- Location
- Yes.
We wouldn't just do that, we'd make an entire fucking industry out of it.This is true. Jashin-sama himself could create a system and we would start making blood sacrifices to appease him to get better rolls
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- 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
"Challenge Accepted!" by Kurkistan
- Location
- USA
Ooh, a challenge. Well I suck at writing but sure.
-This will end poorly.
Short:
"Again: Sensei, why exactly are we going deeper into the cave?"
"Keiko, Keiko. Dear, sweet, simple Keiko. For Murder. And Wealth. And also because Zabuza is camped out at the entrance."
"A fair point, Orochimaru-sensei."
--
Team Downfall crept further into the cave system, searching for the Chakra Salamander's lair. Not only was the over-sized magpie said to have collected great wealth over the centuries, but the direction of its distinctive smell lead decidedly away from the entrance currently being staked out by a Legendary Swordsman.
After several hours of ninja-like-spelunking (like ordinary spelunking, but infinitely easier because they could walk on any surface and blast holes through walls as necessary), they came upon the Fell Beast's lair. The Chakra Salamander (the locals called it "Smog" for some reason) was waiting for them, as ninja-like-spelunking was not a quiet endeavor. Team Downfall... didn't really do stealth.
After weathering Smog's first fiery blast under air domes, the team split up to attack. Noburi focused on area control, casting syrup traps like no tomorrow. Hazou and Akane played decoy, using Royki (like Roki, but EVILER) and a general lack of realistic expectations for outcomes to taunt Smog into attacks that just barely missed. Meanwhile Keiko was on aggro, her pangolin summons and kunai chipping away at the beast's life until finally the noble Chakra Salamander breathed its last.
Orochimaru hid around the corner, because Mrs. Orochimaru didn't raise no fools and that was a God. Damn. DRAGON there.
The dragon dead, the team fashioned cunningly-worked sleds out of its carcass and piled up the loot littering the floor of the war-torn cavern. Then they realized that they had storage scrolls and used those instead.
---
"But sensei, how are we going to escape? What about Zabuza? Are we going to bribe him?"
"An excellent idea, Akane, and I'm proud that your first thought is of such a 'cowardly' tactic. But bribes won't be necessary. I shall deal with Zabuza myself."
With that Orochimaru fearlessly strode out of the cave system, high fiving his clone hard enough to break its Zabuza henge. The two Orochimarus then took a moment to admire the one-of-a-kind snake-themed jewelry that Smog had happened to have been guarding.
Medium:
"The Chakra Salamander Smog lies in yonder cave. You can tell because everything is either on fire or looks burned."
Though not doubting the sincerity of the wise words from Sagemaster Botholemew, Team Downfall decided to do their due diligence and check with the local adventurers.
"Yup, that cave there. Fred bought it just last week trying for the treasure while Smog was 'out'. 'Out' my ass, I swear that lizardy bastard just likes to take constitutionals in the afternoons and swing round to catch people unawares."
---
Orochimaru plucked out his eyeball with a deeply disturbing "slorp" sound and sent it floating into the cave.
Everyone shuddered.
"Smog is in, it looks like he's asle- nope, definitely awake. Damn, I hate having to harvest new eyes. Always hard to get the colors to match..."
With that Orochimaru fixed them with a one-eye/one-raw-socket look: "I know you wanted to scout ahead, Hazou, but I would advise against going in alone. The Chakra Salamander seems to be a little peckish."
Orochimaru's eyeball hadn't spotted any traps ("it's a LIZARD. It does not do 'traps'"), so Team Downfall took a moment to prepare—casting defensive jutsu on themselves—before advancing on the cave. Akane, Hazou, and some pangolins lead the way, followed by Noburi with Keiko bringing up the rear with kunai at the ready. Orochimaru had promised his dear departed uncle on his deathbed not to hunt endangered creatures, and so stayed behind for moral support.
<Fighting commenced. Mostly evasion-tanking and Keiko/Pangolin-based spanking, as in Short>
Akane, cheered at the prospect of putting her Mechanical Aptitude to good use, began crafting cunningly-worked sleds out Smog's carcass. Everyone else looked at her funny and threw all the loot into storage scrolls.
