Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
alright cool that should still be in Iron Nerve then
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
We certainly need to vomit that up and go drink some powdered (macerator/crushed) charcoal mixed with water.alright cool that should still be in Iron Nerve then
- Location
- Snakesden
Oh, yeah, that makes sense if the Skein or her intuition or whatever can get tainted that way. (Rather than just putting the observation in a separate pool of Iron Nerve reaction data.)
I was thinking more like "look, see? I'm totally not memorizing how long it takes you to shift, or how the things you do compare to other Kurosawas". I agree that's not obviously clan secret territory, but it makes a bit more sense than pretending not to know about body language shifts, which would just be dumb.
- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You know... meeting with Ami feels increasingly like a party with questionable substances.
BEFORE: Oh man we are so hyped, Ami is going to be a riot! Ami X Hazou OTP
DURING: It's exciting but what is happening oh god.
AFTER: We need to puke out whatever she got into me and find an adult ASAP. Who the hell is she? We need to be more careful from now on.
BEFORE: Oh man we are so hyped, Ami is going to be a riot! Ami X Hazou OTP
DURING: It's exciting but what is happening oh god.
AFTER: We need to puke out whatever she got into me and find an adult ASAP. Who the hell is she? We need to be more careful from now on.
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Evenstar
Triple Jump Unlocked
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Life goals or wife goals", as they say
whynotboth.jpg
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Also, props to Hazou for being able to overcome Ami's seduction test by thinking of Keiko's feelings. It's impressive how Hazou kept his head above water throughout the conversation with Ami throwing curveball after curveball, and whatever subtle tests Ami was conducting it looks like we at least passed the obvious ones.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
We could ask Keiko and Jiraiya about the causes of each ninja war in the past. If they start because of struggles for resources, then uplift should help. If there's some underlying reason that having more resources doesn't fix, then we need to incorporate fixing that into uplift too.
I fully agree with telling Jiraiya everything. EVERYTHING. And then maybe begging him to let us do the deal with Ami.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
@eaglejarl @Velorien @OliWhail
Do you have any particular preference on us picking up immediately after Hazou leaves the restaurant?
If she can go full supercomputer in the blink of an eye, Jiraiya should be informed of that.
Do you have any particular preference on us picking up immediately after Hazou leaves the restaurant?
We should also play back our muscle memory of breathing at that time (we can do this I think?) to see if it actually matches up with 37 / min .
If she can go full supercomputer in the blink of an eye, Jiraiya should be informed of that.
- Location
- Snakesden
I think he overall did well given how much weirdness happened, but I was disappointed by his reaction to the seduction.* How is the default assumption not "Ami is fucking with me"? And when he's considering 'being successfully seduced', is he really that excited about a totally loveless, purely pragmatic thing?
Also, it's just kinda weird that Ami supposedly looks a lot like Keiko and this never gets brought up as an issue.
*Assuming she wasn't pulling crazy shenanigans for that, and it was just body language + lack of scary aura.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I mean when the hot older (see also: scarily competent,intellectual badass) ninja chick offers you to "World Domination and Chill?" and you've got a truckload of hormones in your system and are decently off balance already due to a sudden vacuum of killing intent...
Well, I can totally see why there was a bit of a fight there between Hazou's hindbrain and his thinky bits for a few seconds.
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TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
If I had to guess, wars in the Elemental Nations can happen for all the reasons wars on Earth do, with perhaps some additions like Jinchuuriki or bloodlines or other things people might fight to possess for strategic reasons. Industrialization and the resulting abundance of resources certainly didn't completely stop wars on Earth, although it (and the centralization of governments into large nation states) did make them rarer. However it made what wars still happened bigger and deadlier.
I do agree that we should ask. That's a useful history lesson. Maybe Jiraiya can give us a secret political history of the elemental nations on the nights on the road back to Leaf?
I absolutely agree with telling Jiraiya everything. Taking the deal anyway with his knowledge might be worth it. As long as Ami can't use the existence of the deal as blackmail it sounds reasonably manageable. Whatever favor she eventually asks for should be very telling to Leaf intelligence, and if it's something we really don't want her to have we can just refuse.
