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Eh, for what its worth I think (if we were so inclined) that it would be much easier to break a system where the Tower had full control. That merely takes some collusion and bribery. Dealing with a bunch of economically competing clans and their pricing strategies and whatnot OTOH would be fairly problematic if we assumed they would do as we did and would try to counter people doing that etc. The only recourse (at least as I see it) in that situation would be to just sell the damn seals.
Yeah, this is the reason your discussion seemed kind of overstated to me. We have fewer connections, capital, and spare time than the other clans, so there should already be arbitrageurs in the market willing to buy up those cheap seals you were assuming would be on offer. (At least afaict, your idea relies entirely on us being able to buy cheap seals at X and then turn around and sell them to the people who are willing to buy them at X+1. In other words, it relies entirely on us being faster than those people, and faster than other people who would want to sell to them. (Also, either on demand for price X+1 being the same as demand for price X, or on us being okay hoarding seals.) Am I missing something?)

@eaglejarl, I doubt there's a big "print money" loophole here. It does seem like the price setting could end up as a price floor rather than a ceiling, which it sounds like is what you wanted? (Hypothetical Hokage is concerned about clans threatening to raise prices.) Assuming the Leaf Military Store sells seals back to ninja, though, their prices would act as a ceiling.

--
I might be missing some of the nuances here though, like whether the Tower buys the Tower-price seals,, has first right of refusal on them, or just requires the price. Right of refusal does seem most elegant. For avoiding tricky back-and-forth trades (sealmasters A and B trade back and forth at Tower price, then do whatever they want), there's a) ANBU knocking heads together, or b) requiring the price for 50% of net seals sold. It's probably impossible to avoid clan-internal trades (you can't force them to post all trades at the Official Leaf Registry), but if All Legal Non-Clan-Interal Seal Trading happens at the All Legal Non-Clan-Internal Seal Tradinghouse, I think there aren't hard-to-patch exploits.

Ed: Probably it's unspoken but understood that all the clan sealmasters make a bunch of seals for internal use that obviously aren't listed on the market, plus maybe make internal clan 'gifts' that end up being sold/traded informally (again, not officially on the market). As long as the volume that trickles out to the broader market isn't too large, the Hokage tolerates it as clan prerogative, but if it's too much then there's the threat of punishment for contravening the spirit of the rules.
 
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(At least afaict, your idea relies entirely on us being able to buy cheap seals at X and then turn around and sell them to the people who are willing to buy them at X+1. In other words, it relies entirely on us being faster than those people, and faster than other people who would want to sell to them. Am I missing something?)
So like "us" is relative. It can be just us, or us and ISC or us and 100 clanless ninja gremlins running around buying seals on our behalf and giving them to us. All in exchange for a cut.

So the natural counterstrat is some predisposition towards asset freezing (in some way) among those with big capital (clans) else someone else would be using their fortune to do this.

The best way to deal with such assett freezing is to just go about the (effectively same to you) market and sell your seals honestly to undercut any price hiking or asset stealing by clans (or deal with any collusion bullshit).

------

I mean, to be clear even in the case where we are the first people to try to do this, its not exactly a "print money here" button. You need a lot of liquid cash (we do not have enough) and your relative profits are going to be consistent, but tiny (you have to cut in too many people to do this effectively), maybe we make the equivalent of 1000-10000$ more a month or something after paying everyone off.

Also at a certain market size this just becomes marginal gains, although its an interesting problem to consider.

------

OTOH: "Literally just make piles of seals yourself." is a less complicated way of making effectively the same $


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E: I believe this is before first right of refusal as well

Also, CCNJ:

Punishing us in-story for engaging with the economics of the quest by dodectupling (30 hours a week = 120 a month, versus 10 hours a month) our in-character workload is a very good way to discourage us from engaging with the story in other ways.

I absolutely understand that the "but it couldn't be that way!" kind of tantrum is frustrating, but I don't think this is the ideal response.

