen a Konoha Bingo Book.
My wording was a bit ambiguous. No point in leading you to think one thing when your character knows different.
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chaonaut
Totally Not a Spy for Orochimort
- Location
- United States
...
Ah, crap. Well, our protag is (going to be?) a paid killer, I might as well put out the idea even if makes me squeamish.
It requires either an insular community suddenly growing or a insular community of 30 people to suddenly disappear.
Which is a terrible idea, since pretending to be someone only works until you meet someone who knows who you're pretending to be better than you do, and people often have relatives that live far away and come for visits and would be missed if they didn't make it home.
Okay, maybe that was enough to fix the terrible feeling of suggesting the mass slaughter of (fictional) people.
- Location
- USA
I would actually expect Shikigami to be the one in charge, considering their placement in the commander's tent and first-mover advantage with the decision to desert. I don't expect that rules out their status as our former sensei. But I have two questions for you:
Is Shikigami actually a guy? (Boy I hope not, just because we have to be) I notice @eaglejarl seemed to carefully leave out any indicators. :3
How do we know Shikigami didn't forge those documents and make us betray our village?
Goddammit. We should probably practice leaving the campsite as quickly as possible.
I don't consider it such a good thing, because it means there are people voting who haven't even read the discussion. Including the reasons why Stealth Assassin was such a misguided plan?
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- Location
- Somewhere, probably Earth
Those words are not encouraging.
- Location
- Norway
If this is the case we could potentially rent ourselves out as land-clearers yeah.
At the very least it suggests there is a market for periodic clearing of established areas and likely some clearing of new areas as well.
That is in addition to all the other possible missions ninja have. Though the existence of this wild-life is a more organically consistent reason for the wide-spread necessity of ninja.
I think you might be over-estimating how trusting they would be.
If it were the case that villages would accept groups of ninja that easily it would be a good strategy to send groups undercover to take out their watcher-jounin one by one and weaken the village that way. This gets even easier if they are injured. They would probably have to stash several high-level groups nearby to de-incentivise such "hit-and-run"-operations.
Alternatively just give them suicide-ish missions of clearing stuff or kill them outright.
Given these counter-measures it's probably not as low-risk for them as all that. The watcher-jounin is basically bait for our betrayal or we get murdered.
- Location
- USA
Spit-balling ideas for further refinement. With the bloodlimit we could put on a passable performance as a bard of some type as a cover for entering random villages for information gathering plus petty income. Learn to do a juggling act or some minor talent that we could just set our body to do while we pay full attention to conversations around us. Another utility of our bloodlimit if it costs not chakra is food preparation, perfect meals so long as we have an even cooking surface plus layout of spices, we could try and get a mobile cooking cart as another way of moving around populated areas stealthily should the situation call/allow for that disguise, such as a festival or other event.
- Location
- USA
Not even such short-sighted tactics. Assuming the village is naive enough to believe that, the first time they get burned they shore up their security right away. It's much more valuable to have your own agents inside a village as provocateurs and spies. At the very least, you'd want such a large group to insinuate themselves into a village, where they can then kill as many high-value targets as possible (although this is not a target to pull against relatively friendly relations, so just spies and provocateurs). No, especially for such a large group, killing the lot is a much higher expected value, and the only way to do so safely is to convince them that they are being accepted (but not too trustingly, surprises might spook them).
I doubt that we will last a day if we are
We need escape and evasion. As soon as possible. Practicing leaving camp quickly is enough to give us an edge on our escape. And we can train the motion in parts, too. We manage a particularly good first twenty seconds and an additional abysmal failure, we can copy everything up to that in order to get a run that's perfect all the way through.
Diplomacy is also part of stealth. I don't know what skill disguising would fall under...
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- Location
- Yes.
@transfuturist: Disguising=Henge. Blending in=Diplomacy.
- Location
- USA
I'm talking about mundane disguising. We don't know the capabilities of the Byakugan, or the difference in chakra between civilians and ninja, but we need to be able to disguise ourselves without relying on chakra if we want a chance of evading or fooling the Byakugan.
