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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Veedrac said:
Honestly don't see why any of that would be necessary. The only reason sexual stuff is a rumor mill issue in our world is because people have cultural taboos about it, but MfD seems to treat springing sex events on people with significantly less social apprehension than our world considers, say, an unexpected game of Kiss or Dare. (After all, you wouldn't even play Truth or Dare with strangers. That would be weird.) Ino's presence is enough to confirm that at least someone there understands social norms, and she wasn't concerned about that part of it at all. Plus all that really happened was Shiori was like "are we playing Kiss or Dare?" and Anko was like "let's do that" and Hazō was like "that wasn't the plan" and Anko was like "let's do that anyway" and Hazō was like "let's not".

Sure, adversaries might be motivated to lie, but several people are compelled to tell the truth (eg. Ino to Akane, unless Ino's a total idiot), and Jiraiya probably wants the truth to be known, so the explanation is likely soon going to be "Anko wanted to play Kiss or Dare and Hazō said no". Even if it does get twisted, it just doesn't seem that dangerous.
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I wish I could trust that. I just hate feeling so negatively toward this quest over what was supposed to be a funny update.

Which, yeah, is as much my mood about other things seeping in, but it's my personal lack of motivation toward discussing the plan that led to Hazou doing nothing about it.

I just hope he exhibits his own agency and talks to Hana about it or something. I dunno. I'm just... tired.
 
Velorien said:
In other words, in the hypothetical scenario where the consequences hurt Hazō personally but not the clan overall, he's screwed?
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I'm really drawing a blank here about any potential gloom and doom here on Hazou's front. Perhaps you think "The Orgy is Cancelled!" was some sort of tacit admission of "There was actually an orgy planned" in some way? Contextually this clearly wasn't the case as:

Velorien said:
"It seems there has somehow been a misunderstanding. Gaming nights do not, I repeat, do not feature orgies."

"Oh, hey," Mitarashi grinned. "You mean this one is a special occasion? And you thought of little old me? Good call, kid. This shindig got twice as sexy the moment I walked in the front door."

"That's not why we invited you! We weren't planning any kind of orgy to begin with!"

"Spontaneous is good too," Mitarashi allowed. "Not like I've never been struck by divine inspiration halfway through a social before."

"Divine inspiration?" The concept was more than intriguing, but Hazō quickly remembered himself. "No, that's not the point. The Gōketsu Clan does not host orgies!"
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multiple objections were noted prior to any foot-in-mouth stuff.

Quite frankly, mapping this entire scenario into a contextually equivalent one (lets say, random college house party, to remove any age issues and some alcohol to lower any cultural inhibitions) , I still do not see the issue from Hazou's POV. The reaction would be somewhere along the lines of

"Wow, who invited that super dense crazy chick that tried to start an orgy in the middle of Board Games and Drinks?"

Perhaps the situation gets flipped a bit if the person hosting the party is in fact, the Heir Apparent to the Playboy fortune or whatever, but I still firmly stand by"This isn't actually a big deal for Hazou, unless its a very big deal."

Who is actually going to really care about this, and why? If its something along the lines of "The Leaf equivalent of your standard high school rumor mill will brand Hazou a pervert for all time." then that's hardly something that can't be buried, memory-holed and undone with a weeks worth of effort after it dies down a bit. Perhaps we will have to be a little less prosocial about things, but thats hardly an issue.


E: Let it be known I am not trying to compel you to defend against the above argument, I just don't see what the fuss is about.
 
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firestorm440 said:
Remember who our adopted dad is?
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Yeah, I mean thats literally why that statement is there.

I mean sure, even if Jiraiya is the most Perverted Pervert who ever went Perverting, he's had decades to build that rep up.

Frankly, I do not see why the court of public opinion wouldn't just shelve all of this onto "Jiraiya is a pervert, news at 11." before forgetting about it, since they have MORE of a reason to do that if his personality is really such a thing of common legend.

I digress.
 
Cariyaga said:
Other players, would you be willing to give up [X] XP to just... deal with this such that we never have to think of this again?

@eaglejarl Would that kind of transaction be something you'd be willing to do? Basically buying in on that thing you said like a year and a half ago where you mentioned you could do planning for us but it would cost us XP?

