- Location
- Potato land
On the other hand, just how badly can looking for appropriate lodgings for a travelling merchant go?
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
On the other hand, just how badly can looking for appropriate lodgings for a travelling merchant go?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
You've doomed us all!
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- Yes.
Implying we weren't doomed already.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
w h y w o u l d y o u d o t h a t ?
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Nothing has ever gone horribly wrong at all.
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- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
No it's the literal truth. Nothing outside of the prologue has been a major sit back
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- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I feel like the killbox had the potential to go horribly wrong. It was a difficult problem but one we managed to solve without suffering any major setbacks
We had some really close calls though. Remember when Mari tried to sacrifice herself mid-combat and the only thing that saved her was Kei getting bonus dice because Mari's plan sucked?
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- Potato land
Horribly wrong, to me, means getting a massively worse outcome than you expect. Going from vacationing in Leaf, on good terms with Jiraiya and Team Asuma, to a killbox, in a single conversation, fits the bill perfectly.
Close calls are close calls. Sometimes you can't avoid taking serious risks. This doesn't mean anything went wrong, just that the problem was very difficult to solve. The Arikada situation is a good example of this - nothing went wrong per se, in fact quite a few things went well, but in the end Akane almost died.
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I think the Minami thing marked a genuine shift in how the quest is run that the thread still doesn't quite believe is real. If I'm remembering right, that was where the QMs agreed to stop Hazou from doing stupid shit that he should have known better about even if plans had him doing stupid shit because voters didn't know or had completely forgotten it was stupid*. As far as I can see, they've stuck to that promise. Of course, in return he now does stupid shit that no one voted to have him do if the QMs think it's consistent with his character. But at least it's usually stupid shit with less-deadly consequences.
Consequently, there's still huge paranoia that a plan uses the wrong word somewhere and is therefore going to screw Hazou over whenever plans get made. Yet Hazou giving a speech about how he wants to "eliminate clans" and majorly alienating both Noburi and Keiko barely gets a reaction. Even though no one voted for him to do that, and it's an example of the sort of stupid shit** he will now occasionally do on his own.
*First forgetting that Noburi's mist-drain trump card was supposed to be a secret even from other vaillage ninja and then forgetting that the whole Stone Cold Killers thing is also supposed to be a huge secret.
**Not a QM criticism... it was perfectly believable that he overestimates how much his adopted siblings will buy into his sometime radical political beliefs.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
...Uh, yeah, I'd say something very definitely went wrong there, though. We shouldn't have gone through with the (nor, to my eyes, should we have even left our research in Tea to go do that mission) plan that led to that.
Paraphrasing a quote from earlier in the thread, but heroics require some general fucked up shit in the planning phase for them to be required at all
Oh, I fully plan on spending time with Noburi and Keiko later to repair any damage to their relationship when this is done, but I think you're slightly overestimating it. It's a difference in opinion, yes, and one that could create a gulf between them, but it doesn't have to, and as long as we keep an eye on it, we should be able to keep it from getting worse.
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- Potato land
Incidentally, given that Hazou now has Opinions, do we have some way of just putting some thoughts in his head without this being expressed in a conversation? I wouldn't mind injecting some nuance into Hazou's ideas about the clan system, so that he at least acknowledges that tearing it down completely would do more harm than good.
I agree. However, I still think we're better about this now than we were in the past. The vote discussions since the start of the exam, at least, have shown a lot of awareness of opsec issues and consequences of revealing our team's capabilities.
I agree. However, I still think we're better about this now than we were in the past. The vote discussions since the start of the exam, at least, have shown a lot of awareness of opsec issues and consequences of revealing our team's capabilities.
Maybe try very hard to give him the opinion that he shouldn't do that?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Direct him to read more philosophy?
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- Potato land
MfD-verse philosophy? Do we want him to pivot into clan supremacist?
I honestly think the clan thing was sort of a misunderstanding. Hazou said clan people weren't inherently more valuable. Noburi and Keiko countered that they were more instrumentally valuable. Nobody realized that they actually meant different things when talking about the "worth" of bloodline vs non-bloodline ninja, so we got confusion.
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- Potato land
It remains to be seen just how much Noburi and Keiko buy into the clan system logic. Putting aside the unfairness of said system, which they've both acknowledged and agreed that it could stand to be more meritocratic, clans also control information in a way that's demonstrably against the common good. For the Goketsu Clan, it's one thing if said information security is imposed on us by outside parties (the Pangolin jutsu) or is dictated by national security (Skywalkers and Skytowers), but does Noburi, for example, intend to jealously hoard all the results of his future medical research for clan eyes only? Because Hazou, I think, would be absolutely against this kind of thinking, and it clashes heavily with the Uplift ideology as well.
In simpler terms, clans guard their knowledge because it makes them more powerful. Are we willing to do the same thing? I think that, for Hazou, power is just a means of realizing his ideals, and he will ultimately care more about humanity at large than Goketsu supremacy.
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History is full of people who claimed that power was just a means of realizing their ideals and not an end in itself. Many of them probably believed it. Very nearly every one discovered that the need for power never disappeared because there was always more to be done.
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So, what you're saying, is that you think we're going to keep working on improving Hazou's personal power, and never actually get to implementing any of our uplift ideas? It's possible. I, for one, think that our position is good enough, and am planning to actually start getting things done once we're back in Leaf (assuming things don't completely blow up and we're stuck fighting fires again). I suppose we'll have to see.
The clan thing is a bit different, though. Let's say we want to make use of the industrial applications of force walls as developed by @Winged_One. Do we do this in such a way that all the profits remain in Goketsu coffers, or so the whole economy can benefit? I genuinely expect most of us would pick the latter, and that consequently Hazou would as well.
Side note: I'd like to take the term "uplift" out back and have it shot. Even using it imposes an illusionary bi-directionality to societal structure as if there were scale with "higher" at one end and "lower" at the other. If you want to alter the trade-offs and beneficiaries of society that's fine, but there is no "up" to be "lifted" to, only change.
That said, it's more that balancing Hazou's efforts to increase his personal power with efforts to actual make changes he wants to see in the world is a real dilemma. If Hazou never does anything, then obviously nothing will get done. On the other hand, the less personal power he has the more difficult any given change will be to make. Just as a for-example, a non-chakra-using civilian might seek to influence some area of village policy and succeed in doing so after a dedicated campaign of persuasion, social pressure, and influence that is literally the project of years of work. An S-ranker with deep social ties to the rulers of the village might be able to accomplish the same thing with a week of argument and words in the right ears.
The more Hazou works to increase his personal power, the faster he can pass through changes he wants to see. If he does nothing but increase his personal power, then he's not actually changing anything at all. On the other hand, the more time he devotes to projects of social change, the less speed with which personal power accumulates and not much happens either because he lacked the power to push through any changes. How much time do you spend training your army before embarking on a campaign? It's a classic optimization problem and so fuzzy that there's no mathematical answer.
Seems to me that's a false dilemma. The fastest way to introduce an industrial innovation isn't to go around talking about how great it is. It's to use it to successfully make a lot of profits, whereupon imitators will appear so that they can get in on the profits as well. That's literally the foundation of and moral justification for capitalism. I assure you, there's probably dozens of people working on creating their own version of the printing press 'right now' in the Elemental Nations (if they haven't built them already), because they see the utility of printed books. Nara Shikaku didn't need to give it away to make that happen, and in fact attempting to give it away might have been a failure because he didn't demonstrate the actual utility of the thing.