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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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faflec said:
We have enough rations for a couple of days (i.e., from the official official mission), but after that we're SOL.

I think we're scouting and not hunting, but chances are there are fish to eat. Gators are the apex predator so there should be fish, birds and the like.
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Two weeks of food, two days of firewood. You're both scouting and hunting.
 
Diomedon said:
I freely admit that I'm jumping in pretty late in this discussion, but is there a reason you are assuming such very low numbers for the totals of Konoha's military? Did I miss a word of QM on the average size the major villages?
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The thread's grown quite large, but I do remember being told by QMs the numbers @Rihaku was using. I don't recall if they were Mist, Leaf, or an average of all major villages.
 
Icehawk78 said:
@ChronOblivion Well, perhaps, but it's always good to have mid-term goals.

@gbear605 I mean, we don't have real advantages over them yet. But that's no reason to assume we won't be able to develop them.

(I still attest that long-term should be ensuring that all sophonts have full access to Chakratic abilities, immortality, and safety.)
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Chakra abilities are far too dangerous to grant widespread circulation. A single supervillain could destroy nations. Technology should be able to provide far more efficient quality of life improvements for those uninterested in military endeavour.

gbear605 said:
I don't think it's possible to become that strong, considering we have no real advantage over them besides the fact that we're controlling one genin. There's *so* much minmaxing that'll need to happen before we are any threat to a jounin, let alone the kage. The rest of the group is only going to get stronger at the same speed that the rest of Mist is getting stronger.
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Orochimaru, Jiraiya, Sarutobi, and Yondaime didn't have anything particularly special going for them, either - they weren't born with godlike bloodline limits or the innate power of the Senju clan, but they still rose to become among Konoha's most powerful ninja. It's clear that, just as in the real world, some characters are able to grow more skilled in a shorter period of time, with a higher skill cap, than others.

There may be many reasons for this - innate genius, an especially productive trick, the fruits of risk-taking enabled by grotesque snake-based immortality - but with our Bloodline Limit our path to greatness should even be relatively shorter than that of these eminences, assuming we can survive and are motivated to consistently innovate. Most people, even competent ones, don't spend near 100% of their time trying desperately to become stronger, after all. Given the training rates of professional athletes, I would suspect that even those who become jounin don't spend more than 20-30% of their time on truly productive self-improvement.

Speaking of which, I believe our most pressing mid-term priority should be developing some means of bullshit defensive mechanism. We know the GMs aren't going to hand us one on a silver platter, so we'll have to do the hard work ourselves. The ability to survive otherwise lethal engagements will be critical for sustainable developing combat experience. Given even a 90% survival rate in missions, a genin has an almost zero percent chance of undertaking the hundreds of missions necessary to become a jounin. Luckily we have Mori to turn the results in our favor, but we shouldn't depend on her.
 
It would be useful to get any earth users in the camp to dev a technique for modifying the cave system into something resembling an underground city.

Right now it's not terribly comfortable, safe, or professional looking. Not a great way to attract either clients or recruits.
 
Clients probably would not want to spend several hours in a death swamp just to get into our base, and I doubt we would want to convert the death swamp due to its natural defenses.
 
Build a manned outpost outside of the swamp, where clients can go to deal with our village without having to travel through the swamp. Messenger Shinobi will be able to safely move back and forth, and bring payment and mission briefings. This can't really come before we've started to establish ourselves as a Minor Village, but should alleviate that major issue.
 
@eaglejarl, do you guys have any demographic information on Minor Villages? We're close to Grass and Waterfall on the map, do we know what their relative strength is? What proportion of a Village's population is composed of jounin? These would be really helpful in future analysis.

ChronOblivion said:
Build a manned outpost outside of the swamp, where clients can go to deal with our village without having to travel through the swamp. Messenger Shinobi will be able to safely move back and forth, and bring payment and mission briefings. This can't really come before we've started to establish ourselves as a Minor Village, but should alleviate that major issue.
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I'm pretty sure we won't be able to exist as an organization in any form without Konoha's implicit consent in the long term. I don't see a particular reason to claim that we're a Hidden Village rather than Konoha auxilaries or a deniable asset force for them, which would secure us funding and support way beyond what we could achieve by serving local townships.

We could do similar with Hidden Grass or Hidden Waterfall if they're more likely to be amenable, since it's not too far a trek to either locale.
 
If we end up allying with Hidden Grass and Hidden Waterfall, then I propose we name ourselves Hidden Lake and create a new Stock Nature Photography Country.
 
Rihaku said:
@eaglejarl, do you guys have any demographic information on Minor Villages? We're close to Grass and Waterfall on the map, do we know what their relative strength is? What proportion of a Village's population is composed of jounin? These would be really helpful in future analysis.
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Mist had something on the order of 3-5% jonin. You have little to no information on the minor villages.
 
For longer term defense. With our bloodline, earth affinity, and if we develop seals, we might be able to make a really powerful set of scale armor with a protective seal on each one (or a pattern of small sets of seals). Being able to autopilot and push speed, we could churn them out at a speed that is impractical for anyone else.