I just... really don't want to have to deal with this right now, and based on the lack of involvement in the planning for dealing with it this update, in spite of the number of voters, neither do many other people.
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Honestly, I think at least some of us simply don't consider this a big deal. The tone of the update was that of a comedy of errors; it's pretty easy to poke holes in the logic of it all - that at least one person should've tried leaving, that the adults should've intervened, that Anko should've really known better than to start undressing in broad view of Konoha's future ruling elites, and so forth. But we overlook these problems because they made for a very fun read. The flipside of this covenant is that I, at least, trust the QMs not to have this result in major negative consequences for us.
 
Roomba said:
Honestly, I think at least some of us simply don't consider this a big deal. The tone of the update was that of a comedy of errors; it's pretty easy to poke holes in the logic of it all - that at least one person should've tried leaving, that the adults should've intervened, that Anko should've really known better than to start undressing in broad view of Konoha's future ruling elites, and so forth. But we overlook these problems because they made for a very fun read. The flipside of this covenant is that I, at least, trust the QMs not to have this result in major negative consequences for us.
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I trust the QMs to have this result in consequences that follow from it realistically. Which is why I'm panicking, because I honestly don't know what the consequences of this would be, but it's been implied to be something we could have impacted but didn't.
 
Roomba said:
Honestly, I think at least some of us simply don't consider this a big deal. The tone of the update was that of a comedy of errors; it's pretty easy to poke holes in the logic of it all - that at least one person should've tried leaving, that the adults should've intervened, that Anko should've really known better than to start undressing in broad view of Konoha's future ruling elites, and so forth. But we overlook these problems because they made for a very fun read. The flipside of this covenant is that I, at least, trust the QMs not to have this result in major negative consequences for us.
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Yep, I think part of the problem is the between-update suspense. I guess I'm picking up a bit of @Cariyaga's anxiety now too, but expect it to go away after the next two updates.

That's kinda why the news that the update is split into two, and Ino conversation is in the later, is kinda meh (though obvioulsy understandable). If nothing is brought up on the topic in the first one, or if it's brought up as an escalating unmanaged issue, we will have longer sad times. OTOH actually knowing for a fact that we have a problem is still much easier psychologically than being unsure if we have one. The thread is very good on reacting to problems after they've been presented - it's the predict/guess if something is a problem that gets us.
 
My general take on reacting to social situations that may or may not be a big deal is, "Let's see if this blows over and if not then we do something about it."

In the quest, but also in life, it's sometimes hard to know what will end up being a big deal. So you have a choice. Anytime there's something that may be a big deal you can jump on it immediately (put a response in next update) or you can wait and see what the repercussions look like and then decide what if anything needs to be done about it. The first has its advantages in a "jump on small problems before they can become large" sense, but it can also lead to overreacting and putting in effort and stress where it's not needed. The second approach is better for conservation of energy but it does indeed sometimes mean that it's harder to address problems that are problems.

This applies to not just 'the orgy is canceled' but also the time Hazou put foot in mouth before that, making Keiko feel bad about the pangolin situation. Other stuff too. And I think the debate comes up over and over in votes, with essentially one side wanting to wait and see and the other side wanting to jump on things immediately.

I feel like the reason it's such as reoccurring contentious topic is that it represents a fundamental real life disagreement in how human beings like to handle things. Players will have different ideas on how to handle this in real life; no wonder there are different ideas on how to handle it in fiction. All I ask is that people try to be understanding on where each other is coming from and understand that, "Let's not do anything yet," is not a dismissal so much as wanting to wait and see before trying to jump in and fix something that may or may not need fixing.
 
Briefvoice said:
My general take on reacting to social situations that may or may not be a big deal is, "Let's see if this blows over and if not then we do something about it."

In the quest, but also in life, it's sometimes hard to know what will end up being a big deal. So you have a choice. Anytime there's something that may be a big deal you can jump on it immediately (put a response in next update) or you can wait and see what the repercussions look like and then decide what if anything needs to be done about it. The first has its advantages in a "jump on small problems before they can become large" sense, but it can also lead to overreacting and putting in effort and stress where it's not needed. The second approach is better for conservation of energy but it does indeed sometimes mean that it's harder to address problems that are problems.

This applies to not just 'the orgy is canceled' but also the time Hazou put foot in mouth before that, making Keiko feel bad about the pangolin situation. Other stuff too. And I think the debate comes up over and over in votes, with essentially one side wanting to wait and see and the other side wanting to jump on things immediately.

