Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[Inferno Vulpix]

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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While mine is a bit of an edge case, I can say that I was really busy for most of the cycle, until the plans were already mostly finalized. I could throw a post or two out, especially if they didn't need anything more out of me than a couple minutes of typing, but I couldn't spare the focus to actually plan.

So I can confirm, for me at least, that my lack of participation had little to do with my reaction to the update.

 

[Velorien]

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 get the feeling that people overall are treating this as more of a Kōta/Minami/tunnel update than a comedy update. The QMs have unfairly thrust a disaster upon them, and now they have to desperately look for a solution or suffer the consequences. I don't think the comedy nature of the update has affected that.

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 reasons other hypothetical failure modes, 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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I agree that this is a problem, and welcome suggestions on how to resolve it.

As an aside, I've never had a problem with branching conditionals. To me, the problem with the old plans from the QM side was that they a) required more written content that could reasonably be expected and b) were a nightmare to process. That isn't an issue with branching conditionals, because you only ever have to worry about one path at a time.

 

[Emstar]

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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My recollection of things was that some damage control measures were proposed, some contemplation was made, and no actual course was agreed upon.

Likewise, no serious analysis was done in terms of "Will this unfuck us? Will this fuck us? How will X react to this? Do we want that or not?" on any of the above.

Besides maybe the Ino conversation, which I listened to and implemented.

In general, I do not think it should fall entirely on the Plan Creator to think of and implement good stuff in a vacuum, without some input from others.Trying to do so in a manner that is both

a) Effective
b) Efficient
c) Popular with the thread

is very difficult. If "Hey, could you include X! I think we should do X!" is a statement made, I find myself weighing whether or not this is

a) A good idea
b) An actionable idea
c) A popular idea
-c.1) "Will this cause a decent percentage of voters already voting for my plan to revolt?"
-c.2) "Does this conflict with already stated intentions of said voters?"


This is an order of magnitude more difficult for social events, since the usual thread response is varied between
(do forgive me for being blunt,uncharitable and/or comedic with the following)

a) I don't give a shit about this. Where's the punching and the explosions?
b) Is X reallllly a problem?
c) No, we should do OTHER THING #21 instead!
d) Nonono, this may give an impression to CHARACTER A that we do not want to give!
e) What if Foot-in-Mouth causes Hazou to forget to wear pants during this conversation? Dangerous!
f) I do not want Hazou to do this because it doesn't mesh with the planned characterization that I personally have of him.
g) I think we are being too simplistic in how we view the scenario.
h) My own perspective is just different on this, from personal experience
i) This is an infringement of character agency, if we do this KNOWING their response, its like the Akane situation all over again!
j) Shouldn't we be training for that tournament?
k) We should just cut this entire section, I want that +1 XP.
l) We are being overly complicated in handling this!!!
...

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After a certain point (somewhere in between "I don't like the Ino section for this reason." and "I don't like the Ino section for THAT reason." ) default response was:

Noted.

Last call for plan edits for my particular plan, speak now or Scream in Kagome should it not go your way.

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So thats the clarification on that. Perhaps it wasn't as simple as "Nobody really talked about this." but they're functionally the same from my point of view.

 

[Inferno Vulpix]

I get the feeling that people overall are treating this as more of a Kōta/Minami/tunnel update than a comedy update. The QMs have unfairly thrust a disaster upon them, and now they have to desperately look for a solution or suffer the consequences. I don't think the comedy nature of the update has affected that.

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I wouldn't say overall, the people who seem convinced it's a Big Deal with Serious Consequence seems to be balanced out by the It's Not A Big Deal people and the If It Was, Jiraiya Would Take Charge people. Divisive to be sure, but it wasn't a case of you sending entirely the wrong signals.

 

[Cariyaga]

e) What if Foot-in-Mouth causes Hazou to forget to wear pants during this conversation? Dangerous!

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Hey, it's a serious concern!

 

[Vecht]

Hey, it's a serious concern!

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!!!

We should take precautions against this. I bet If we have Hazou throw out his entire wardrobe and replace it with one-piece training outfits, we won't have to worry.

 

[Tua]

I get the feeling that people overall are treating this as more of a Kōta/Minami/tunnel update than a comedy update. The QMs have unfairly thrust a disaster upon them, and now they have to desperately look for a solution or suffer the consequences. I don't think the comedy nature of the update has affected that.

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It's possible there is some form of selection bias involved here since the people who are not as worried about the situation are more likely to not vote or comment on it than those who think Something Bad happened.

Speaking for myself as someone who does not think the issue was a serious one and did vote, I did not check if there was enough to deal with the orgy aftermath or even particularly much about the finer details of training. The former because I do not/did not think it's a big deal and the latter because this isn't really an area of interest or expertise besides some broad strokes or being particular about which scenes I would like to see written.

 

[Anderkent]

Hey, it's a serious concern!

