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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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To comment on social spec mechanics:

1. Actual social combat should be rare. Most people will simply refuse to continue the conversation if they feel they are being pushed into such an emotionally high-stakes mentally stressful confrontation. It takes extreme outside (they feel they must stand there and take it) or internal (feeling desperate to defend themselves/argue the point) circumstances to allow for it.

2. At least in core Fate mechanics, it's sometimes possible to skip social stuff if you can compel someone on one of their Aspects.

If I were asked to represent mechanically what Keiko did in her interactions with Hana, it would not be an opposed roll-off. Instead what Keiko did was successfully guess that Hana had an aspect related to her son (Anything for my Son; or I Will Protect Hazou; or something along those lines), and then spent a Fate point to compel the Aspect and force Hana to reconsider her actions in that light. Note that this doesn't necessarily guarantee success or mean that Keiko will precisely control how Hana will react, but it does allow her to force Hana to alter her actions to better align with those of her Aspect as the player controlling Hana (the GMs) see it.

Aspects can be very important in the social Fate game. Hitting one of a character's core personality aspects is always a way to get them to reconsider their actions, though it doesn't work if they're already perfectly in line with that aspect.
 
eaglejarl said:
My headcanon, which has not been discussed with the others, is that it's essentially an apprenticeship. You learn basic ninja skills in ninja school, then you get placed with a teacher (squad leader) and teammates who can give you one-on-one training and backup respectively. You do D-ranks for a while so that your teacher has a chance to ensure that your skills are adequate, and to get you sick and tired of low-paid chores so that you're motivated to bring your skills up to scratch so you can do real missions. You're sent on missions as skill checks but generally kept to things that are expected to be level-appropriate.

Becoming a chūnin means you are ready to have the training wheels taken off and go out on your own. There might also be something about not getting a team right away.

Basically, it's your standard medieval apprentice/journeyman/master system.

Again, don't rely on this yet, since @OliWhail and @Velorien should have a chance to tell me that I'm all wet.
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Ninja demographics have bugged me a bit for a while now. I'd like to toss around a few of the thoughts I've had so you can tell me if they make sense or if I'm modeling something horribly wrong.

Observation: There are more Genin than Chuunin, and more Chuunin than Jounin. Second observation: stagnation of skills doesn't seem to be much of a thing here, as long as you keep living and gaining XP you can increase your skills. Third observation: The period between becoming Genin and becoming Chuunin feels shorter than the period between becoming Chuunin and becoming Jounin. Fourth observation: ninja ranks tend to match to age groups. Genin are kids and teens, Chuunin are teens and young adults, and Jounin are young adults and older.

What I get out of that is that if ninja attrition over the years wan't a factor, we'd have more Chuunin than Genin and more Jounin than Chuunin, by a wide margin. But the EN is a deathworld, so clearly ninja attrition is relevant, and if you factor that in then it can make sense for there to be fewer Chuunin than Genin and fewer Jounin than Chuunin.

But that's one heck of a death rate, right? There are something like (fermi estimates) 1000 Genin and 100 Jounin in Konoha? That suggests 90% or more of ninja die before reaching adulthood. I'm fine with that, but it also creates interesting questions when you consider Jounin-senseis and what you were just talking about.

If Genin generally go on safe missions geared to their skill level, how is the death rate that oppressively large? The two answers I can think of is that either their missions aren't that safe after all, or something else (read: war) is keeping numbers down.

But the last world war was a while ago, and if we expect Chuunin/Jounin numbers to swell during peacetime then the numbers of Chuunin/Jounin numbers we have now either means Leaf had basically no one left alive after the last war, or there wasn't that much swelling.

Thoughts? Does this roughly match what you've thought about these things, am I missing something important?
 
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail

I have a proposal which may or may not be immediately shot down: Investment Stunts. By which I mean decently expensive (100XP+) stunts that make you better at training a certain thing so that you get +10% XP put in a bank for that skill, like how the pangolin training jutsu works. The idea is that that you pay a large initial cost to be able to level a specific skill faster in the long-run. A 100XP Investment Stunt would break even after 1000XP, and then keep improving the skill afterwards, for example.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
Observation: There are more Genin than Chuunin, and more Chuunin than Jounin. Second observation: stagnation of skills doesn't seem to be much of a thing here, as long as you keep living and gaining XP you can increase your skills. Third observation: The period between becoming Genin and becoming Chuunin feels shorter than the period between becoming Chuunin and becoming Jounin. Fourth observation: ninja ranks tend to match to age groups. Genin are kids and teens, Chuunin are teens and young adults, and Jounin are young adults and older.