Modular armor is also easy to repair.
 
eaglejarl said:
Mist had something on the order of 3-5% jonin. You have little to no information on the minor villages.
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Wait, 30-50 Jonin? And at least 12 were sent on this mission? That's not... Waaaaait a minute.

...was THIS mission the crazy bloodline purge that everyone kept talking about in the initial vote? Does anyone know if the majority of the people sent on the mission have bloodlines, or if the majority of the people not on the mission don't have bloodlines?

Or something else. I don't even know. This is continuing to spiral out of control, the more we learn about it.
 
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eaglejarl said:
Mist had something on the order of 3-5% jonin. You have little to no information on the minor villages.
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...Whoa.

A population of 1000 ninjas @ 4% means 40 jounin total... there were twelve jounin in our strike force, not counting the force commander who was also a jounin. Would Mist really voluntarily sacrifice 30% of its Jounin, no matter how problematic?
 
ChronOblivion said:
Alright, so I've been thinking on where this quest will go, given our starting position and trajectory, and it seems like our little group of Missing Nins will officially establish the Village Hidden in the Swamp, located in Fire Country. It may never truly become more than a minor village, as I don't think any current Major Village would tolerate more competition, but let's not count our eggs before they hatch. We aren't even a Village yet, and we have many things to do if we are to be secure enough to survive the coming months/years. The following are my proposed goals for our embryonic Village. Nothing very specific or ingenius, just the basics of our journey to be the Village Hidden in the Swamp.


1) Make the swamp safe for our own people. This is our biggest priority right now. The village will go absolutely nowhere if we have fatality rates for simply travelling to the village. No sane civilian will want to risk even travelling to the actual village, and forget living there. This step has two main substeps, in order of importance:

1a) Establish a safe base camp. We need a place to rest, and a place that our village buildings will go when we get things up and running. A cave is fairly defensible, but any Earth-using enemy shinobi could cave us in and kill everyone fairly easily. Plus I doubt we can find enough space to fit everything later on, so this will have to be out in the open eventually. Some minor terraforming will be needed to clear out a large area for structures and living quarters.

1b) Establish reliably safe travel routes/methods. As much as we're currently relying on the swamp's inherent deadliness to ward off potential attackers, we lost so much resources, talent and manpower both, just getting to where we are. Just the loss of that medic was massive, and our current rate of death is utterly unsustainable. As such, we need ways to get both our shinobi and civilian guests through the deadly swamp safe and consistently. At absolute best, this method would let us make it safe for only our people and allies, but making this swamp less deadly period may be a forced move if we want to go anywhere.


2) Get our village looking like a Hidden Village. As good as our natural surroundings are at defending from enemy attacks, we're not going to make it very far if the major Powers of this world would benefit from killing us. Our military strength is weak, and a single S-Class Shinobi could probably ruin us right now. Our living conditions make living here as a ninja or civilian a pretty terrible prospect. Once we ensure the safety of our own people from our environment, we can move on towards establishing a Hidden Village.

2a) Set up trade deals with merchants. A decent economy is an absolute necessity, and we're going to find some ways to gain resources and start laying the groundwork. It's not completely clear right now if there's any natural resources in this swamp that's valuable enough to get this whole thing off the ground, but we should start looking for them right now. Becoming a contributor to the world economy will also give us more legitimacy, but more on that later.

2b) SimCity this place. We need hospitals, we need comfortable living quarters, we need schools, we need waste disposal, we need security measures, we need defensive structures, we need a lot to make our Village grow. A Village cannot consist of ninja only, we really need civilian economy to back it up.


3) Gain legitimacy as Hidden Village. This is extremely important if we want to accomplish anything. We need to get ourselves recognized as a Minor Village, not a dangerous group of traitors, if we want to live. Establishing diplomatic and economic ties with our neighbors will be huge, though Leaf is the most important. We are completely on their territory right now, and we will have to make it worthwhile for them to allow our existence. That means becoming important enough that they won't just wipe us out with ANBU squads to exterminate the missing-nin trash off of their property. Our military strength and economic presence will need to be at a sufficient level Leaf would be willing to grant us clearance to live here, as an added buffer against both Rock and the three minor Countries that are close to our location. Giving resources to Leaf as a tax will be well worth establishing these vital diplomatic ties. Getting diplomatic status will allow us to officially take ninja missions without pissing off every Hidden Village nearby.
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This seems like a good set of immediate goals for our village, I'd just like to do them underground if possible (though that requires jutsu and/or materials or geography we don't know about yet, I'll try to figure out if anything in the next update makes it possible).