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More concerned about shoes myself. Not even sure if it's correct to wear them while foot in mouthing. We should ask Mari

 

[Emstar]

More concerned about shoes myself. Not even sure if it's correct to wear them while foot in mouthing. We should ask Mari

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Psh. You think he wears shoes? We've never once put

• Hazou puts on his shoes and ties them correctly

In a single plan. He likely doesn't do this at all!

Really, its the fact that we never put up precautions for putting his underwear on backwards that irks me. This could be problematic down the road.

 

[Cariyaga]

So thats the clarification on that. Perhaps it wasn't as simple as "Nobody really talked about this." but they're functionally the same from my point of view.

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Oh, right. screams in Kagome

There, done my duty.

 

[Roomba]

It makes me wonder why characters are a lot more humanistic in a supposedly medieval society.

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Let's be honest with ourselves here. Intellectually and morally, the ruling elites of this world (clan ninja, that is) are probably comparable to their equivalents of early XVIIIth century of our history.

Note, for example, how basically all of the ninja we've seen exposed to the idea of scorch squads have reacted with some combination of outrage and horror. This really isn't a late medieval attitude, where the idea of specifically targetting the civilian population of an enemy territory via raids would've been seen as perfectly natural.

While mine is a bit of an edge case, I can say that I was really busy for most of the cycle, until the plans were already mostly finalized. I could throw a post or two out, especially if they didn't need anything more out of me than a couple minutes of typing, but I couldn't spare the focus to actually plan.

So I can confirm, for me at least, that my lack of participation had little to do with my reaction to the update.

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Ditto. I even promised a reaction post, but then was literally out of range of a computer for the entirety of Friday and Saturday. And this late, it seems really awkward to do one.

After a certain point (somewhere in between "I don't like the Ino section for this reason." and "I don't like the Ino section for THAT reason." ) default response was:

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From my own perspective, one of the things that frustrated me about curating a plan was that I rarely got feedback or suggestions on sections or topics I explicitly solicited them for. It's a bit counterintuitive, but I found the hivemind singularly unhelpful in terms of solving specific problems as opposed to just throwing things at a wall until something stuck. And I did not cherish being the wall.

 

[Threnodist]

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Intellectually and morally, the ruling elites of this world (clan ninja, that is) are probably comparable to their equivalents of early XVIIIth century of our history.

Note, for example, how basically all of the ninja we've seen exposed to the idea of scorch squads have reacted with some combination of outrage and horror. This really isn't a late medieval attitude, where the idea of specifically targetting the civilian population of an enemy territory via raids would've been seen as perfectly natural.

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I don't think this is as quite a ringing endorsement as you believe it is. 18th century (western) rulers are chock full of examples of people who advocated for the genocide & slavery of civilians

 

[Noumero]

For my part, I didn't participate in the orgy-related brainstorming much because I considered it unnecessary. I saw the "disaster" as a fairly minor one, and my ideas were medium-effort at least. I already saw Jiraiya dismissing them as an overkill then solving the problem with a few letters. It appears this is not the case?

Oh well then. I vote we figure out Shiori's culpability in-character, then send Keiko after her for catharsis.

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

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Akatsuki doesn't work for Leaf:

Akatsuki have been these terrifying killer mercenaries, working for everyone under the sun except Leaf

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According to Kagome, at least.
On second thoughts, you raise a good point in that it'll be another easy way to verify Kagome's information. I now have no objections to your plan as put forward.

 

[Kiba]

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Intellectually and morally, the ruling elites of this world (clan ninja, that is) are probably comparable to their equivalents of early XVIIIth century of our history.

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More like late 20th century.

The european did stuff like the Opium Wars and a number of other atrocities, of which humanity is still paying for. China is not exactly the West's best friend.

The fact that Keiko refuse to murder a few condors, who doesn't even resemble humans, means that Elemental humans, or at least the upper echelon of society is much more humanistic than even the most sophisticated of late modern societies.

 

[Roomba]

I don't think this is as quite a ringing endorsement as you believe it is. 18th century (western) rulers are chock full of examples of people who advocated for the genocide & slavery of civilians

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I'm not making any kind of endorsement; I'm making an observation that the ninja elite actually do see civilians as fellow human beings, inferior as they may be. As opposed to a resource to be bought and sold and plundered. Again, if you pointed out to a XIIIth century feudal lord that his neighbours might sack and burn the villages in his domain if they thought they could get away with it, his reply would be the equivalent of "Well, duh.". By the XVIIIth century, these attitudes will have changed considerably.

More like late 20th century.

The european did stuff like the Opium Wars and a number of other atrocities, of which humanity is still paying for. China is not exactly the West's best friend.

The fact that Keiko refuse to murder a few condors, who doesn't even resemble humans, means that Elemental humans, or at least the upper echelon of society is much more humanistic than even the most sophisticated of late modern societies.

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I don't think Keiko's revulsion at the Pangolin victory parade is universal among the ninja elites, necessarily. Jiraiya, at least, appears to be largely unbothered by the Condor genocide. On the other hand, even he was visibly repulsed by the idea of scorch squads.