Thoughts? Does this roughly match what you've thought about these things, am I missing something important?
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I have argued many times in the thread without getting much traction, but I will argue it again. Still stagnation and skill caps absolutely have to be a thing. That's how it works in the real world, and for MfD to work differently would require a drastic alteration to humans. XP rules are a metagame conceit to roughly model character advancement. They should in no way be taken as "how the world works" for anyone who is not a PC or being tracked as if they were a PC.

Ironically, many other game systems do XP in a slightly tweaked way that would explain this. That is, people get XP only for overcoming challenges. As you get more powerful, you encounter less situations that are naturally challenging and you are less inclined to risk your existing comfort and station (and life) in seeking further challenges (though even that doesn't really make sense).

My answer would be, there are more genin than chuunin because people don't have xp. That is a metagame thing. You get better at skills by training and pushing yourself, and many genin can't muster up the time, energy, and effort to keep pushing themselves up the hump to chuunin. Many chuunin are unable to become jounin. The cast majority of jounin can't continue pushing themselves or discover they've hit their natural caps. And so on.
 
Briefvoice said:
I have argued many times in the thread without getting much traction, but I will argue it again. Still stagnation and skill caps absolutely have to be a thing. That's how it works in the real world, and for MfD to work differently would require a drastic alteration to humans. XP rules are a metagame conceit to roughly model character advancement. They should in no way be taken as "how the world works" for anyone who is not a PC or being tracked as if they were a PC.

Ironically, many other game systems do XP in a slightly tweaked way that would explain this. That is, people get XP only for overcoming challenges. As you get more powerful, you encounter less situations that are naturally challenging and you are less inclined to risk your existing comfort and station (and life) in seeking further challenges (though even that doesn't really make sense).

My answer would be, there are more genin than chuunin because people don't have xp. That is a metagame thing. You get better at skills by training and pushing yourself, and many genin can't muster up the time, energy, and effort to keep pushing themselves up the hump to chuunin. Many chuunin are unable to become jounin. The cast majority of jounin can't continue pushing themselves or discover they've hit their natural caps. And so on.
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Do you not think chakra is a drastic alteration to humans?
 
Briefvoice said:
I have argued many times in the thread without getting much traction, but I will argue it again. Still stagnation and skill caps absolutely have to be a thing. That's how it works in the real world, and for MfD to work differently would require a drastic alteration to humans. XP rules are a metagame conceit to roughly model character advancement. They should in no way be taken as "how the world works" for anyone who is not a PC or being tracked as if they were a PC.

Ironically, many other game systems do XP in a slightly tweaked way that would explain this. That is, people get XP only for overcoming challenges. As you get more powerful, you encounter less situations that are naturally challenging and you are less inclined to risk your existing comfort and station (and life) in seeking further challenges (though even that doesn't really make sense).

My answer would be, there are more genin than chuunin because people don't have xp. That is a metagame thing. You get better at skills by training and pushing yourself, and many genin can't muster up the time, energy, and effort to keep pushing themselves up the hump to chuunin. Many chuunin are unable to become jounin. The cast majority of jounin can't continue pushing themselves or discover they've hit their natural caps. And so on.
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I should have brought this up, I admit, but the concept wasn't fully formed: Observation four notes how ninja ranks also separate into age groups more often than not. If some ninja simply didn't have the skill caps to reach Chuunin, we'd see 30 year old Genin walking around, but I don't think we've seen a Genin over 18. There was even a QM statement recently that Genin either exit their teens as a Chuunin or posthumously.

I agree that XP doesn't match how skills work in the real world, but the way the world is modeled right now skill stagnation can't be a significant factor or else we'd see 30 year old Genin about as much as 15 year old Genin. Something has to give.
 
Briefvoice said:
If I were asked to represent mechanically what Keiko did in her interactions with Hana, it would not be an opposed roll-off. Instead what Keiko did was successfully guess that Hana had an aspect related to her son (Anything for my Son; or I Will Protect Hazou; or something along those lines), and then spent a Fate point to compel the Aspect and force Hana to reconsider her actions in that light. Note that this doesn't necessarily guarantee success or mean that Keiko will precisely control how Hana will react, but it does allow her to force Hana to alter her actions to better align with those of her Aspect as the player controlling Hana (the GMs) see it.
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This makes the most sense to me.

