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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Inferno Vulpix said:
We haven't heard of the Nara doing secret sealing research on printing press seals, but then again we kinda didn't ask. Once we get back we can ask Shikaku if he's considered it, if he's already doing it, and/or if he's hit a roadblock we haven't anticipated, and doing that is well worth our time on the chance that we get to be the spearhead of true seal mass-production.
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If I were a betting eldritch horror, I'd wager that printing press seals cause quite so many headaches for the QM's. If it could be done already easily, the world would look vastly different. If it could be done with moderate effort, the Nara would have figured it out and Leaf would have a massive advantage against all of the other villages, and this in turn would mean that events like the Ultimate Showdown would have gone differently as well. In order to preserve the basic premise of the world of MfD, sealing printing presses, if possible at all, have to be obscenely hard to make or have such a high failure rate that they are not economically viable to construct.

The hivemind may take this as a challenge, but personally I believe it is a friendly reminder that our efforts would be put to better use elsewhere. We've broken this setting so many times already, necessitating an obscene number of revisions and edits to the world setting. It would be far easier on us and them if we stuck to less world-challenging endeavors: things that the villages would not have had cause to think of already in their endless pursuits of military power. Creating better infrastructure would, in my opinion, be the most useful and relatively easiest improvement we could make to Leaf and Fire country as a whole. Every ninja and clan has been obsessed with increasing their own personal power through bloodlines, secret techniques, and signature jutsu's, but with the relatively recent invention of the village system there is still plenty of room to innovate on a macro scale. Faster troop and resource transportation via seal powered trains or airships would never have been pursued by child soldiers in a constant arms race with each other, but now with our resources we can.

We should give the QM's a break from this particular brand of headaches. They deserve it after all of the hard work they've given us over the years.

(I also don't want the quest to go through another round of world and rules revisions. The last one lasted long enough.)
 
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Oneiros said:
They aren't risking there life to seal failures. They don't require safety features or labs to do research. All they need is ink and paper. If Ren can convince 10 members of the clan to join her conspiracy every day she can equip every Mist ninja with the best seal ever designed by a Kurosawa seal master. She can repeat this day. Moving on from one seal to another. Each seal giving every Mist ninja more power and utility. Every day mist is growing stronger than every village. She has a cease fire in place. Which is all she needs to become powerful enough to fight of all the other villages
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Not sure where you're getting this. In safety terms, what the Iron Nerve does is allow the Kurosawa to automatically succeed on one of the two rolls required to make a seal. They are absolutely risking their lives because of sealing failures, just less so than everyone else.
 
Velorien said:
Not sure where you're getting this. In safety terms, what the Iron Nerve does is allow the Kurosawa to automatically succeed on one of the two rolls required to make a seal. They are absolutely risking their lives because of sealing failures, just less so than everyone else.
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What @Oneiros is saying is that the Kurosawa could delegate the steps in seal-making by having the less skilled Kurosawa focus solely on the first step of the process: drawing the blank. Those blanks can then be transported over to an actual sealmaster who can then perform the most dangerous part of the sealing process, the infusion. The "10 clan members" don't have to risk their lives because they will never attempt the 2nd step in the sealing process. By freeing up the sealmaster's time so that he does not have to spend time on drawing blanks and only has to infuse seals (like Jiraiya did when Hazou handed him a stack of goo bombs, IIRC) Mist could dramatically improve its seal output virtually overnight.
 
Dictator4Hire said:
What @Oneiros is saying is that the Kurosawa could delegate the steps in seal-making by having the less skilled Kurosawa focus solely on the first step of the process: drawing the blank. Those blanks can then be transported over to an actual sealmaster who can then perform the most dangerous part of the sealing process, the infusion. The "10 clan members" don't have to risk their lives because they will never attempt the 2nd step in the sealing process. By freeing up the sealmaster's time so that he does not have to spend time on drawing blanks and only has to infuse seals (like Jiraiya did when Hazou handed him a stack of goo bombs, IIRC) Mist could dramatically improve its seal output virtually overnight.
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This is true, but the original claim is still hyperbolic. The benefit of having a skilled sealmaster do the infusing is a low failure rate. However, this rate becomes less low if the seal being infused is "the best seal ever designed by a Kurosawa sealmaster" as opposed to something simple like explosive tags or storage scrolls (the things that you'd normally see a sealmaster mass-produce), and even a low rate can be fatal if the sealmaster is infusing enough of that seal to equip every Mist ninja. And if that sealmaster gets one lethal sealing failure, the 10 clan members are rendered irrelevant and entire setup collapses.
 
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Dictator4Hire said:
If I were a betting eldritch horror, I'd wager that printing press seals cause quite so many headaches for the QM's. If it could be done already easily, the world would look vastly different. If it could be done with moderate effort, the Nara would have figured it out and Leaf would have a massive advantage against all of the other villages, and this in turn would mean that events like the Ultimate Showdown would have gone differently as well. In order to preserve the basic premise of the world of MfD, sealing printing presses, if possible at all, have to be obscenely hard to make or have such a high failure rate that they are not economically viable to construct.

The hivemind may take this as a challenge, but personally I believe it is a friendly reminder that our efforts would be put to better use elsewhere. We've broken this setting so many times already, necessitating an obscene number of revisions and edits to the world setting. It would be far easier on us and them if we stuck to less world-challenging endeavors: things that the villages would not have had cause to think of already in their endless pursuits of military power. Creating better infrastructure would, in my opinion, be the most useful and relatively easiest improvement we could make to Leaf and Fire country as a whole. Every ninja and clan has been obsessed with increasing their own personal power through bloodlines, secret techniques, and signature jutsu's, but with the relatively recent invention of the village system there is still plenty of room to innovate on a macro scale. Faster troop and resource transportation via seal powered trains or airships would never have been pursued by child soldiers in a constant arms race with each other, but now with our resources we can.