I feel like the reason it's such as reoccurring contentious topic is that it represents a fundamental real life disagreement in how human beings like to handle things. Players will have different ideas on how to handle this in real life; no wonder there are different ideas on how to handle it in fiction. All I ask is that people try to be understanding on where each other is coming from and understand that, "Let's not do anything yet," is not a dismissal so much as wanting to wait and see before trying to jump in and fix something that may or may not need fixing.
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While I agree, the Velorien has implied that we should have done something, so I'm still inclined to blame myself for not. :p
 
Hey, here's an idea.

Why don't we just hire Akatsuki to assassinate Hiashi?

All problems are solved.
 
Despite my joke action, my view on the outcome is fairly in line with Veedrac and MMKII

My only concern is what future compels look like.

In a typical live game, the QM informs a player (or the player informs a QM) that they have reached a point where Aspect B can be invoked. The player then either gains or loses as FP, depending on how the Aspect applied and whether a player decided to avoid it. So long as the player has FP, there is always a decision on whether to accept or avoid it.

The problem in an SV format is that we only get to change our plans at discrete narrative points - and due to excellent story telling these points often fall after a significant or dramatic event. It is beneficial to the narrative flow of a chapter that the author can choose to resolve the main conflict within an update, rather than breaking near the end to determine an aspect invocation, only to then need to follow up with a relatively short conflict and chapter resolution.

So we arrived at the status quo: Hazou has enough agency to avoid some compels that we did not see coming (as in CH 209), but not generally enough to avoid all seriously damaging compels that slip through a plan. We try to envision ways in which an update might go wrong, and sometimes we include mitigations into the plan. We do not want to proclaim a blanket avoidance on all foot-in-mouth compels, because, like it or not, that is a key point of characterization that we want to mitigate narratively rather than meta-mechanically (also I suspect doing so would quickly cause us to run out of FP)

For the Keiko compel, I believe we legitimately could have seen that compel coming, and could have included specific mitigation's around it without ballooning the plan. That we did not could easily be read as tacit acceptance of compels.

For the Game Night compel, I do not think we could have seen that coming (Shiori wasn't even invited, and several invitees had actually participated in Game Nights before). We could not have prevented that specific outcome without several broadband mitigation's that would have ballooned the plan (because there are a multitude of other hypothetical failure modes we'd have needed to consider, some more likely than the one which occurred) In this case, not including the mitigation for a possible orgy, in my opinion, can't be read as tacit acceptance of compels related to orgies. So it falls back to Hazou's agency. Lacking an appropriate aspect that leads him otherwise (say, Idealist when he natively declined back in Ch 209) Hazou's characterization drives him to natively accept this kind of compel.

I do not think we (neither players nor QMs) want to go to the state in which we break an update to resolve a compel. Maybe we need to come up with a range of broad conditions that would drive compel accept/decline decisions (say, lowering reputation with e.g. Ino / Akane results in immediate decline, or something of that nature) as a secondary fall back before it goes to Hazou's agency. I am only hesitant to do that, because it is reminiscient of plans with lists of branching conditionals and operating instructions (which we have rightfully broken away from)
 
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Copying a portion of the QM chat, in hopes of a constructive discussion:
Cariyaga said:
Would that kind of transaction be something you'd be willing to do? Basically buying in on that thing you said like a year and a half ago where you mentioned you could do planning for us but it would cost us XP?
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There already exists a mechanism for trading off XP for more certainty in resolving problems. The plan could, for example, have had Hazou going to a bunch of people, carefully laying out the situation and his current plans, and asking specific questions about what to do. This wouldn't magically solve things, but it's a safe, boring, mature plan that's more likely to work than Hazou going solo. Take less risk, get less XP in exchange for a higher chance of success.
 
Anderkent said:
Doing things about genocide is healthy. Feeling bad on its own is not healthy unless it leads to action.
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Doing things about ethical issues you don't have much emotional connection to is too rare a skill for me to consider it archetypal of a healthy mind, as much as I would that it be otherwise. As to the later, votes matter even if they don't win.
 
OliWhail said:
Copying a portion of the QM chat, in hopes of a constructive discussion:

There already exists a mechanism for trading off XP for more certainty in resolving problems. The plan could, for example, have had Hazou going to a bunch of people, carefully laying out the situation and his current plans, and asking specific questions about what to do. This wouldn't magically solve things, but it's a safe, boring, mature plan that's more likely to work than Hazou going solo. Take less risk, get less XP in exchange for a higher chance of success.
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Yes. But the reason I'm willing to make that exchange so explicitly is because I did not want to make the plan. I don't really want to put it this way, but... I wasn't really in the mental headspace at the time to do so, and at least a couple other people that I know of were the same.