Long:
"The Chakra Salamander Smog lies in yonder cave. You can tell because everything is either on fire or looks burned. Thanks for helping me retrieve the Orb of Ordon last year, by the way."
"But is it a black dragon or a dracolich?" Hazou inquired earnestly.
"FIRE. Kid. Fire. Fire means red."
Though not doubting the sincerity of the wise words from the grateful Sagemaster Botholemew, Team Downfall decided to do their due diligence and check with the local adventurers. First, they asked the local barkeep where they might find such a brave soul.
"Pete's literally right there." The barkeep pointed at Sneaky Pete, your friend of several months. Pete waved.
With alacrity Team Downfall shifted over to Pete's table. "Yup," Pete confirmed, "that cave there. Fred bought it just last week trying for the treasure while Smog was 'out'. 'Out' my ass, I swear that lizardy bastard just likes to take constitutionals in the afternoons and swing round to catch people unawares."
---
"Ow. I liked that eye. And no Hazou I still haven't worked out a jutsu to remove your smell so no scouting for you."
Team Downfall began preparing for Great Battle.
[...]
"Hazou I think that's enough. It's a Chakra Salamander, not a god."
"Just a few more buffs..."
[...]
<Fighting commences. Team Downfall wins.>
<Kurkistan runs out of the ability to keep the Team Downfall storyline going with all the D&D-specific plan details, regrets the decision to read each plan in sequence so as not to taint the process>
AN: Ran out of spoons writing the update/following the plan, so no details on loot just now. Everything fit in your portable hole, so KurkWhail, KurkLorien, and I will figure out the loot haul in the QM chat and get back to you.
It was a solid plan that gave us a lot to fall back on, but was perhaps a bit more specific than necessary, and didn't allow for much improvisation (no accounting for it being a red dragon, for instance).
FYI, you also were almost never going to get a surprise round there because the Chakra Salamander isn't a complete idiot, you walked into the main entrance to its cave (to be fair you wouldn't have been able to find any of the others) and invisibility doesn't cover sense of smell. Don't plan your tactics around always getting surprise, though I know it's worked out so far.
Ease-of-use review:
I may be biased because Long was detailed enough that I couldn't get away with pretending the setting was MfD, but Medium seemed perfectly workable and I don't think Small would have been a problem if (as mentioned by @Scribbler in the time I've written these up) I'd had some more in-world context before beginning to write. If I'd known how Team Downfall's last X encounters had gone then I'd have a better grasp of what "appropriate precautions" meant, etc.
e: Besides ruffling my creative feathers with details that subverted my setting, Long also felt constraining in that, when I was contemplating actually writing everything out, I was in no way looking forward to making sure to account for each and every detail of buffs, etc.
e2: In addition the excessive detail on how to find out info about the dragon (though finding out what kind of dragon is certainly something worth knowing) was rather silly. If I want the players to find something out I let them find it out. No need to go three contacts down the chain until you're busting down doors just so someone will tell you where the damn dragon to slay is.
--
A fun little writing exercise if nothing else, my apologies for if/that it's terrible.
For the bolded part here, my thought was that the "any sensible ninja would have known to do X!" only kicks in if Hazou gets hurt by not doing X. If your narration doesn't include scouting inside the store but also doesn't include a ninja hiding inside the store ambushing us then it's a wash. At the point where there is going to be a ninja waiting to ambush us inside the store is where saltiness seems appropriate, as the same thought process that leads a QM to go "ooh, I should have the enemy hide inside the store!" would tend, I think, to naturally lead to the "oh wait, the team should probably have been scouting stores out in advance."
If you don't have a scene of the team scouting out the store or you have a scene of them explicitly not scouting out the store or whatever then it doesn't really matter until it has a definite impact on the narrative.
So I guess I'm advocating for option (1.5) Come up with something that sounds reasonable and then gloss over any inconsistencies that might arise from it as they arise. Most of this process would end up taking place behind the QM-screen, I imagine, with the players none the wiser.