I've been trying to imagine pure skill versus skill social combat IRL, and all I can come up with is a rap battle. That is, truth doesn't matter, nature of your argument doesn't matter, what you care about, what your goals and insecurities are, none of it matters. You just talk shit at each other and it's purely your skill at rhyming said shit and turning your opponents words against him.

Obviously, that's not simulationist at all in case of a serious conversation with real personal and external considerations. A lot of words can be said that can be impactful no matter how good you are at delivering them, even if blurted out on accident.

I propose that roll vs roll applies only in purely offensive situations, i.e. manipulation, deception, interrogation, scaring into submission and so on. In cases when words are more earnest, social stats will serve as a modifier of success of getting your point across and degree of impact of said point. That is, if Social Godspec with 90+ stats decides to honestly convince someone of a Really Stupid Plan, they go "I understood completely what you are trying to say and where you are coming from, and that is stupid." No good point - no impact.

social!Keiko vs Hana would go the same way, but with more impact - that is, on top of what happened Hana would feel more guilt for her actions and maybe even reconsidering her past treatment of people she viewed the same as Mari.
 
Cariyaga said:
Do you not think chakra is a drastic alteration to humans?
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Not in terms of "everyone can keep getting better with no cap over time". That's absolutely not the way it's presented in the original material or in MfD, where being a jounin is an elite thing that not everyone will be able to accomplish rather than a simple milestone that everyone will hit if they live long enough.

Inferno Vulpix said:
I should have brought this up, I admit, but the concept wasn't fully formed: Observation four notes how ninja ranks also separate into age groups more often than not. If some ninja simply didn't have the skill caps to reach Chuunin, we'd see 30 year old Genin walking around, but I don't think we've seen a Genin over 18. There was even a QM statement recently that Genin either exit their teens as a Chuunin or posthumously.

I agree that XP doesn't match how skills work in the real world, but the way the world is modeled right now skill stagnation can't be a significant factor or else we'd see 30 year old Genin about as much as 15 year old Genin. Something has to give.
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I'm going to try a couple of explanations on for size:

1. If you can't make the jump to chuunin then you also aren't getting to the place where chakra can completely replace mundane muscle and bodies wear out from accumulated injuries. 30 year old genin essentially retire from active duty to be called up only for emergencies.

2. There are plenty of 30 year old genin; they're people without potential so they get no narrative focus. (Apparently contradicted by GM statement.)

3. Chuunin is the "natural skill level" for most ninja and almost everyone can make it there, but the jump to jounin is the far more difficult step where most people hit skill caps and will never be able to make it.

I think almost any answer is better than ninjas being a gerontocracy where the older you are the automatically more powerful you are.
 
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Briefvoice said:
Not in terms of "everyone can keep getting better with no cap over time". That's absolutely not the way it's presented in the original material or in MfD, where being a jounin is an elite thing that not everyone will be able to accomplish rather than a simple milestone that everyone will hit if they live long enough.



I'm going to try a couple of explanations on for size:

1. If you can't make the jump to chuunin then you also aren't getting to the place where chakra can completely replace mundane muscle and bodies wear out form accumulated injuries. 30 year old genin essentially retire from active duty to be called up only for emergencies.

2. There are plenty of 30 year old genin; they're people without potential so they get no narrative focus. (Apparently contradicted by GM statement.)

3. Chuunin is the "natural skill level" for most ninja and almost everyone can make it there, but the jump to jounin is the far more difficult step where most people hit skill caps and will never be able to make it/

I think almost any answer is better than ninjas being a gerontocracy where the older you are the automatically more powerful you are.
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I mean, more realistically than skill caps, I think, is simply the fact that as you get older you get less XP per day with few exceptions.
 
eaglejarl said:
Multi-voting is actively encouraged. It's why we're using approval voting in the first place.


Leaf: 30,000 total population (ninja + civilian)
Early medieval tech level
Only ~1500 ninja in Fire (all based in Leaf although some have long-duration assignments in major cities/towns)
Numbers are approximate, but:
1200 genin
250 chūnin
50 jōnin: 20 special jōnin, 20 regular, 10 elite (Gai, Kakashi…)
Typical ninja teams are 3 genin + 1 commander (chūnin/jōnin)
Some ninja operate solo. Teams of like-ranked people are occasionally assembled, usually for short term use.
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Velorien said:
Correct.

You need to be at the rally point at sundown, which is around 5:15pm. If you exit the Swamp more than 30 minutes before sundown you are DQ'd.