 

[Cariyaga]

Let's be honest with ourselves here. Intellectually and morally, the ruling elites of this world (clan ninja, that is) are probably comparable to their equivalents of early XVIIIth century of our history.

Note, for example, how basically all of the ninja we've seen exposed to the idea of scorch squads have reacted with some combination of outrage and horror. This really isn't a late medieval attitude, where the idea of specifically targetting the civilian population of an enemy territory via raids would've been seen as perfectly natural.

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Uh, we haven't exposed anyone to the idea of them. We told Jiraiya, who went "Hm."

Yes, Hazou, Noburi, and Keiko reacted as such, but they're children.

 

[Emstar]

Uh, we haven't exposed anyone to the idea of them. We told Jiraiya, who went "Hm."

Yes, Hazou, Noburi, and Keiko reacted as such, but they're children.

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Nara Shikaku was also like

"Huh. Is that a thing?"

Keep in mind this is a world where Jiraiya was like "Oh yeah Ren could totally start using all the female ninja as breeding stock for more ninja, like no questions asked that would work."

 

[Cariyaga]

Nara Shikaku was also like

"Huh. Is that a thing?"

Keep in mind this is a world where Jiraiya was like "Oh yeah Ren could totally start using all the female ninja as breeding stock for more ninja, like no questions asked that would work."

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I still am not sure that I believe that. Like, she's weak, as a ninja. Skill in politics only goes so far when you're forcing your ninja to be broodmare.

 

[Kiba]

I still am not sure that I believe that. Like, she's weak, as a ninja. Skill in politics only goes so far when you're forcing your ninja to be broodmare.

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Jiraiya offered it as an example of incredibly unlikely scenarios as a counter to Hazō's incredibly unlikely scenario.

Such a program also has a potential to destroy Mist as a society, ranging from civil war to outright defection.

 

[Cariyaga]

Jiraiya offered it as an example of incredibly unlikely scenarios as a counter to Hazō's incredibly unlikely scenario.

Such a program also has a potential to destroy Mist as a society, ranging from civil war to outright defection.

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And with our defection as an example, I find it even more unlikely: Anyone who goes missing could come to us, specifically, for shelter.

e: That said, I can definitely see Ren using it as a threat to bully Jiraiya into favorable agreements.

 

[Tua]

I still am not sure that I believe that. Like, she's weak, as a ninja. Skill in politics only goes so far when you're forcing your ninja to be broodmare.

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Does skill matter that much? Yagura could turn Mist into a police state by being intimidating and - presumably - a good amount of divide and conquer so no one power faction could oppose him.

Yes, being a jinchuuriki helps with both power and intimidation but a single jinchuuriki would not be a match for a whole Village if individual power was all that mattered. Though in a way, being skilled (or intimidating) enough could be a deterrent against assassination so maybe you are correct.

 

[Threnodist]

m not making any kind of endorsement; I'm making an observation that the ninja elite actually do see civilians as fellow human beings, inferior as they may be. As opposed to a resource to be bought and sold and plundered. Again, if you pointed out to a XIIIth century feudal lord that his neighbours might sack and burn the villages in his domain if they thought they could get away with it, his reply would be the equivalent of "Well, duh.". By the XVIIIth century, these attitudes will have changed considerably.

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Chattel slavery?

 

[Cariyaga]

in a way, being skilled (or intimidating) enough could be a deterrent against assassination so maybe you are correct.

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This is the point, yeah. Like... if you piss off your ninja enough -- and given Mari's response, I believe this would -- at least a few will get together to off you.

 

[Velorien]

All this is regrettably unsimulationist of us. The fact is: we were forced to drop the Narutoverse's civilisation level to the very rough equivalent of the 12th century in order to make the tech, population numbers etc. make any kind of sense (reminder: Kishimoto didn't know the order of magnitude of the number of ninja in a village). Plus it became a death world. If we'd imported Early Middle Ages culture and ethics on top of that... well, the result just wouldn't be fun to write or play for anyone. Even for me, as it's too easy to be evil in a world where the majority of people are property and things like sexism and xenophobia are too ubiquitous to exist as concepts.

 

[Emstar]

All this is regrettably unsimulationist of us. The fact is: we were forced to drop the Narutoverse's civilisation level to the very rough equivalent of the 12th century in order to make the tech, population numbers etc. make any kind of sense (reminder: Kishimoto didn't know the order of magnitude of the number of ninja in a village). Plus it became a death world. If we'd imported Early Middle Ages culture and ethics on top of that... well, the result just wouldn't be fun to write or play for anyone. Even for me, as it's too easy to be evil in a world where the majority of people are property and things like sexism and xenophobia are too ubiquitous to exist as concepts.

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I'm sure no one holds it against y'all. Cleaning up that mess was almost impossible I'm sure.

In other news.


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