- Location
- ✳
Well, that'd depend on how hardcore you want to make the disguise. For the usual mundane things like changing clothing, hairstyles, posture, and make-up, you'll get the the dedicated "disguise" skill. If you find a good med-nin, they'd probably be able to significantly reconfigure the face for you as well.
You'd still have to take care of not giving yourself away in conversation, even if your visual disguise is perfect.
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- Location
- Norway
More like: "at least you got what you wanted, even though you didn't read through it", than anything else.
A better plan would be to just create a little insular community ourselves somewhere. If the plan is to pretend to be civilians anyhow. Which is basically what we've done. Except we're still working as ninjas since that is less risky than for all of us to attempt to pose as civilians somewhere. There are likely counter-measures against infiltrators, like checking chakra-levels, hands for callouses or scars or whether they have some papers of identification or regular pass-codes.
Also, since the life of a civilian is not good, being wholly in-character as a civilian would likely suck. Suddenly doing too well(losing less people to animals, starvation and disease than is statistical, looking fed, having actual shoes or good clothes) would also be suspicious as all get-out. Probably difficult to convince everyone to live in squalor as well.
Well, maybe not pickpocketing or killing every ninja we come across, but at least gathering as much info as we are able to without unnecessarily antagonizing everyone we meet. Fact-checking and gathering is, after all, essential to making informed choices.
Well, yeah, but since that is a good strategy re:weakening other villages, we would never be let into the village itself as you noted.
Rihaku argued that one possible way of utilizing ninjas claiming to want to defect would be to keep them away from the village, in some location where you can easily track them and keep track of them. That the cost of doing that and putting them to some useful purpose would hopefully be less than outright killing them.
My response was a problem with having that be the regular response to such overtures.
So yeah.
The goal here is to find some rational argument as to why it would make more sense to do something other than just murder us all when we are found out.
We would probably have to think really well on how to make such a deal sound more appealing to the ninjas who find us than just outright murder. It's, after all, just much less hassle to leave the bodies to the animals than to have to write reports and recommendations for why the 25 ninja you found should be kept as work-slaves and future logistical and bureaucratic headaches instead.
But if all else fails we could try to argue for it anyway. This is not meant as plan A, it is plan "Shit, fan; fan, shit"
Essentially I believe. More like, if you can reproduce the circumstances, you can reproduce the results.
In game-terms I believe this equates to being able to reproduce a dice-roll we made earlier given same or "close-enough" circumstances.
- Location
- USA
A new skill, that is?
Correct me if I'm wrong, @AugSphere @dwibby, but the true cost of skills is something like sum(2(n+1)/attr. coefficient) + (n+1), right? If we fall below that reservation (minus the explicit cost of the skill) rate per skill level gained, we're in debt to attributes.
I think we should run if Konoha shows up.
- Location
- ✳
Yup, it'll be a new skill for your character. You'd still be able to develop it with practice (by spending XP on it) as usual.
- Location
- Somewhere, probably Earth
I think the idea is that because of the natural twitchiness of people, most can never reproduce a successful result every time unless they have years of practice.
We only have to succeed once and, at the cost of not necessarily ever doing better, we never do worse.
We only have to succeed once and, at the cost of not necessarily ever doing better, we never do worse.
- Location
- Norway
Well yes, assuming that is a good option. And assuming we are confident about our ability to cover our tracks well enough to get away from Aburame and Inuzukas on our trail.
It all depends on how and by whom we are discovered.
If it is some lowly genin and we are fairly sure this is not a trap, kill'em, run and hope the delay between discovery and chase being given is enough to get away.
If we are suddenly surrounded by high-level jounin and given three seconds to surrender, we would do well to surrender and have practiced making these arguments in a coherent way.
It's all about preparing contingencies, which is what our bloodline can do excellently.
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- Location
- USA
A lot of our rolls will fade out of usefulness over time as we will not have the same body dimensions as when we first did the thing, should we live that long for it to mater. We also can't fall into the trap of using it blindly to give us an "I win" every time we do a thing. People will pick up on the patterns and nail us if we are not careful in its use.