The plan you laid out in that post is basically the kind of thing I would expect out of such an exchange, though. Not a magical solution, just... a good low-effort one (in a plan that could take less than a line or two, and doesn't take too much time to come up with for a QM) that we don't have to interact with. It's not the kind of thing that we should or can, really, abuse: When we actually put effort into our plans, we can generally come up with better than "low risk, low XP reward".

That said, I... also kind of disagree with "take less risk get less XP". In a vacuum, why should a less-risky plan that accomplishes the same thing as a more-risky plan get less XP? Shouldn't it get more for showing that Hazou's learning how to avoid risk while still accomplishing his goals?

It doesn't really make sense to me to incentivize risk-taking behavior like that. That said, if you meant "Take less risk and do not actively participate in the risk [so as to get less personal lower-case-e experience], so get less XP", that makes more sense, though I'm still not really sure it deserves less XP. And of course, in the context of giving it over to QM planning it'd of course earn less/no XP, this is just in reference to our own planning.

All this said, I do still totally understand if you all don't want the XP:QM planning standard to be a thing, but I don't think it would be a particularly large issue given our XP magpie tendency.
 
I think a plausible compel-related mechanic would be for the QM to describe a bit of the tradeoff behind the decision to accept/reject; we can then provide more feedback about whether we would have accepted the compel or not in a vote. Where the purpose of the vote is not to decide on a retcon, but rather to inform QMs how much support those have in-thread, and bias more towards rejecting / accepting.

For the recent compels, it could be:

eaglejarl said:
"Yes, that seems entirely workable. I see no way in which the Merchant Council would object to us using ninja abilities to give one merchant an advantage over another. Or in which the medical corps would mind what they will doubtlessly consider wasting their time on civilians."

Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
Compel refused! -1 Fate Point
"Keiko...." Hazō paused, reconsidering the biting words that had been about to fall from his lips. "We've never been in a position to make the world better before. Now we are."

"That's not—"

"Yes it is," Hazō said, quickly cutting off the objection that Keiko was clearly about to make. "Growing up in Mist we were kids, and unadmired for reasons that weren't our fault. Everything I said to that proctor was true: You and Noburi are brilliant ninja and brilliant people. Your families were dumb as rocks for not realizing that, but they didn't.
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Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo will crash the conversation with awkward or get side-tracked in details. He will need to start again later, and others may be tired of that topic by then.
If refused, he will turn the conversation back to more productive avenues of looking for ways to make Leaf a better place.
Compel refused! Creative Idealist does want to make the world a better place, and it's high time we do it. -1 Fate Point

Velorien said:
She sat down heavily on the bed. There was still no expression on her face, but Hazō knew her well enough to see the tell-tale signs of how much effort that was taking. Any moment now, she'd find an excuse to retreat into the Frozen Skein and he'd lose his chance to support the part of her that needed it most.

Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
"Keiko," he said hurriedly, not thinking so much about the detail of the words as about the need to keep her emotionally present, "there is nothing wrong with caring about strangers. The whole point of Uplift is caring about strangers. I… I know it hurts. The people on the Sunset Racer were strangers too, and I still haven't forgotten that feeling of anger and helplessness and guilt after we failed to…" He bit his tongue, but it was too late.

Keiko didn't respond. Her stance shifted and her eyes lost focus. Hazō, feeling entirely new helplessness and guilt, waited, because this was not something that was safe to interrupt.

"I apologise," Keiko said tonelessly after a while. "I was allowing my emotions to interfere with my judgement. Having established that you are amenable to cooperation, I will consider the situation in more depth and attempt to evaluate our options."
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Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo's good intentioned follow-up will make Keiko feel more guilty and depressed. Getting Keiko to open up again will be tough, and you'll need to figure out another way to make her feel better. Maybe solve the ongoing genocide? Or at least a pony.
If refused, he will choose a more delicate phrasing, and Keiko will not retreat to her Frozen Skein facade. He has no ideas on how to solve the issue right now, but at least he can provide some emotional support, and grow closer by shared suffering.
Compel accepted, because Velorien was writing the update :p
Wow personally this compel was feelsbad, I think I would have rejected it here.