That said I'm on this side of the QM-screen so of course I may well be vastly oversimplifying things.
Last edited:
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I'm not too too familiar with in-universe statements on Technique Hacking (mostly something along the lines of you won't break a hole in reality like you might with sealing, the worst that happens is you splat yourself), but I expect if we picked it up we'd have the difficulty of the new jutsu based on not just the absolute complexity of the technique or its distance from the technique it's derived from, but QM fiat just like in Sealing.
So if we want to make that month-long jutsu with insane chakra costs to compensate, the QMs will tell us that the TN is now sky-high and if we try we'll likely splat ourselves. Assuming TH works like sealing research, anyways. If it doesn't, all bets are off.
In a world without cameras or photographs, anyone who hasn't personally interacted with us would be going by distinctive features like "has a barrel" or "is accompanied by a pangolin". Take off the forehead protectors, and you have two teenage boys and one teenage girl... basically the generic ninja team.
I think we should be conservative on the henging. The chakra cost isn't a lot, but it is something. If Hazou is constantly dropping and reassuming henge, it'll eat through his chakra pool faster than you'd think.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
And since we're in Mist, "has a barrel" is not a defining feature of our team. I mean, realistically, we could just henge a mist headband and all shopkeepers would be very friendly to us
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Wait a second, that means that if we know a team has one Wakahisa and one Mori, we just stick Panashe by them and have Hazou wear Noburi's old barrel to confuse Mist hatred of us.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
You know, on a side note, it occurs to me that The Yellow Flash may not have used the Hiraishin at all. It's hard to tell the difference between someone moving fast and capable of using genjutsu while in active combat, and someone who's actually teleporting.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Agreed with all of this. This is exactly what I was going for: 'Short' left you to do all the work and gave little direction, 'Medium' was about right, and 'Long' was too much. (There's some quibbles -- the 'Long' plan included a few helpful-but-not-essential things, like the reminder of a particular 'in' that the group had with Sagemaster Bartholomew.) In point of fact, 'Short' was a pointless plan -- it contained no useful information or direction and could easily have been boiled down to "[x] Go kill the dragon".
If we wanted to do plans like Short all the time, we could. It seems to me like it removes most of the players' agency, but it's a thing we could try. It does mean, however, that the players must agree not to complain if the QMs have the character do/don't do something that the player thinks they should / should not have done. Moving to super-short plans means that y'all are explicitly giving up agency and agreeing that the QMs' model of the characters is acceptable to y'all, even if that model does not perfectly conform to what y'all consider optimal.
If people wanted to try this experiment, then I would be fine to do it for Sunday -- we would make a rule that for this particular update the plan is limited to 100 words. What does everyone think?
Note the threadmark. :>
- Location
- Potato land
Well, yes, but I assume anyone interested enough to specifically target us would've either bothered to have a good look on one of the many occasions the examinees we're gathered in one place, or at the very least had obtained a description.
The point is for them to not be able to tell it's us without actually getting closer or watching for an extended period of time. Should reduce the chances of getting waylaid by overzealous Mist loyalists, I think.
Now, if only there were a way to hide the fucking barrel...
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
100 words seems closer to 'short' than 'medium', but I suppose? My paranoid side is screaming in Kagome at the thought of not being explicit in our precautions, though.
I think most of the answer to that has to come from the QMs; them being reasonably generous about potential "gotcha" moments where something goes terribly wrong because we didn't specify one particular precaution is the only way to make shorter plans work, because otherwise we need to include three paragraphs of "if we don't say we did the thing, we'd get stabbed in the everywhere." Abstract more of an ambush's success to the Alertness-vs-Stealth roll, instead of "did the players say to specifically look up when they went into the room?" and such.
(Which isn't to say we shouldn't try to have clever ideas, but most of the really clever stuff isn't fiddly details - it's stuff like making a deal with the Yakuza, which was an update's worth of plot in-and-of-itself, or using the fort, scribe, and trade setup to laugh at the Swamp portion of the Exam, or designing Skywalkers. "Do they or don't they have someone check the room before the vulnerable 'client' enters" just doesn't have the same narrative or tactical oomph.)
