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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Velorien said:
"The future," the Oyabun said. "With its position in negotiations enhanced as it has been by your success throughout this exam, Leaf is in an unparalleled position to lift some of the tiresome trade barriers that have so choked commerce between our two great nations since before the village era. The finest minds of the Chivalrous Organisation have produced a proposal which will greatly enhance the international flow of goods, and of course of information, while also imposing certain new restrictions to prevent unsavoury individuals and groups from exploiting this new status quo. It would give me unalloyed pleasure if you were to pass this on to the Hokage together with my congratulations."
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So, the Oyabun finally tells us what he wants from us. Looks like less tariffs on legal products that the Yakuza sell, giving the Yakuza a monopoly on Mist-Leaf trade, probably legalizing a few less than ethical products, and possibly somehow giving the Yakuza greater ability to spy on us (I'm not actually sure what he means by information)? And of course the Mist Yakuza gets a monopoly on all of the illegal trade between Mist and Leaf.
The main takeaway seems to be less regulation, and the Mist Yakuza getting a huge monopoly on a bunch of trade. Not sure if they'll try to edge out the Leaf Yakuza or not.

Regardless, this seems like the kind of stuff that Jiraiya would have predicted being asked for, and I'm sure he has this under control.
 
Looks like the Oyabun's still got complete control of our conversations and is playing at a level beyond us... but we're not making major mistakes and he's forgiving our minor ones so that's a win in my book. Give it a few years and we might start playing the same game as him, and then it'll be nice to trade words as equals.
 
That whole "tell everyone how badass we are" thing would have gone a bit better if we actually fought and won the 3:1 odds confrontation, I suppose.

Oh well.

Velorien said:
"A trickle," the Oyabun said. "I am given to understand that the Gōketsu are cowards who were only able to triumph by cowering behind the backs of their summons and throwing seals from a safe distance, and by the second round had all but given up on exposing themselves to danger. Any success they had was thanks to the generous gifts Leaf had given them."
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So, this seems a bit alarming to me. This is not the first time we have been given notice IC that people will not respect us for using Daddy's seals and summoning help in from other dimensions to do the fighting.

This seems to be the kind of thing Hiashi could exploit against us. "You literally only won because Jiraiya made you a bunch of seals."

It's not entirely true, of course, but it is true from a certain point of view.

Maybe we should try not to use any sealtech in the finals?


Velorien said:
"As an aside," he added with a touch of mischief, "tournament gambling could reach heights unseen since the year Uchiha Itachi broke the old scoring system. The Chivalrous Organisation will, naturally, perform its public duty by supervising the process."

Hazō's smile had turned just as predatory as the Oyabun's. "That sounds perfect, sir."
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It seems we stand to make a truly ludicrous amount of money on the tournament betting, if this is any indication.

So for betting, either we could bet on an individual (Nobby, Keiko, Hazou) winning the whole thing or we could bet on more specific stuff (Team Uplift makes semifinals) .

Regardless, I think we'd need to have the bracket first.
 
MMKII said:
This seems to be the kind of thing Hiashi could exploit against us. "You literally only won because Jiraiya made you a bunch of seals."

It's not entirely true, of course, but it is true from a certain point of view.

Maybe we should try not to use any sealtech in the finals?
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Jiraiya is going to be hokage or not in two weeks. Whatever jabs Hiashi could use won't be applicable to us.
 
MMKII said:
So for betting, either we could bet on an individual (Nobby, Keiko, Hazou) winning the whole thing or we could bet on more specific stuff (Team Uplift makes semifinals).
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Hmm... Hazo's seal-assisted taijutsu or Keiko's seal-assisted ranged combat + pangolins?

For prolonged engagements Keiko should beat anyone in the tournament, but for flash combat she might need a better option to keep enemies at range.

Also, betting on her should finally make it clear to her that we consider her our top combatant.
 
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Kiba said:
Jiraiya is going to be hokage or not in two weeks. Whatever jabs Hiashi could use won't be applicable to us.
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That's possibly dependent on us crushing his spawn in the finals in an absolutely impossible to contest way.
Nachtigall said:
Hmm... Hazo's seal-assisted taijutsu or Keiko's seal-assisted ranged combat + pangolins?

For prolonged engagements Keiko should beat anyone in the tournament, but for flash combat she might need a better option to keep enemies at range.
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Invisible girl could likely dodge anything she throws. I don't know what everyone else's athletics scores are but Hazou's is roughly comparable to Keiko's RW score.

Perhaps if she opens up with a summons, but again: might only be usable once(insane chakra costs), and we're trying to avoid that.

This could prove to be difficult.
 
If we can find out who we are going to be matched against we should be able to design a custom seal for each opponent.
 
Enjou said:
He is referring to the Yakuza acting as part of Leaf's spy network. We would be giving them this profitable trade deal as a way of perpetually buying information from them, and thus both parties prosper.
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Incidentally, this ties the nations together in a way that each has a knife at the other's throat.