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I don't know why I am even surprised. Remind me to reference this when the GMs try to claim that my "perfect and compulsively cross-indexed", 'Iron Brain' bloodlind is unrealistically overpowered.
alright cool that should still be in Iron Nerve then
Awesome! Stomach acid can reach a pH as low as 0.8 and a good hurl can certainly reach a full zone. Talk about a surprise attack.
Has the llama summoning scroll been claimed yet?
You know... meeting with Ami feels increasingly like a party with questionable substances.
BEFORE: Oh man we are so hyped, Ami is going to be a riot! Ami X Hazou OTP
DURING: It's exciting but what is happening oh god.
AFTER: We need to puke out whatever she got into me and find an adult ASAP. Who the hell is she? We need to be more careful from now on.
If only somebody could have seen that coming...
Considering that he's been established to be explicitly afraid of ninja, tge SOB gives us our general gambling license already.
- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Can we not do that right now, please?
We just had an encounter of the third degree with a social spec jounin.
Sure, she's also a supercomputer who runs her own international favor economy, but...
Ren is a kage, and Hana is Hazou's mom. And both of them have a socially optimized bloodline.
Please let's take this one bit of advice from Ami, and don't.
Not until we spend some of that XP on social stats, at least. Or maybe a stunt against emotional onslaughts.
...
We don't really have defensive social stunts, do we? Outside of Social Nerve (or whatever it's called), which is a clan secret/property.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Random thought. This may have been noted already, but the reason that Ami thinks she'll probably die in the next month or so may be because she's Ren's supporter.
Ren is still in the process of cementing her power. Right now, the supporters she has are still the ones she needs in order to gain power, and Ami's mystery faction is absolutely useful for that.
However, once she fully cements herself in power (perhaps once the Mist-Leaf alliance is cemented and getting rid of her would be horribly detrimental to Mist), Ren will begin focusing on how to keep power. And the supporters she needs in order to hold power are slightly different from the ones she needs in order to gain it. Naturally, Ren wants to minimize the number of essential supporters she has, so she can spend less time and resources keeping them all happy. After all, rich and happy supporters are less likely to start wondering whether things might be better if they were the ones in power instead of Ren, but it takes a lot of resources to keep them happy. Right now Ren is running herself ragged trying to walk a tightrope between all her different supporters (we're not helping matters, of course). She'll absolutely want to start purging unnecessary essential supporters once things quiet down.
Ami's faction seems like a pretty fair candidate for purging. Ren probably doesn't know much about them or their motivations, and they may not have become as well established as more traditional supporters like the clans. The clans are excellent supporters for a leader trying to keep power, because the status quo benefits them. They want the leader to remain the same, because a new leader means that some of them may be purged, they may lose benefits that they enjoyed under the current leader, and in general uncertainty is bad for those that benefit from the current system. Ami's faction may not be quite so happy with the status quo. Ren probably doesn't know what their goals are, and they're a new player, so they probably don't benefit as heavily from the status quo as the clans do. Furthermore, Ami herself is a potential competitor for Ren. She is new, ambitious, and incredibly skilled. For all Ren knows, Ami's faction may decide that Ren isn't being the kind of leader they want, and decide to replace her with Ami. This all leads to Ami and her faction being a very attractive target for a purge to reduce the number of supporters. In a autocracy like Mist, particularly in MfD where all the players are ninja, purges are much more likely to be violent and very lethal for the purged supporters.
TLDR: Ami's got a good chance of dying precisely because of how unknown her faction is and how competent Ami is.
For the record, I'm getting my ideas for this from The Dictator's Handbook, and the YouTube video Rules For Rulers. Both are well worth checking out if you haven't heard of them yet.
Ren is still in the process of cementing her power. Right now, the supporters she has are still the ones she needs in order to gain power, and Ami's mystery faction is absolutely useful for that.