Beyond that, an advantage of having done the more detailed plans for so long and of the characters having the experience they do is that we can probably get away with a fair bit of shorthand - for example, "we build a Kagome-doesn't-disapprove fort" is a single sentence that covers several paragraphs of details.
- The Entire Wakahisa Clan, throughout all of history
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Here comes Hazou with his Bag of Holding seal, allowing one to store it within a storage space contiguous with reality...
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't imagine it comes up as often as you might think. The Wakahisa are a support clan whose speciality is providing lots of chakra--something you'd crave on combat missions but not necessarily have much use for on infiltration ones.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I understand that there is a problem here. Players can only overspecify so far in a plan, and sometimes it's impossible to cover every angle, and even trying can result in huge, offputting plans. But I don't think the alternative is as simple as "write short plans and have the QMs be generous". For one, QM generosity denies player agency. Where is the achievement in successfully pulling off a mission if someone else (the characters or the QMs, depending on your perspective) did all the heavy lifting? When the world itself needs to be on your side to compensate for the inherent limitations of playerhood? To take the most recent example, you got through the second event virtually untouched because you had a fort design that covered all the bases we could think of and then some, to the point that we couldn't see how anyone could realistically have decided to take the risk of attacking it. Would it have gone the same way if you'd just said "build a fort"? I doubt it. Would it have been satisfying for anyone if it had, and QM generosity had allowed you to obviate the majority of the challenge involved? "Well done, by voting to build a fort, you win the event because we came up with a great fort design for you"?
For another, this just sows the seeds of a different kind of player-QM conflict, one we have seen before. "Why did Noburi get stabbed through the spleen when he could have used Ability X to get out of the way? Why did the team get ambushed when they could have deployed Seals Y and Z? Why did we get arrested for treason when there's an obvious alibi we could have invented?" As the team's options expand, these things become harder for the QMs to keep track of, to the point where we had an entire rules overhaul prompted by this problem's acuteness in large-scale combat. And though I prefer to think of it as the attitude of a vocal minority, I don't feel that the players have always been generous to us when things went wrong for the characters.
It's going to take a middle ground. This approach worked with the "things Hazō knows but we don't" issue--the players gave the QMs more freedom to determine Hazō's actions, the QMs gave up spoons in order for those actions to be processed as by an in-universe character, and so far things seem to be going OK. Something similar may have to take place here. The flip side of QM generosity is that players would need to accept that the team's actions are going to be less optimal than they would be if they were guided by the players' greater spoon supply, and there will be negative outcomes that could have been avoided if it were the players' hands on the steering wheel.
One other option that no one seems to have brought up is simply to shorten plans by having fewer events per plan. It's not always applicable, and it would potentially slow down the pace of the story, but it would also allow the QMs to put more detail into each scene, and write actually new things that aren't part of plan execution (I miss having the freedom to do that on a regular basis). We'd have to establish some means of making sure time doesn't whizz by before the players have a chance to do the other things they want, but I'm sure there must be a way to do that. Maybe if the plan covers an afternoon's activity, it could also mention that Hazō wants to finish in time to be able to do other things in the evening. And in a longer timespan, the update could end at the point where more detailed input is required from the players. At any rate, it seems as reasonable an experiment as shortening plans by reducing detail.
For another, this just sows the seeds of a different kind of player-QM conflict, one we have seen before. "Why did Noburi get stabbed through the spleen when he could have used Ability X to get out of the way? Why did the team get ambushed when they could have deployed Seals Y and Z? Why did we get arrested for treason when there's an obvious alibi we could have invented?" As the team's options expand, these things become harder for the QMs to keep track of, to the point where we had an entire rules overhaul prompted by this problem's acuteness in large-scale combat. And though I prefer to think of it as the attitude of a vocal minority, I don't feel that the players have always been generous to us when things went wrong for the characters.