Velorien said:
Hazō took a deep breath…

QM Compel: "Open Mouth, Insert Foot".
-o-​
It had been, without question, the most awkward night of Ino's life. She wished she could just lock the memory away in the deepest recesses of her mind and never think of it again (there was probably clan ninjutsu for that), but she knew better than anyone how fast rumours spread. Better if Dad found out from her. At least this way she could restrain his overprotective father mode enough that he didn't go burn down the Gōketsu residence or something. It would be hard to make this situation even worse than it was, but she had faith in his ability to do so.
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Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo's panicked response will fail to satisfy everyone around. Clan heirs will leave a bit weirded out, Anko will think she's owed a favour for calling that rain check, and Hazo will have to do some explaining over the next week.
If refused, Hazo will find a disarming response, and Game Night will continue fully dressed.
Compel accepted, because the game night was almost over anyway.


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Thoughts? I think knowing more about how QMs choose to react to compels would be a good incremental improvement.
 
Anderkent said:
I think a plausible compel-related mechanic would be for the QM to describe a bit of the tradeoff behind the decision to accept/reject; we can then provide more feedback about whether we would have accepted the compel or not in a vote. Where the purpose of the vote is not to decide on a retcon, but rather to inform QMs how much support those have in-thread, and bias more towards rejecting / accepting.

For the recent compels, it could be:



Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo will crash the conversation with awkward or get side-tracked in details. He will need to start again later, and others may be tired of that topic by then.
If refused, he will turn the conversation back to more productive avenues of looking for ways to make Leaf a better place.
Compel refused! Creative Idealist does want to make the world a better place, and it's high time we do it. -1 Fate Point




Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo's good intentioned follow-up will make Keiko feel more guilty and depressed. Getting Keiko to open up again will be tough, and you'll need to figure out another way to make her feel better. Maybe solve the ongoing genocide? Or at least a pony.
If refused, he will choose a more delicate phrasing, and Keiko will not retreat to her Frozen Skein facade. He has no ideas on how to solve the issue right now, but at least he can provide some emotional support, and grow closer by shared suffering.
Compel accepted, because Velorien was writing the update :p
Wow personally this compel was feelsbad, I think I would have rejected it here.




Hazō is Compelled: Open Mouth, Insert Foot!
If accepted, Hazo's panicked response will fail to satisfy everyone around. Clan heirs will leave a bit weirded out, Anko will think she's owed a favour for calling that rain check, and Hazo will have to do some explaining over the next week.
If refused, Hazo will find a disarming response, and Game Night will continue fully dressed.
Compel accepted, because the game night was almost over anyway.


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Thoughts? I think knowing more about how QMs choose to react to compels would be a good incremental improvement.
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I like it, it reminds me of how the QMs will put the dice rolls in spoilers when they write a fight scene. It doesn't change anything fundamental to the system, but it does streamline the communication between QM and player as to why a given character acted a certain way.
 
Cariyaga said:
I just... really don't want to have to deal with this right now, and based on the lack of involvement in the planning for dealing with it this update, in spite of the number of voters, neither do many other people.
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I believe you are typical-mind-fallacying here. I don't think it's valid to claim that even though there were 14 voters (E: in the winning plan, 22 total), somehow participation was still lacking, and further that it's clearly for the same reasons that you are upset. I don't think that's even slightly true here.

Personally, I very rarely get to seriously contribute on the Thursday/Friday planning due to work and timezone issues, and nothing particular about this last cycle impacted that, except for maybe the fact that nothing critical was being voted on (I might be tempted to put off work for that).

Adept_Woodwright said:
For the Keiko compel, I believe we legitimately could have seen that compel coming, and could have included specific mitigation's around it without ballooning the plan. That we did not could easily be read as tacit acceptance of compels
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FWIW I would have voted to accept that compel.
 
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Vecht said:
I believe you are typical-mind-fallacying here. I don't think it's valid to claim that even though there were 14 voters, somehow participation was still lacking, and further that it's clearly for the same reasons that you are upset. I don't think that's even slightly true here.

Personally, I very rarely get to seriously contribute on the Thursday/Friday planning due to work and timezone issues, and nothing particular about this last cycle impacted that, except for maybe the fact that nothing critical was being voted on (I might be tempted to put off work for that).
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Almost certainly to some extent. On the other hand, @MMKII also complained of people not actually participating in discussion about the plan.
 
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