Ideal for long term relationships.

e: ...Political ones.
 
faflec said:
Only if your explosives aren't big enough.
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If we can actually use lethal force then this tournament is pretty much a wrap.

It would be horrible and everyone who thought the speech was bad for our image will be against this with the force of a thousand suns, but it would be a wrap.
 
With 16 entrants, we have the potential for four matches (assuming we win each one). We should win each fight in a completely different way.

Suggested Strategies

  • Use Strobelight Seal to dazzle the opponent, weakening overwatch as we engage to melee. Beat the snot out of them with our standard nonsense-assisted Taijutsu.
  • Hide Like a Mole, breach the surface with a hand holding a seal of poison gas and spray it into the arena close to the enemy, retreat fully underground. Repeat. Do not suface until the enemy is down, no matter how long that takes, showing off our ability to HLaM indefinitely.
  • Expanded capacity PMYF to throw huge chunks of rock/water around at kunai speed. Hazou's RW skill is shit, but that probably stops mattering so much when your projectile is 4m wide. Maybe we could get a good enough bonus for it that we can compete with Athletics 30-40?
  • Explosion shenanigans. I like @Radvic 's explosive seals activated in the same way as skywalkers. Kick directional explosions at people? Yes please. Plus all the other stuff we can do with explosives. I'm sure we'll have five or six more gimmicks by the tournament.
 
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Statement of curiosity: Are our directional explosives supposed to be an OPSEc secret? When Kagome first showed us them everyone treated them as if they were this major secret, but now we have macerators (which are unidirectional) being thrown out and nobody seems to care?
 
MadScientist said:
With 16 entrants, we have the potential for four matches (assuming we win each one). We should win each fight in a completely different way.

Suggested Strategies

  • Use Strobelight Seal to dazzle the opponent, weakening overwatch as we engage to melee. Beat the snot out of them with our standard nonsense-assisted Taijutsu.
  • Hide Like a Mole, breach the surface with a hand holding a seal of poison gas and spray it into the arena close to the enemy, retreat fully underground. Repeat. Do not suface until the enemy is down, no matter how long that takes, showing off our ability to HLaM indefinitely.
  • Expanded capacity PMYF to throw huge chunks of rock/water around at kunai speed. Hazou's RW skill is shit, but that probably stops mattering so much when your projectile is 4m wide. Maybe we could get a good enough bonus for it that we can compete with Athletics 30-40?
  • Explosion shenanigans. I like @Radvic 's explosive seals activated in the same way as skywalkers. Kick directional explosions at people? Yes please. Plus all the other stuff we can do with explosives. I'm sure we'll have five or six more gimmicks by the tournament.
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As long we researched those seals in time.
 
MadScientist said:
With 16 entrants, we have the potential for four matches (assuming we win each one). We should win each fight in a completely different way.

Suggested Strategies

  • Use Strobelight Seal to dazzle the opponent, weakening overwatch as we engage to melee. Beat the snot out of them with our standard nonsense-assisted Taijutsu.
  • Hide Like a Mole, breach the surface with a hand holding a seal of poison gas and spray it into the arena close to the enemy, retreat fully underground. Repeat. Do not suface until the enemy is down, no matter how long that takes, showing off our ability to HLaM indefinitely.
  • Expanded capacity PMYF to throw huge chunks of rock/water around at kunai speed. Hazou's RW skill is shit, but that probably stops mattering so much when your projectile is 4m wide. Maybe we could get a good enough bonus for it that we can compete with Athletics 30-40?
  • Explosion shenanigans. I like @Radvic 's explosive seals activated in the same way as skywalkers. Kick directional explosions at people? Yes please. Plus all the other stuff we can do with explosives. I'm sure we'll have five or six more gimmicks by the tournament.
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I'm currently in the process of writing up a big pile of jutsu/seals/other stuff suggestions for the break (with mechanics written, god help me).

By my calculations, with an average XP gain of ~90 or so over the month, we will have enough XP to get everyone ~3-4 levels in Alertness (Alertness 33-34;going by the rolls done in Event 5 this should be enough to bootstrap us above most people, I think) and then have double digits XP leftover for some other stuff.

I think if we actually play out the month, we can get more than ~90 XP on average over the course of it. So we will likely be able to stuff more jutsu or other stat increases in.

NB: Noburi will have a pile of extra XP leftover even with that. I don't know what to do with that. He needs better ranged options for the Tournament though, so maybe level whatever ranged water jutsu we can get our hands on (Syrup Trap is garbage for range).

faflec said:
Statement of curiosity: Are our directional explosives supposed to be an OPSEc secret? When Kagome first showed us them everyone treated them as if they were this major secret, but now we have macerators (which are unidirectional) being thrown out and nobody seems to care?
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Solution: Ask Kagome (they're his). And Jiraiya.
 
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