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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Velorien said:
This comes up a lot, and I figure Hazō will have worked it out by now through looking at Jiraiya and the products of other sealmasters' efforts: Kagome is not terrifying. He's an average sealmaster who spent ~15 years living in the wilderness thinking about explosives.
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I'm not sure you can call him 'average' when the average sealmaster is only capable of producing explosives (based on what I recall of the worldbuilding, anyway), whereas he was capable of producing skywalkers without dying and Hazou (who has been posited as a good sealmaster by Jiraiya) was not.
 
Hello.

Feel free to join the Marked for Debt discord, where we will hopefully hash out some reasonable way to solve this clusterfuck without shitting up the thread and/or usual channel, before compiling things and having someone post it.

Edit: To be clear about this, especially given the recent info-posts: this is for attempting to scaffold things together so that things plausibly converge to the current state of affairs-ish and in a way that is useful, figuring out international economic bullshit in such a way so that the first Grand Economic Munchkin Plan proposed doesn't have the accidental consequences of "Twenty markets across the continent now crash through the floor. World War 4 results." without us intending it to do so, and INDEPENDENTLY OF THAT (if you are one of those "I can't help but to use what I know though!" folks, maybe don't engage here) sussing out some ways that we could maybe plausibly have some 14 year old punk and his friends Spice and Wolf their way to the top-- though that's something for the future.

Starting a 300 message debate about (Insert Thing You Don't Like) and why you don't think it should be the case from an OOC worldbuilding perspective is just a waste of everyone's time.
 
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Velorien said:
This comes up a lot, and I figure Hazō will have worked it out by now through looking at Jiraiya and the products of other sealmasters' efforts: Kagome is not terrifying. He's an average sealmaster who spent ~15 years living in the wilderness thinking about explosives.
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IIRC Hazou with his Sealing 20 was once described as a good sealmaster. I'm sure there was some degree of exaggeration there, but if Kagome has something like Sealing 30/40 then he'd assuredly be at least on the far upper end of 'good sealmaster'.

As Cariyaga said, most sealmasters apparently don't go beyond explosives and storage seals. Compared to utter behemoths like Jiraiya or Orochimaru Kagome's certainly nothing special, but out of the sealmasters in Konoha I'd be surprised if he wasn't top five or ten.
 
Cariyaga said:
That's why we get Shikamaru to order her to stop shipments.
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This is particularly appealing because it leaves the door open on Goketsu-Pangolin trade. Hell, since the Toads will be the conduit for the alliance and the Pangolins want us trading with them ASAP, maybe they'll even teach us summoning for free!

(And while we're at managing summon relations, speak with the snakes to form a sacred contract with them and get Hazo in on the lessons with Noburi)
 
Velorien said:
This comes up a lot, and I figure Hazō will have worked it out by now through looking at Jiraiya and the products of other sealmasters' efforts: Kagome is not terrifying. He's an average sealmaster who spent ~15 years living in the wilderness thinking about explosives.
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I understand that from the perspective of an omnipotent Avatar of the Out GMs, Kagome seems pretty harmless as far as things go, but i can confirm, from my position as normal human(allegedly), that he is positively terrifying.
Now, jokes aside, that was less my position, and more trying to see how everything could make sense.
If you note, i don't any proof that other sealmastesr can make only make one seal/need to check every time/and so on, it was just a theory.

As far as my actual opinion is, i consider Kagome by no means a genius Sealmaster, but one with an excellent(albeit paranoid) work ethic that had more than enough time to improve his particular specialization by virtue of doing exclusively that for a long time.
While this almost surely stopped him from inventing new things(Because of a lack of confrontation with other sealmasters and his paranoid vision of sealing research ,until Hazou arrived) it also meant he exclusively concentrated his efforts on a particular set of seals, and more generally, on his execution.

I would like to note that an "Average Sealmaster", once he has roughly 15 years of doing exclusively seals for pretty much all his day....is not going to be average anymore, at least in simple execution.

I mean, aside from the fact that he is the High-Warden secretly spying on us, but we are not supposed to know that.
 
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Inferno Vulpix said:
IIRC Hazou with his Sealing 20 was once described as a good sealmaster. I'm sure there was some degree of exaggeration there, but if Kagome has something like Sealing 30/40 then he'd assuredly be at least on the far upper end of 'good sealmaster'.

