Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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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
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Have some one sentence suggestions:
[X] Interlude: The foundation of the hidden Villages
[X] Interlude: Grandmaster F's origins
[X] Interlude: That one time we no longer speak of when all the nations allied to defeat a sealing failure of interdimensional horror
[X] Interlude: The forbidden love between a daimyo and a kage
[X] Interlude: Akane's first day back in Leaf as a Leaf-nin
[X] Interlude: Hazou's strained relationship with the Kurosawa (pre-missing nin)
[X] Interlude: Hazou's dreams of a seal powered perfect future where civilians use seals for everything and there is no war and everything lives in the clouds where it's pretty and Akane's really nice
[X] Interlude: Jiraiya teaching a class of genin-in-training decades ago
[X] Interlude: That one spy whose sisters are probably dead and probably got tortured to death and gave up information to the Yakuza because we bolted as fast as we could from his house
[X] Interlude: The fate of that one village we helped out a bit in Iron after we took Kagome away from them
[X] Interlude: Missing-nin & Yakuza hijinks
[X] Interlude: Ninja Pirates
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Hm. I think Jutsu worldbuilding, and just technological development in general is something I'm going to need to type out.
So first, jutsu and seals are weapons, subject to arms races.
So first, jutsu and seals are weapons, subject to arms races.
- For example, ninja from the First Shinobi World War seem to be wearing armor all the time, yet by the current era, ninja only wear clothing that doesn't limit mobility. This implies that taijutsu, ninjutsu, and/or genjutsu has gotten so deadly that armor will not save you, and in fact will only weigh you down.
- This is also why subsequent Liberator rebellions don't work; the Liberator is just on the edge of chakra ninja becoming so deadly that armor and katana techniques will no longer be a viable fighting force.
- Jutsu and seal development being treated as weapons also means that you don't see people sticking to an idea for long; they'll be too busy building either a counter to the other village's counter or they'll be busy developing their own projects.
- This mentality also leads people to see counters as hard counters to whatever they're build to counter and nothing else; see Jiraiya's "I give a fucking snot nosed kid a defensive seal I've had for years, and he comes back with the greatest fucking strategic shift since the fucking Sage of Six Paths.". Another example: People don't realize that Living Roots makes you always hit first in Taijutsu because they're too busy seeing it as a scouting technique against Hiding Like a Mole, which was probably the third biggest strategic shift, after skywalkers and Tailed Beasts, unless its been heavily nerfed (enemy forces can appear literally anywhere they feel like except over water, supply lines cannot be cut even with S-Rank ninja on the opposite side, etc.)
- This also implies that any modern jutsu used is highly lethal and efficient; Water Whip is fairly cutting edge (hah) in terms of its versatility and efficiency; Grand Fireball Technique, on the other hand, is ponderously slow and only lethal to ninja in minutes rather than seconds. Statwise, this probably translates to modern jutsu having higher Chakra Manipulation requirements but lower CP requirements, with also a more efficient XP to rolls (aka they have multipliers attached to their level) then old style techniques.
- I make the conjecture that there's a lot of iron around from all the kunai being thrown around, but the low quality iron is from the existence of tanto and katanas as the primary melee weapon of choice. Tanto and katanas are generally not as good as their broadsword counterparts, mostly because the iron was worse, so GIGO. Since tanto and katana are the melee weapons of choice, this probably means that most iron deposits are low quality.
- Iron in particular has the most (no surprise there), but it leverages those iron exports to hire mercenaries, which has managed to keep it relatively independent. Also on Iron's side is the fact that so much of its iron is relatively low quality; every Elemental Nation, weighing up the numbers, decides that invading a fairly well armed country for minimal gains is just pointless.
- Again with the Liberator, his adoption of the katana drove most sword development to copy his swords; even though most countries have superior iron deposits some way or another, the ur-example of a swordsman is the Liberator; they're not going to deviate from the script for a while, but eventually some radical blacksmith is going to look at that and go "wait, what would happen if I added a hilt to a ken?" Sad, really, that this genius blacksmith's greatest invention will be obsolete in the same generation.
- They're a mercenary economy, playing a role quite like Switzerland during feudal times. They're typically known for their quality mercs (aka can kick all the asses at a price; see Hanzo of the Salamander), and Akatsuki is just seen as an extension of the concept, the newly formed merc company since Hanzo "retired" from the last one.
- Hazou has a brokenly large head-start on literally everybody concerning physics; scratch atomic theory, conservation of mass isn't even a thing yet.
- There's no reason for anyone to suspect nuclear fusion or highly energetic decompression when a jutsu creator randomly vaporizes the entire swamp they're working in; in a world where sealing failures exist, the R&D wing just breathes a sigh of relief that they don't have to go and clean the failure up, as opposed to the bunch of times when their jutsu or seal misfiring opens up a hellish dimension from which nothing survives.
- This is not to say high altitude bombardment would not result in world destruction though; finding out that going higher up and dropping heavy things leave bigger craters is not hard to grasp as the root cause, as opposed to weird seal failure.
- Alchemy, and by extension chemistry, is probably a science that nobody bothers to spend effort in; why bother trying to turn lead to gold when you have a jutsu/seal that will literally do that for you, except better? (note: no actual gold was transmuted, but, you know, semantics)
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
According to Kagome, Akatsuki were based in Rain when they were selling books on why killing people is bad, and when the Sage of Six Paths sent his defective brother to Rain Akatsuki fought hard just to escape with their lives and has been based everywhere else since.
Hazou's got more of a super-intuition than anything else here. It's easy enough for us to have him shrug and say conservation of mass just makes sense, but he has no actual proofs and no real way to convince others. Remember how tenacious miasma theory was even after bacteria became known; it seems obvious that the tiny exponentially-replicating lifeforms on your skin might play a part in getting sick, but it was a surprisingly hard sell. The best boon here is that Hazou knows which tech trees to pursue and which ones are dead ends, but even then there's only so much you can research in a lifetime.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Depends on how long your lifetime is.