We should give the QM's a break from this particular brand of headaches. They deserve it after all of the hard work they've given us over the years.

(I also don't want the quest to go through another round of world and rules revisions. The last one lasted long enough.)
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Printing press is not an obvious idea. One accurate enough to be relied on for sealing and fast enough to be worth it is not only non-obvious, but also a fairly hard engineering problem.
 
Convincing sealmasters to infuse weird blanks they haven't drawn themselves will also be a problem. Especially given that the early models will have non-trivial failure rates.
 
Velorien said:
This is true, but the original claim is still hyperbolic. The benefit of having a skilled sealmaster do the infusing is a low failure rate. However, this rate becomes less low if the seal being infused is "the best seal ever designed by a Kurosawa sealmaster" as opposed to something simple like explosive tags or storage scrolls (the things that you'd normally see a sealmaster mass-produce), and even a low rate can be fatal if the sealmaster is infusing enough of that seal to equip every Mist ninja. And if that sealmaster gets one lethal sealing failure, the 10 clan members are rendered irrelevant and entire setup collapses.
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Yes. However I was under the impression that a sealmaster skill determined the odds of a failure. Also that each time you infused a seal the odds decreased. So assuming we have a very skilled sealmaster who knows what they can safely infuse while using respectable but below kagome level safety procedures I'd imagine they would be able to safely infuse the seals they would normally use in combat successfully. Are any of my assumptions incorrect?
 
Oneiros said:
Yes. However I was under the impression that a sealmaster skill determined the odds of a failure. Also that each time you infused a seal the odds decreased. So assuming we have a very skilled sealmaster who knows what they can safely infuse while using respectable but below kagome level safety procedures I'd imagine they would be able to safely infuse the seals they would normally use in combat successfully. Are any of my assumptions incorrect?
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That seems about right, except that there's no direct link between the seals a sealmaster can safely infuse and the seals they can successfully use in combat. Case in point: skywalkers.

Bear in mind that I didn't say your claim was wrong, merely hyperbolic. The more concessions you make, e.g. "seals the sealmaster is personally experienced with" rather than "best seals ever made by a Kurosawa sealmaster", the more viable your idea becomes.
 
TBH a lot of non-basic seals produce utility effects. Air Domes, Earth Domes, Usamatsu's seal, Skywalkers, etc.
 
Cariyaga said:
TBH a lot of non-basic seals produce utility effects. Air Domes, Earth Domes, Usamatsu's seal, Skywalkers, etc.
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Yeah, and I personally expect a lot of high level seals to produce more specialized and valuable utility effects, as opposed to straight up increasing a ninja's combat power. The privacy seals Jiraiya uses, for example, or chakra suppression seals hidden villages likely have. Or bijuu containment seals, for that matter.
 
Roomba said:
Yeah, and I personally expect a lot of high level seals to produce more specialized and valuable utility effects, as opposed to straight up increasing a ninja's combat power. The privacy seals Jiraiya uses, for example, or chakra suppression seals hidden villages likely have. Or bijuu containment seals, for that matter.
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And while the villages keep stores of the seals produced, they don't engage in mass production of high value offensive seals because it would encourage the same in their rivals, probably.
 
Roomba said:
seal tech equipped supersoldiers
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So how DO we become seal-tech equipped supersoldiers, anyway?
How do most ninja die in combat, and what do we need to avoid that death?
Should we be angling for Starship Troopers mechsuits, or invisibility cloaks, or what?

Or is the key to equalizing the world instead mutually assured destruction? Should we let loose @Radvic and equip every civilian with a mini-nuke and two AR-15s, so that they can fight ninjas or chakra beasts on equal-ish footing?
 
KaGoGoGadgetMe said:
How do most ninja die in combat, and what do we need to avoid that death?
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They die by being killed, and we can avoid that by not being killed.

Serious: The easiest way to avoid dying in combat is to avoid combat. We don't need to invent overpowered combat seals, we just need to invent enough useful seals such that the village recognizes our value as sealmasters and keeps us away from that shit.
 
Right, I suppose I should have instead said "How does one become...".

If our value as a sealmaster keeps us holed up in comfort at base, then how instead do we need to equip chuunin Nobodi Akashatsu who is sent in out in our place to keep him from death?
 
faflec said:
Except we already decided to do that when we were under the impression that selling Skywalkers to Leaf would result in the equivalent of permanent house arrest for Hazou?
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It's great that impression turned out to be mistaken then, because being under permanent house arrest doesn't seem very enjoyable as game, separate from its merits for Hazou.
 
Personally, I don't like the idea of making decisions based on completely OOC considerations such as "will this be fun as a game?". I see the simulationism of this quest as a contract between the players and QMs, rather than just a promise from the QM side. And so, while the QMs do their best to have the world make sense and behave as if it was real, the players should do their best to make decisions as if this was true. As opposed to picking whatever sounds most fun.

Also, sitting in Leaf and having to constantly interact with people, including some level of clan diplomacy, sounds a lot more difficult for us than punching.
 
Roomba said:
Personally, I don't like the idea of making decisions based on completely OOC considerations such as "will this be fun as a game?". I see the simulationism of this quest as a contract between the players and QMs, rather than just a promise from the QM side. And so, while the QMs do their best to have the world make sense and behave as if it was real, the players should do their best to make decisions as if this was true. As opposed to picking whatever sounds most fun.

Also, sitting in Leaf and having to constantly interact with people, including some level of clan diplomacy, sounds a lot more difficult for us than punching.
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Yes it is. As it should be.
 
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