We are, I am sure, perfectly willing to leverage our brainpower to give you an appropriate stricture on the sale of seals, if you'd like to provide in a few lines what the purpose of them is to be.
Ccnj:

I sort of disagree with the way this discussion is being cast? "Tantrum" ?

A system was proposed and some (Jello, possibly Veedrac but that came later when we started doing exploits) were like "Idk this doesnt make sense. Also: This seems breakable, heres how."

I personally took some time to try ro parse what Jellos exploit in mind was and Hashed out some variation of it.

At which point we all started debating feasability of said exploit, mostly.

At least for me(and probs some others) this was just playing around in a sandbox. This was never in line with Whining about Worldbuilding details.

Like, i could give a damn if the in universe justification was "Because Tobirama was drunk and thought it up on a dare." Likewise, if the only reason no one abritrages these is "Because dont fucking do that." I also dont care.

It seems strange to me that we have probably a hundred or so pages of physics calcs about stuff in universe that *arent* treated like the people doing the physics are trying to invalidate the worldbuilding or something, but a few pages of economics digression is looked at like its a big issue?

Lets not be obtuse: everyone in that discussion had zero delusions about any "Print gold in just five easy steps!" being allowed to survive the light of day. It was mostly an academic discussion on what could go horribly wrong. Is that so out of place?

I wouldnt think so. And I'd object to calling it a "Tantrum." Thats just rude.
 
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So like "us" is relative. It can be just us, or us and ISC or us and 100 clanless ninja gremlins running around buying seals on our behalf and giving them to us. All in exchange for a cut.

So the natural counterstrat is some predisposition towards asset freezing (in some way) among those with big capital (clans) else someone else would be using their fortune to do this.

The best way to deal with such assett freezing is to just go about the (effectively same to you) market and sell your seals honestly to undercut any price hiking or asset stealing by clans (or deal with any collusion bullshit).

------

I mean, to be clear even in the case where we are the first people to try to do this, its not exactly a "print money here" button. You need a lot of liquid cash (we do not have enough) and your relative profits are going to be consistent, but tiny (you have to cut in too many people to do this effectively), maybe we make the equivalent of 1000-10000$ more a month or something after paying everyone off.

Also at a certain market size this just becomes marginal gains, although its an interesting problem to consider.

------

OTOH: "Literally just make piles of seals yourself." is a less complicated way of making effectively the same $


----

E: I believe this is before first right of refusal as well


Ccnj:

I sort of disagree with the way this discussion is being cast? "Tantrum" ?

A system was proposed and some (Jello, possibly Veedrac but that came later when we started doing exploits) were like "Idk this doesnt make sense. Also: This seems breakable, heres how."

I personally took some time to try ro parse what Jellos exploit in mind was and Hashed out some variation of it.

At which point we all started debating feasability of said exploit, mostly.

At least for me(and probs some others) this was just playing around in a sandbox. This was never in line with Whining about Worldbuilding details.

Like, i could give a damn if the in universe justification was "Because Tobirama was drunk and thought it up on a dare." Likewise, if the only reason no one abritrages these is "Because dont fucking do that." I also dont care.

It seems strange to me that we have probably a hundred or so pages of physics calcs about stuff in universe that *arent* treated like the people doing the physics are trying to invalidate the worldbuilding or something, but a few pages of economics digression is looked at like its a big issue?

Lets not be obtuse: everyone in that discussion had zero delusions about any "Print gold in just five easy steps!" being allowed to survive the light of day. It was mostly an academic discussion on what could go horribly wrong. Is that so out of place?

I wouldnt think so. And I'd object to calling it a "Tantrum." Thats just rude.
Yes, it is rude, and I would have phrased it otherwise if that was directed at anyone but eaglejarl. You will note that I didn't specifically call anyone out, because the discussion wasn't a tantrum, and I do not view it as one.

I referred to it as one, about 60% tongue-in-cheek, because insofar as I am aware of eaglejarl's position/mindstate, given his recent post, that would have been how it came across when viewing a scattering of posts without anyone explicitly saying -- at the time -- that it was just intended as trying to make it make sense as a form of collaborative worldbuilding in pursuit of simulationism as opposed to trying to abuse it to make money or whatever.