However, once she fully cements herself in power (perhaps once the Mist-Leaf alliance is cemented and getting rid of her would be horribly detrimental to Mist), Ren will begin focusing on how to keep power. And the supporters she needs in order to hold power are slightly different from the ones she needs in order to gain it. Naturally, Ren wants to minimize the number of essential supporters she has, so she can spend less time and resources keeping them all happy. After all, rich and happy supporters are less likely to start wondering whether things might be better if they were the ones in power instead of Ren, but it takes a lot of resources to keep them happy. Right now Ren is running herself ragged trying to walk a tightrope between all her different supporters (we're not helping matters, of course). She'll absolutely want to start purging unnecessary essential supporters once things quiet down.
Ami's faction seems like a pretty fair candidate for purging. Ren probably doesn't know much about them or their motivations, and they may not have become as well established as more traditional supporters like the clans. The clans are excellent supporters for a leader trying to keep power, because the status quo benefits them. They want the leader to remain the same, because a new leader means that some of them may be purged, they may lose benefits that they enjoyed under the current leader, and in general uncertainty is bad for those that benefit from the current system. Ami's faction may not be quite so happy with the status quo. Ren probably doesn't know what their goals are, and they're a new player, so they probably don't benefit as heavily from the status quo as the clans do. Furthermore, Ami herself is a potential competitor for Ren. She is new, ambitious, and incredibly skilled. For all Ren knows, Ami's faction may decide that Ren isn't being the kind of leader they want, and decide to replace her with Ami. This all leads to Ami and her faction being a very attractive target for a purge to reduce the number of supporters. In a autocracy like Mist, particularly in MfD where all the players are ninja, purges are much more likely to be violent and very lethal for the purged supporters.
TLDR: Ami's got a good chance of dying precisely because of how unknown her faction is and how competent Ami is.
For the record, I'm getting my ideas for this from The Dictator's Handbook, and the YouTube video Rules For Rulers. Both are well worth checking out if you haven't heard of them yet.
Ample Accelerate
Gotta stab fast
- Location
- Texas
We need to give her a youth suit on the next date.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
She offered no advice, really. Not anything of the sort. Every thing there, including the frosty speech, was just for show. Take none of it as gospel.
Like, we shouldn't kick down Ryugamine's office door and start debating him on the feasibility of his philosophy, but there's nothing stopping us from having a conversation with Hazou's mother. ( Despite her flaws, I don't think shes in much of a position to do anything other than momentarily confuse him over some stuff that they can just agree to not talk about. )
Should we start avoiding Gai as well? What about Ebisu? Tsunade? Jiraiya? They're all Jonin, how do we know they haven't been lying to us the whole time? Setting us up for some big sacrificial lamb play to further their own nebulous interests? A hundred chapters from now it turns out that Gai was in cahoots with Orochimaru (who is Kabuto) all along and his master plan is to get our nervous system grafted onto his body so that he gains the Iron Fist and can take over the world!
What we can concretely take away from this:
- Ami can be many different people.
- Is a scary motherfucker.
- Seems to make a habit of getting people to owe her favors. Is very proactive about this.
Ample Accelerate
Gotta stab fast
- Location
- Texas
How can we get Ami to owe us favours instead?
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Ehh, I can see an argument for keeping a large number of supporters rather than narrowing the field. When you're a dictator/emperor/king/etc you don't want any one supporter or small group to get enough power that they become a threat, and the best case scenario is that you have a whole bunch of them that spend their time fighting one another for power and influence rather than challenging you. For feudal kings in particular keeping the nobility fractured enough that they could run the country without powerful dukes interfering or threatening civil wars was a major time sink and concern. A more frequent threat than foreign invasion, often times.
True story, I once scared myself half to death when I threw up about a liter of bright red fluid. I was about to call an ambulance and tell them I needed to be on an operating table in minutes to plug a major bleed or I'd be a dead man when I remembered that I'd just drank a lot of red gatorade. Whoops.
When it comes to Ami, we've got one trump card. Keiko.
Although we could also offer her sanctuary if she feels like she's in danger in Mist. Getting a free pass to defect would be very valuable to someone who thinks they might need it.
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- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The entire conversation itself proved how much Hazou is outmatched by jonin in social fields (without them even trying that hard), even when ignoring her actual words.