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
[X] Interlude: Ninjas and Neorealism, the tabletop RPG-themed parody webcomic version of Marked for Death.
Maybe this is because I came in on D&D where stories about the players who insisted his wizard was going to "invent gunpowder" were subjects of mockery and derision, but I don't know why you would get satisfaction from doing this sort of thing. Like, why would it bring you pleasure to have your character in a game coming up with modern inventions using completely out of character knowledge? Why is that a thing that would be considered "fun"?
To win? What, who cares, it's a game. Winning a game only has a point if you're winning by playing fair. If you want to play A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you can set up a game around that premise.
Taking a character who has supposedly grown up on the fantasy world and trying to have him invent a bunch of modern stuff seems like it's completely departing from the premise. It's trying to bring in tools from outside the world rather than having the character run by the limitations of what he would reasonably think and feel.
Why is that fun for you? Because for me, it would suck all the fun out of a game.
It is possible to do that, but there are so many constraint imposed on Hazō that this should not be a worry for you. We hardly have any energy to work on something like, say, a hot air balloon.
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
Alchemist's fire is shelf-stable self-igniting napalm, not an explosive.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Not with that attitude, it isn't!
- Location
- London
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
Are there any systems that roll a speed stat each round to work out how many feet/meters/a.u. your character gets to move that round? I can't think of one, but I really like the idea.
I believe (though I'm not super sure) that TacMov currently rolls one character against another to determine success in approaching or escaping; would it be more interesting/effective/simulationist/cool to roll for movement range each round? Just for example, Akane's character sheet has her TacMov at 30, rolling 30d4 yields mean 75 and stdev 6.12, compared to Noburi's TacMov 22 yielding mean 55, stdev 5.24.
Does it sound logical that Akane could gain on an escaping Noburi by 20 feet per round? I don't know, but it doesn't seem insane. Comparably, a 60 TacMov jonin on average gains 75 feet of distance on Aka-chan each round, but could still lose with extreme rolls. That said, the chance of Aka-chan winning is extraordinarily, perhaps unrealistically(?), small.
I think that using this idea for combat would require a war-game-y style map, and I don't know whether that's the way y'all run the combats in practice. I would think it would do away with the Character A vs Character B roll-offs.
This was fun for me to think about. If Dex weren't already overvalued in D&D 5e I would consider using this for combats there, maybe rolling (6+DexMod)d6 feet of movement, so that the DexMod=-1 wizard moves on average 17.5 feet per round, vs the DexMod=+4 rogue moving 35feet on average.
- Location
- a
WOO THE GLORIOUS QM HAS REVEALED THE ENDING,turns out the main character is not hazo, but OUR GLORIOUS ONE AND TRUE FATHER, Kagome
Roadie
A plate full of blins and a cat nearby.
GURPS (since I keep bringing it up) has a stat-based Basic Move rating for how far characters can move per second, with the Running skill to reduce fatigue when running and and to determine who wins in a race with equal Move ratings. Variation is provided less by chance and more by how sustained running at top speed (up to 120% of your normal Move, but with maneuverability penalties) requires a successful Running roll every 15 seconds or you lose 1 FP. You can also used paced running, to go at 60% of your normal Move but risking only 1 FP per minute. When you're at 1/3rd or less FP, you halve your Move, Dodge, and Strength, so sustained pursuit when combat is a risk for either party has a certain tactical aspect to it.
Incidentally, fighting itself has an FP cost per battle based on how heavily encumbered you are (which fits nicely with the idea of ninja minimizing gear in order to spend their energy on techniques instead), and hiking or other overland travel has an FP cost per hour, though that usually doesn't matter much because you recover 1 FP per ten minutes of rest anyway.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Hm. It'd require reworking a lot to fix the Dex-being-overrepresented problem, but that does sound interesting.
It doesn't seem that difficult to me to make up a map even on googlesheets. Use coloring for terrain, letters to represent characters and symbols for misc effects, with a key out to the side.
Whether @eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail want to do so is another question, though: I'm not sure it's appropriate to use quite that degree of granularity for something like movement. Personally I would be somewhat worried about it being restrictive.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
What is 'playing fair' in this context? Because if we use a strict interpretation of metagaming, even stuff like combat tactics, or creative things like using oil-log-maccerators to make a big boom would be beyond Hazou.
While it's certainly possible to outline a set of rules to follow as a community, the easier solution is to ask the question "Could Hazou know the things necessary to lead to this conclusion?" For gunpowder, the answer is no: He doesn't have the background in chemistry (yet) to figure something like that out. For basic principles of science, philosophy, etc, though, I don't see much problem. Insofar as actually doing research goes, I would fully expect Hazou to be required to make rolls the same as anyone else did (at least in newer systems where research rolls (in general) are a thing); the difference is that we can direct him where to focus his attention.
Because at the end of the day, we're not going to have him pursue miasma theory when we know how disease is spread.
- Location
- floating away
Would this combat be the quest equivalent of crashing the game?
We should save that for the Christmas special- It's getting to that time of year, after all.
Unless the QM's changed a bit more than we think.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Yes. And I would be fine with our metagaming biting us in the ass in that case
The whole reason for our success was to break the world that exist within the MfD with inventions such as skywalkers.
So, yes, we're playing "Giving Radio to the Romans", but it's the kind of success that must be organic.
Hazō cannot invent gunpowder because he simply doesn't have the chemical or alchemical background, and there's no need for him to invent them.
Hazō could invent hot air balloons because he is inspired by sky lanterns and jumping the Mizukage tower in his youth.