I am a creature of deep empathy for nearly anyone, so it's not really hard for me to imagine how he'd have viewed the last ten or so pages of discussion and gotten frustrated at what he perceived as trying to game the system in a way that preys on the QMs' lack of economics knowledge rather than that of characters in the story.

That said, I apologize for not being more clear on what I meant to observers. In optimizing for eaglejarl's interpretations, I failed your own.
 
Yes, it is rude, and I would have phrased it otherwise if that was directed at anyone but eaglejarl. You will note that I didn't specifically call anyone out, because the discussion wasn't a tantrum, and I do not view it as one.

I referred to it as one, about 60% tongue-in-cheek, because insofar as I am aware of eaglejarl's position/mindstate, given his recent post, that would have been how it came across when viewing a scattering of posts without anyone explicitly saying -- at the time -- that it was just intended as trying to make it make sense as a form of collaborative worldbuilding in pursuit of simulationism as opposed to trying to abuse it to make money or whatever.

I am a creature of deep empathy for nearly anyone, so it's not really hard for me to imagine how he'd have viewed the last ten or so pages of discussion and gotten frustrated at what he perceived as trying to game the system in a way that preys on the QMs' lack of economics knowledge rather than that of characters in the story.

That said, I apologize for not being more clear on what I meant to observers. In optimizing for eaglejarl's interpretations, I failed your own.
Oh no, I totally get that and Im not trying to lampoon you or anything.

I am just pitching in my two cents on this thing, in that it was IMO more of a collaborative effort to fix or root out any problems than some sort of inherently adversarial thing going on.

While l personally dont think theres very much that can be done in the setting to make a truly bulletproof set of regulations (at least without significant effort), we could still try to figure out what the deal was with the rules as written to try and mitigate things.

Basically-

Honestly, you should know better. We Goketsu now. There ain't no federal reserve to stop us from "printing gold," and if we ever get tired of that we can back the Nara in a switch to paper money using their presses. /s

But seriously, I sympathize with your position that these discussions shouldn't be discouraged and would even go as far as saying that they're part of what makes the quest so great. I think it's just an unfortunate circumstance of the context of past, contentious economics discussions messing with tone interpretation, hard enough already over text. Any stress going on IRL wouldn't help either.

For the record, a 30 hour work week mandate once again brings into question why seals aren't wide spread. In any case, I fully expect everyone will be able to come together to reach a satisfactory explanation. We're all on the same side, after all.
Yeah pretty much this ^

Oh hey look! A change of subject!

Do you think we're going to be assigned genin students once we're promoted?
GODDAMNIT MADSCIENTIST

DID YOU HACK MY GOOGLE DRIVE TOO?!?!

E: no but seriously I have like a half written proposal on grabbing genin after we get promoted and why this is a really good idea for everyone
 
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I'm all for getting cute little minions indoctrinated in the ways of uplift. It's for the good of everyone, really!
 
upon further review (thanks y'all) and catching up with the discussion, I'd like to change my vote to
[X] Action Plan: That Very Same Day



I am very excited for the possibility of Genin squads after we make Jonin, assuming we haven't managed to grue chakra and/or sealing by then. Hazou, despite being a sealmaster is an absolute beast in melee and might be seen as the 'sane' alternative to Might Guy for Taijutsu spec kids.

...huh. Felt weird saying that we were the sane alternative. Does Guy-Sensei know we independently came up with YOUTH-style?
 
upon further review (thanks y'all) and catching up with the discussion, I'd like to change my vote to
[X] Action Plan: That Very Same Day



I am very excited for the possibility of Genin squads after we make Jonin, assuming we haven't managed to grue chakra and/or sealing by then. Hazou, despite being a sealmaster is an absolute beast in melee and might be seen as the 'sane' alternative to Might Guy for Taijutsu spec kids.