Fair enough about Hana, and I am not mentioning other jonin because... they are in our camp, for one. And more importantly, they have no special motivations to fuck us over (outside of Kabuto, maybe).
Ren, though? A politican from another village, competing against Hazo's adoptive father. Also Hana's sister, and in general probably interested in manipulating Hazou to her own ends, simply because he's a more influencial level to pull.
Evenstar
Triple Jump Unlocked
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You don't want Ami to owe you favours. She might pay them back.
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
I like Ami.
I mean, she's as dangerous as a swarm of rabid cabbage. Getting deeper involved with her right now would be one of the biggest mistakes we could make.
But I like her.
---
Also I really wish I could sit down and have a talk with Hazou, raptor to pointy meat.
@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @OliWhail
[X] Player Question: How can we get Hazou to start holding his own conversations like this?
It's really unclear what we, as players, can do to get to the point where Hazou isn't constantly on the back foot in this sort of conversation.
This even happens with Keiko, Noburi, Downfall, and others in our peer group. We end up passively listening to the other party, making a few flummoxed noises until the interaction ends, with our responses only arriving in later plans.
Presumably part of getting Hazou to the point where he isn't just a confused wallflower is XP in socials. But you all have said that plans and characterization also feed into how proactive/centered Hazou can be.
Issue is that these conversations are basically impossible to predict. There are so many things that could happen we just can't make plans which cover enough of the possibilities to be useful. We just don't have the time to write a thesis twice a week, and it's gets even worse with the word limits.
So characterization seems to change through practice and success. The more Hazou successfully deals with some situation in a plan, the better he gets at dealing with similar situations when outside of player control. Which, given that plans can't really deal with this sort of high bandwidth communication, leaves with a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Basically, I want Hazou to be less of a doormat and don't see what us players can do to shift Hazou in that direction.
We're making good progress with opsec, by writing better plans and making fewer mistakes. I just don't see how that same sort of thing is feasible if we want Hazou to grow a spine.
Edit: To be clear this interaction fits perfectly with who Hazou is right now. I just don't know where to push to make Hazou better at this.
I mean, she's as dangerous as a swarm of rabid cabbage. Getting deeper involved with her right now would be one of the biggest mistakes we could make.
But I like her.
---
Also I really wish I could sit down and have a talk with Hazou, raptor to pointy meat.
@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @OliWhail
[X] Player Question: How can we get Hazou to start holding his own conversations like this?
It's really unclear what we, as players, can do to get to the point where Hazou isn't constantly on the back foot in this sort of conversation.
This even happens with Keiko, Noburi, Downfall, and others in our peer group. We end up passively listening to the other party, making a few flummoxed noises until the interaction ends, with our responses only arriving in later plans.
Presumably part of getting Hazou to the point where he isn't just a confused wallflower is XP in socials. But you all have said that plans and characterization also feed into how proactive/centered Hazou can be.
Issue is that these conversations are basically impossible to predict. There are so many things that could happen we just can't make plans which cover enough of the possibilities to be useful. We just don't have the time to write a thesis twice a week, and it's gets even worse with the word limits.
So characterization seems to change through practice and success. The more Hazou successfully deals with some situation in a plan, the better he gets at dealing with similar situations when outside of player control. Which, given that plans can't really deal with this sort of high bandwidth communication, leaves with a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Basically, I want Hazou to be less of a doormat and don't see what us players can do to shift Hazou in that direction.
We're making good progress with opsec, by writing better plans and making fewer mistakes. I just don't see how that same sort of thing is feasible if we want Hazou to grow a spine.
Edit: To be clear this interaction fits perfectly with who Hazou is right now. I just don't know where to push to make Hazou better at this.
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- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
By the same idea, just minimizing contact (or really vectors through which she can influence us) is a good idea.
Be they favors, or debts, or lingering emotions, or common acquaintances...
The biggest favor Ami did to us was severing contact with her sister. I doubt Ami would just so easily ignore the immense potential this bond has.
...
Just imagining the world where Keiko is Ami's inside agent in our clan is terrifying.
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