You don't know exact numbers or the full list of villages, but it's a safe bet that the number of teams from a given village is in rough proportion to the number of ninja they have. Leaf has the most at ~1500, Mist is second at between 1000 and 1200 (you aren't sure). There's probably something like 10,000 - 20,000 ninja in the entire EN.

Respectively:

Depends on where you exit. You're about 1 mile from the nearest edge and the rally point is about a mile beyond that. The swamp is 10 miles in diameter and you can run about 20mph.

You made a total of 432 Party Trick seals. (The event is 48 hours; you spent about 6 hours finding the site for the fort, building it, and gathering up the other Leaf teams, then slept 5 hours last night and spent about 1 hour on food, water, bathroom, and occasionally shaking the cramps out of your hand.) In addition, each member of Team Uplift brought 6 PT seals with them to the exams, giving you a grand total of 456. You've traded 51 of them away, receiving in exchange a total of 128 night light seals, all of which are now dead. That leaves you with 405. You need to divide that among the 12 Leaf ninja in the fort, meaning 33 per person with 9 left over that you can assign as you choose. There are 3 hours left before the time you are allowed to exit the swamp and you can make 12 Party Tricks per hour.

You've traded with teams from Sand(3), Rock(4), Lightning(1), Noodle(1), and Hot Springs(1).

Yes. It's a seal. Looks simple, but that's all you can tell at a glance. Comes in an oblate cylindrical (think 'Go stone') wood case, emits a tiny bit of light that shifts colors slowly.
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My main concern was with Fire having 1200 Genin, but only 300 combined Chunin/Jonin, so there have to be a significant number of Genin outside of the three-person + Sensei structure.

What's a good control for a population curve? Say 3-6 active ninja in their 70s across the entire population? (As in Sarutobi, Inoki, etc). Total active population is 10000-20000 ninja.

I'll look at making a population curve by age.
Rather than arbitrary ages, I'll mark a chunin as the minimum age to get 2 skills in the mid 40s with a full column + 10% for stunts for a person with XP gain of 3/day.
Jonin I'll mark down for 2 skills in the mid 60s with a full column +10% for stunts.

Does that sound about right?

I expect that I'll need to put a death spike in for freshly minted Jonin, corresponding to their entry into big league bingo books and bounties due to ruffled feathers in high profile missions.
 
Briefvoice said:
2. There are plenty of 30 year old genin; they're people without potential so they get no narrative focus. (Apparently contradicted by GM statement.)
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Older genin are definitely a thing in canon and in fanon there is such a thing as career genin who are happy with their lot in life doing low risk missions like courier work inside the village, being secretaries etc.

I think that this makes sense for the MfD world as well. If you know you can't cut it as chunin (metagaming: your XP/day is so low that you virtually have no chance to get there even if you lived to 60+) then it makes sense to never do higher ranked missions. And presumably without doing those, you can't earn a field promotion either after doing X amount of C or higher level missions.

Leaf command would also let them get away with it because they would rather have experienced genin than dead chunin in case of emergencies (i.e. reserves for the war) since even genin would help with war logistics like courier duty, building camps and keeping (most) chakra beasts at bay.
 
eaglejarl said:
Good morning," Hazō said, coming through the door to the mission room with the others trailing behind him. "We're looking for some short-term missions. Can you help us?"

The desk chūnin was a middle-aged woman with a neatly-turned-out uniform, the left leg of which was pinned up over the stump of her leg. Her left hand was missing the ring and little fingers and there were vicious burn scars down the left side of her face. Her hair was long and carefully styled to cover the worst of them, but there was only so much that could be done to conceal the damage.

Hazō didn't even blink. There were too many scarred and wounded ninja veterans around for it to be noteworthy, even if her wounds were unusually severe.
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Found the quote.

For some reason SV doesn't let you insert quotes into a post edit.
reeeeee
 
@eaglejarl Some more thought on skill pyramid:

Current restrictions on N+1 skills at level X+1 require N levels at level X, plus validity at every step, mean that you can only build skill columns; for five skills at level 5, you need 4 skills at each level below five.

This is because to construct a pyramid like this:

OOO
OO
O

you had to at some point encounter this:

OO
OOO
O

which is illegal.

I suggest instead making the rule that at every level you can have TWO more skills than at previous level, allowing this construction:

OOOO
OO
O

which you can lift arbitrarily high. So you have groups of 7 skills at different heights, each levelled up to where you want the top four skills to be.