...huh. Felt weird saying that we were the sane alternative. Does Guy-Sensei know we independently came up with YOUTH-style?
Hazou's fighting style is, both fortunately and unfortuntaely, not something that can be taught to genin; it's dependent on the iron nerve.

On the plus side, it's not necessary to wait until jounin-level. Not all students are taught by jounin, only the best.
 
Hazou's fighting style is, both fortunately and unfortuntaely, not something that can be taught to genin; it's dependent on the iron nerve.

On the plus side, it's not necessary to wait until jounin-level. Not all students are taught by jounin, only the best.

OTOH, we do have Taijutsu 40 before mods, and, let's be honest, our lessons would probably boil down to "How to Get Your Grubby Little Hands on Every Bonus Ever 101".
 
This all said, I'm not sure I'd want a team just yet. We're highly specialised for being on the same team as Kei and Noburi, and we haven't quite got enough XP to round out our build properly.

I expect we would be ready in another in-game year, but I would want, for example, 40/40/40 Empathy/Deceit/Resolve, 30 Sealing, and maybe even 50/50 Alertness/Athletics before I would be confident that we could properly protect a genin team without assistance.

E: probably better doton levels, too.
 
OTOH, we do have Taijutsu 40 before mods, and, let's be honest, our lessons would probably boil down to "How to Get Your Grubby Little Hands on Every Bonus Ever 101".
Very true. On which note, I need to write up a few single level stunt-jutsu.
I was talking our retconned performance in addition to our wildly successful ones.
Hazou's taijutsu prowess has never been in question as far as retcons go.
e:
This all said, I'm not sure I'd want a team just yet. We're highly specialised for being on the same team as Kei and Noburi, and we haven't quite got enough XP to round out our build properly.

I expect we would be ready in another in-game year, but I would want, for example, 40/40/40 Empathy/Deceit/Resolve, 30 Sealing, and maybe even 50/50 Alertness/Athletics before I would be confident that we could properly protect a genin team without assistance.
There's also the question of how we'd teach a ranged weapon specialist when Hazou can't throw for shit. :p
 
It's likely that one of the main reasons only jounin are assigned full squads of graduates to teach, is that they can be trusted to at least be competent in all aspects of ninja combat. You know, unlike Goketsu "I can only punch" Hazou.
 
It's likely that one of the main reasons only jounin are assigned full squads of graduates to teach, is that they can be trusted to at least be competent in all aspects of ninja combat. You know, unlike Goketsu "I can only punch" Hazou.
If they think we're going to learn throwing things by the time we're jounin they've got another thing coming.

...No, we're going to invent guns.
 
Inserted tally
Adhoc vote count started by MMKII on Sep 12, 2018 at 6:48 AM, finished with 614 posts and 17 votes.
 
Jutsu Centering Seal

A high level seal only a few steps below Skywalkers in security level. When activated, the next technique that the person who did so uses is centered on the seal. This includes certain suicide techniques, and is the only method to actually teach them or use them effectively.

This seal, generally speaking, does not leave the deepest levels of T&I, though particularly strong and trusted sealmasters are granted leave to use it outside.

Medical Status Seal

When placed flush against an adult human male/female's body (different seals for each), it outputs green for "Okay", yellow for "Check condition" and red for "Treat now". This seal is intended for triage with unskilled persons and is not a substitute for medical professionals. It is also the kind of seal that a society who had never encountered medical jutsu might come up with to make up for their lack.
 
The Tower is considered to own 30 hours per week of every sealmaster's time. Every week they specify what you will make for them this week. You either supply it, get someone else to make it for you, beg for an easement, go missing-nin, or deal with ANBU for breaking the law.
Just a minor nitpick, but I'm pretty sure Kagome would have told us about that to support his "we'll end up in a secret sealing slavery facility" argument back when we considered joining Leaf. After all, 30h/week unpaid work is basically half-time slavery. So if you decide to implement this, you'd be giving Kagome the idiot ball.
 
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