It's going to take a middle ground. This approach worked with the "things Hazō knows but we don't" issue--the players gave the QMs more freedom to determine Hazō's actions, the QMs gave up spoons in order for those actions to be processed as by an in-universe character, and so far things seem to be going OK. Something similar may have to take place here. The flip side of QM generosity is that players would need to accept that the team's actions are going to be less optimal than they would be if they were guided by the players' greater spoon supply, and there will be negative outcomes that could have been avoided if it were the players' hands on the steering wheel.
One other option that no one seems to have brought up is simply to shorten plans by having fewer events per plan. It's not always applicable, and it would potentially slow down the pace of the story, but it would also allow the QMs to put more detail into each scene, and write actually new things that aren't part of plan execution (I miss having the freedom to do that on a regular basis). We'd have to establish some means of making sure time doesn't whizz by before the players have a chance to do the other things they want, but I'm sure there must be a way to do that. Maybe if the plan covers an afternoon's activity, it could also mention that Hazō wants to finish in time to be able to do other things in the evening. And in a longer timespan, the update could end at the point where more detailed input is required from the players. At any rate, it seems as reasonable an experiment as shortening plans by reducing detail.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
This is something I support and I actually rather miss this as well. I was just always unsure of proposing something like this because, well, the XP system actively discourages it: The more time a high quality plan takes, the more XP we get for it
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It depends if you're optimising for XP per plan or XP per time period. For XP per time period, having more plans carried out within a given space of in-universe time will be to your benefit.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Actually, it's to your interest to have shorter updates. We'll typically give at least 1 XP per update, or maybe every other update if it covers just one conversation. You've usually gotten 3-5 XP per day, so if you got 1 for an update that covered only 2 hours then you'd be well ahead.
It would, of course, slow progress to a crawl.
EDIT: Ninja'd by my co-author. Feh.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There are advantages, though, beyond the aforestated. More writing space for the QMs also means more plot hooks and interesting opportunities for the characters. For example, who knows what interesting hints or worldbuilding material you might have uncovered if the QMs had had the time and spoons to write a full scene of the team questioning townspeople about the event?
On the other hand, lack of progress can get frustrating. It's interesting to look back at the time spent in Hidden Mountain, which probably seemed to take a lot of updates at the time but in fact ended up speeding through a great deal of chronological time pretty quickly.
- Location
- Norway
I think this goes too far. The characters must do almost all the heavy lifting by necessity, like having chakra and knowing jutsu. The players can decide that the protagonist should raise chakra stats and learn jutsu, which aren't 'opposed' checks of any sort, nor very agentic, and yet there is achievement in seeing the character spend chakra on jutsu to pull off a mission or overcome a challenge. I think Erolki raised a very good point here:
If players are allowed to sometimes trump Stealth by saying to specifically look up (and other stats, mutatis mutandis) I don't think this creates increased player achievement or satisfaction in having remembered the checklist and guessing which hide-method the QMs are using today. It only shifts the location of agency from "vote to spend XP being a high-Alertness, sensory-jutsu character" to "vote to search everything and use the appropriate jutsu repeatedly" while creating an expectation to keep writing out checklists.
The extreme end of this spectrum of detailed planning moment-to-moment is perhaps A Sword Without a Hilt which runs on D&D 3.5 mechanics with high-level characters and all the countless fiddlybits belonging thereto, and repeatedly winds up with five separate votes to resolve thirty seconds of fighting, action by action.
While the middle ground is sensible, I think it's overlooking the above third way of making the outcomes be more abstractly stat-dependent in such a manner that it matters less exactly whose hands are on the steering wheel at the moment of crisis. Punching is obviously this way already; players get nothing out of writing a checklist of making sure Hazou bends his elbow at the right angle and whatnot, and QMs don't have to worry about whether the punch could have been optimized better in method, only whether it succeeds mechanically. Is it feasible for more things to be resolved like punching, rather than resolved like fortbuilding?
- Location
- USA
Aw shucks, thanks.
I've reorganized the post to put the omake-content at the top for the sake of future generations, BTW.