(This is assuming we want an inverted pyramid. Back when we were changing systems, I thought the goal was a straight up pyramid, where you had to have less lower-level skills than the top-level ones)
 
By my simple estimate, a fresh Chunin with an average XP gain of 3/day, having graduated as a child soldier with 1500 XP at the tender age of 12, has the following array by the age of 16 (15.80), with 5659 lifetime XP.

(Note - 1500 graduation XP is chosen to make sense of our current numbers after ~1.75 years and a generally above average plan... ~4000 = 1500 + 365*1.75*4)

# 43 - 2
# 33 - 3
# 23 - 4
# 13 - 5
# 1 - 10

The same average Chunin, having lived to the age of 23 (22.72) has increased to low-Jonin rank in skill, and has the following array, with 13242 lifetime XP

# 63 - 2
# 53 - 2
# 43 - 2
# 33 - 3
# 23 - 4
# 13 - 5
# 1 - 10​

Unless there are arguments to the contrary, I will proceed with an age of 16 for average Chunin, and an age of 23 for average Jonin.

I chose a stopping point of 3 in each skill arbitrarily. Reducing down to 0 (just enough for the extra AB) reduces the ages to 15 and 21 for Chunin and Jonin, respectively (4576 and 11407 lifetime XP)

Thoughts before I proceed?

XPrate_per_day = 3
place = 0
XPreq = [(i*10+place)*(i*10+place+1)/2 for i in range(15)]
XPreq[0] = 1

"""
# Chunin
levels = [10,5,4,
3, 2]
totalXP = 0
for i in range(len(levels)):
totalXP = totalXP + levels*XPreq

"""
# Jonin
levels = [10,5, 4,
3, 2, 2,
2]
totalXP = 0
for i in range(len(levels)):
totalXP = totalXP + levels*XPreq
totalXP = totalXP * 1.1 # for stunts
lifetimeXP = totalXP
totalXP = totalXP - 1500 # starting XP at age 12
age = totalXP / XPrate_per_day / 365.25 + 12
 
Adept_Woodwright said:
By my simple estimate, a fresh Chunin with an average XP gain of 3/day, having graduated as a child soldier with 1500 XP at the tender age of 12, has the following array by the age of 16 (15.80), with 5659 lifetime XP.

(Note - 1500 graduation XP is chosen to make sense of our current numbers after ~1.75 years and a generally above average plan... ~4000 = 1500 + 365*1.75*4)

# 43 - 2
# 33 - 3
# 23 - 4
# 13 - 5
# 1 - 10

The same average Chunin, having lived to the age of 23 (22.72) has increased to low-Jonin rank in skill, and has the following array, with 13242 lifetime XP

# 63 - 2
# 53 - 2
# 43 - 2
# 33 - 3
# 23 - 4
# 13 - 5
# 1 - 10​

Unless there are arguments to the contrary, I will proceed with an age of 16 for average Chunin, and an age of 23 for average Jonin.

I chose a stopping point of 3 in each skill arbitrarily. Reducing down to 0 (just enough for the extra AB) reduces the ages to 15 and 21 for Chunin and Jonin, respectively (4576 and 11407 lifetime XP)

Thoughts before I proceed?

XPrate_per_day = 3
place = 0
XPreq = [(i*10+place)*(i*10+place+1)/2 for i in range(15)]
XPreq[0] = 1

"""
# Chunin
levels = [10,5,4,
3, 2]
totalXP = 0
for i in range(len(levels)):
totalXP = totalXP + levels*XPreq

"""
# Jonin
levels = [10,5, 4,
3, 2, 2,
2]
totalXP = 0
for i in range(len(levels)):
totalXP = totalXP + levels*XPreq
totalXP = totalXP * 1.1 # for stunts
lifetimeXP = totalXP
totalXP = totalXP - 1500 # starting XP at age 12
age = totalXP / XPrate_per_day / 365.25 + 12
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Why the fat bottoms instead of straight up columns?
 
Adept_Woodwright said:
Thoughts before I proceed?
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3XP/day is our average gain for our talent pool, but we are notably above average. Not geniuses, but closer to that end of the bell curve than average IIRC.

Perhaps if one supposes a normal distribution centered at like 2XP/day, it may reflect more accurately on such an analysis. Mid teens and mid twenties for Chunin/Jonin fits well with my personal headcanon though.

Does this take into account doublecost skills and leveling ninjutsu? These seem to be a nontrivial time sink.
That may be negligible for low-chunin... OTOH, I would expect Jonin to know a lot, and be fairly proficient at many of them.
 
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