As Cariyaga said, most sealmasters apparently don't go beyond explosives and storage seals. Compared to utter behemoths like Jiraiya or Orochimaru Kagome's certainly nothing special, but out of the sealmasters in Konoha I'd be surprised if he wasn't top five or ten.
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I'm actually pretty sure there wasn't exaggeration there. Unless my memory is failing me, Jiraiya wasn't talking to Hazou when he said that. Also, lying to a sealmaster you care for about their capabilities is a good way to get them killed.
 
faflec said:
This was said to Hiruzen in private.
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Also this time:

eaglejarl said:
She glowered at him. "Don't you start." She turned back to Jiraiya. "Honoka has made incredible progress under Kagome. It makes perfect sense to get her checked out, but he's demonstrated that he's an excellent teacher. Hazō is fourteen years old and you said yourself that he's a good sealsmith. Not just for his age, a good sealsmith."

"He did?" Hazō asked, surprised.

Mari-sensei shot him a Look. "Yes, he did. Now hush while I keep our 'adult' clan members from acting like idiots." She turned back to Jiraiya. "Hazō is a good sealsmith at fourteen because he studied under Kagome—"

"Cheating bloodline cheater, oughta..." Kagome's grumbles didn't stop, but they trailed off into nigh-inaudibility.

"—a good sealsmith, at the age of fourteen, because he studied with Kagome. Honoka went from failing out of the Academy to ahead of what she's learning in her class. As to the chakra manipulations, I've seen her open and close the scroll myself, and there's no sign of any problems. Honestly, I agree with Kagome; Leaf's chakra education is overly conservative. In Mist we started kids on chakra manipulation much earlier than Leaf does—"
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Rafin said:
There recently has been a development that makes sealing cheaper. Something regarding sealing grade paper for instance. For whatever reason this fact has not yet reached genin or clanless ninja in general. Other sealmasters may or may not soon show their annoyance at us for flooding the market with seals.
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Nara printing press seals? Anything we heard about it being impossible might just be for OPSEC reasons.

Rafin said:
Making a seal is actually much slower for an ordinary non-Kurosawa. Kagome sunk a lot of xp into speeding the process up to ludicrous levels. All seal prices get raised to reflect that. Gokētsu's fears regarding money are grued away. The Mist Kurosawa clan are proud idiots.
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Combined with a massively huge mortgage, we could still keep the Gōketsu as in debt. We just say that Jiraiya was terrible at financial things and didn't realize just how bad of an idea the clan compound was. This meshes well with his cannon characterization. Adding on the fact that Jiraiya was sleep deprived, grieving for Naruto, and desperately spending money on trying to get Naruto back, plus having a ton of pride and seeing that every other clan had a huge compound, I think it's very reasonable that he might have just plain spent way more than was reasonable.
 
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MfD word count statistics 31/05/19
  • Informational
    • Edit: The table has been updated as of 14/03/20. Some of the notes below will no longer apply.

    In the aftermath of "we're just a small quest with a particularly dedicated community," I decided to go through the threadmarks and put together an MfD word count table, quantifying for the first time the amount of text this here thing contains.

    Various notes:

    • The data are entirely unreliable. The per-update word counts were derived from the SV threadmark manager, which is dubious, the numbers have not been fully double-checked, there's various weirdness like some threadmarks being out of chronological order so I had to figure them out manually (especially but not exclusively that month of the Chūnin Exam Tournament), and just generally trust nothing.
    • The longest updates on record are 10,000 words, and there are several of them.
    • The shortest update is hard to calculate because at low levels it's hard to draw the line between an update and an in-character infopost. The absolute shortest canon story post is 59 words (Chapter 2b), but that's major Early Instalment Weirdness. I'd arbitrarily go with Chapter 156.3., at 660 words.
    • The two shortest months were December 2017 and January 2018, during the Great Rules Rewrite. January 2018 featured one canon update, weighing 2,500 words, with everything else dumped into the "non-canon" grab bag.
    • The smallest representative month is June 2018, during the fist stage of the Chūnin Exam, at 13,400 words.
    • The biggest month is May 2019 at 54,900 words. Honourable mention goes to October 2018, the inter-stage training period of the Chūnin Exam, with 50, 600. Contrast with the previous point.
    • The average (mean) month falls around 30,000 words.
    • If anyone wants to come up with any other interesting stats, feel free. The data are all there.
    Now for the showing off.

    MfD started in December 2015. According to this useful site, it overtook Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone for Americans) in word count in April 2017, and the entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit) the following July. Also War and Peace and the full Chronicles of Narnia. Apparently those are all within around 20,000 words of each other. Who knew. Having finally beaten the full Harry Potter series this January, our natural next objective is to catch up with A Song of Ice and Fire, which should only take two more years at our current pace. Of course, having recognised a worthy rival, G. R. R. Martin is sure to publish another novel purely to stymie our efforts.

    Now we just need the writing skills to go with the output, and we'll be set for life.
     
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