To an extent I'm fine with an "[x] Go kill the dragon" plan, is the thing. Maybe I've spent too much time on Spacebattles with AGG and CKII quests (still not quite sure what all the acronyms mean), but it seems like you can get pretty far with relatively simple choices. In this case Team Downfall arrived in the village and found out about the sealmaster convention, the bandits in the north hills, and the dragon. Then they were presented with a choice on what to do and decided it was dragon-slaying time.
-If the QM said "You need to kill this dragon. What's your plan?" and "[x] Go kill the dragon" was the response that would be one thing, but hearkening back to @Briefvoice's point about decision points maybe at that point there just shouldn't have been a vote at all.
To the general points about player agency and reliance upon QM-spoons/generosity I think that Briefvoice, Erolki, and Exmorri (hyperlinks to posts) all have excellent points. In particular the conversation @Erolki began about how character design is an expression of player agency seems particularly salient: much more solid and reliable than my own "well maybe just fudge it a bit..." suggestions. See also the conversation @Briefvoice began about "flashes of inspiration" still being something worth going into detail on in our plans.
Last edited:
I should say that as I've been the one to write several of the "ultra-long" plans that have inspired this discussion-
Part of it is my writing style. I ramble, I justify, I try to include what I'm thinking and context behind items in the plan. I'm not just interested in saying what the characters should do, but also what I hope to achieve from taking these actions and why I think it would work. I try to lead QMs through my chain of logic and provide context. Like, let's look at something from the latest plan:
That is a long chunk of text! That many words would be an entire plan themselves in most quests. So why did I write it?
1. I started out with my vision of how the characters would even talk about this, because obviously we didn't know the client would be in the drug trade ahead of time. That means that we would have to structure the discussion around guarding Karina, unless we wanted to be blatant and talk about it in front of her, which is not what I was picturing. But okay, one ninja watches her while two others get a little distance and look around, that seems like something that would happen. And since we did all this pre-planning, a contingency for keeping discussions private from the client seems reasonable. So that's context for what follows.
2. What is this idea about? Why are we doing it? That takes a few sentences to explain, because I don't think it's obvious.
3. I explain the core behind the idea and then a couple of examples of the sort of result Hazou would be looking for. It lets the QMs know what a ;successful' implementation of the plan would look like.
4. Further discussion of the expected outcome and how it could be beneficial to the group.
5. How do we actually make this happen? Well I'm not a ninja, so I can't properly evaluate which method is best, but I can offer several ideas on how it might work, both for how to plant the drugs and how to obtain drugs to plant. All of them seem plausible,
6. This was probably unnecessary, since pushback from "this plan is stupid and we won't do it" is assumed. I could have deleted those thirteen words.
Part of it is my writing style. I ramble, I justify, I try to include what I'm thinking and context behind items in the plan. I'm not just interested in saying what the characters should do, but also what I hope to achieve from taking these actions and why I think it would work. I try to lead QMs through my chain of logic and provide context. Like, let's look at something from the latest plan:
That is a long chunk of text! That many words would be an entire plan themselves in most quests. So why did I write it?
1. I started out with my vision of how the characters would even talk about this, because obviously we didn't know the client would be in the drug trade ahead of time. That means that we would have to structure the discussion around guarding Karina, unless we wanted to be blatant and talk about it in front of her, which is not what I was picturing. But okay, one ninja watches her while two others get a little distance and look around, that seems like something that would happen. And since we did all this pre-planning, a contingency for keeping discussions private from the client seems reasonable. So that's context for what follows.
2. What is this idea about? Why are we doing it? That takes a few sentences to explain, because I don't think it's obvious.
3. I explain the core behind the idea and then a couple of examples of the sort of result Hazou would be looking for. It lets the QMs know what a ;successful' implementation of the plan would look like.
4. Further discussion of the expected outcome and how it could be beneficial to the group.
5. How do we actually make this happen? Well I'm not a ninja, so I can't properly evaluate which method is best, but I can offer several ideas on how it might work, both for how to plant the drugs and how to obtain drugs to plant. All of them seem plausible,
6. This was probably unnecessary, since pushback from "this plan is stupid and we won't do it" is assumed. I could have deleted those thirteen words.