I think we would do better to set up a forward outpost for interfacing with civilians (like ChronOblivion suggested). Rather than bringing them into our village. This makes us safer by keeping us hidden. This could be as simple as renting/buying a building in town and making some form of business which advertises solving problems. Once we own a building in town, we do business with civilians there, but live in the swamp. Make tunnels or something connecting the building to the outside so we can escape and enter and leave the town as necessary (obviously, we'd want to have some people use the main gate so it's not suspicious, maybe even build a fake house outside town so people think we live there). If Jounin battles regularly completely wreck the ground of a battlefield, there must be some way to convert all that energy into useful digging.

On our base village, I'm inclined to go more hidden than defensive because ultimately structural defenses are unlikely to turn the tide of a ninja battle, but not being found will. At the moment, plan underground fortress is still in it's infant planning stage, but I'm trying to solve each of the problems we'd face. Currently, the main problems are dying of asphyxiation and going crazy/depressed from darkness. I'll make a post sometime in the future detailing a plan to make an underground bunker. I recognize it's hard and will likely require a fair bit of trial and error, but I think it's possible given we have at least some capacity to use chakra to mold the ground (especially since we have the Gatorade Ninja). It'd also be a lot of fun to be based in an underground lair. When we have more information on means available to us, I'll write up a post on ways I think we could do it (likely using a lot of our chakra transfer powers).



Rihaku said:
We would want to avoid the symbolic term 'Hidden Village,' as it unnecessarily intrudes upon the legitimacy of Hidden Leaf. Ideally, if we are going to be dealing with the official forces of the Fire nation in any capacity, our win condition would be legitimization as 'Konohagakure Auxilaries' or some manner of forward base, under the remit and within the chain of command of the Hokage - assuming we would want our presence known at all. Of course this would only be after Konoha med-nins manufacture corpses for Konoha to show to Hidden Mist, and surgically alter our faces to be unrecognizable.
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I agree about not advertising as a hidden village. I think it'd be worth setting up in town as a group which solves a wide variety of problems. Maybe make a gang, or a religion, or a cult, or a business.


Rihaku said:
Speaking of which, I believe our most pressing mid-term priority should be developing some means of bullshit defensive mechanism. We know the GMs aren't going to hand us one on a silver platter, so we'll have to do the hard work ourselves. The ability to survive otherwise lethal engagements will be critical for sustainable developing combat experience. Given even a 90% survival rate in missions, a genin has an almost zero percent chance of undertaking the hundreds of missions necessary to become a jounin. Luckily we have Mori to turn the results in our favor, but we shouldn't depend on her.
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I agree. My main thoughts on personal safety is less on developing overpowered defenses (though I'm all for it if someone figures one out), but simply avoiding combat altogether. If we make ourselves a strategic resource, it's no longer in the village's interests to send us on dangerous missions, and we have a much lower chance of dying. If we get a sealmaster, this should be pretty easy to do, since our blank production is pretty useful, and both our companions have bloodlines which can have strategic value (checking plans for errors and managing people's chakra). So long as we're doing something, we should get some experience, even if it's not quite as much as from combat, the fact we aren't risking our lives for it seems good. Note that it's possible there are other exploits for the Iron Nerve bloodline which make us a strategic asset, though I haven't though of any.
 
eaglejarl said:
I'm not looking at my notes right now and I don't remember how many we said there were, but 12 sounds high. Where are you getting that number from?
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There were twelve teams sent on the mission, and Shikigami says we survived a fight between a dozen jounin.

Icehawk78 said:
@Rihaku Possibly as many as half, or more. I'm struggling to think of what possible gains they could have even hoped to achieve to merit such a heavy commitment.
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Yeah, it's a purge that makes Stalin look softcore. We're not even counting knock-on effects like lovers (jounin lovers are probably statistically quite likely to be other jounin), our mom (also a jounin), etc.

Assuming Shikigami didn't just sell out to Konoha or something. Would explain why we're in Fire Country territory, and why the trackers never caught us, though our losses in the swamp would have been avoidable if Konoha was really backing Shikigami. I don't think this was a Bloodline Purge, though, since Terumi Mei wasn't with us.
 
Rihaku said:
Yeah, it's a purge that makes Stalin look softcore. We're not even counting knock-on effects like lovers (jounin lovers are probably statistically quite likely to be other jounin), our mom (also a jounin), etc.

Assuming Shikigami didn't just sell out to Konoha or something. Would explain why we're in Fire Country territory, and why the trackers never caught us, though our losses in the swamp would have been avoidable if Konoha was really backing Shikigami. I don't think this was a Bloodline Purge, though, since Terumi Mei wasn't with us.
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I meant even if we assume trickses and that it wasn't a purge, but instead was an honest mission. What possible benefit would merit committing between 25%-50% of your entire military forces to a single mission?
 
Icehawk78 said:
I meant even if we assume trickses and that it wasn't a purge, but instead was an honest mission. What possible benefit would merit committing between 25%-50% of your entire military forces to a single mission?
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Well, the total ninja population is 1000, so it may have just been that 12+ jounin were necessary to serve as siege engines for breaking the enemy fortified position. Maybe they felt like such overwhelming numbers would have translated into lower losses.
 
Icehawk78 said:
crazy bloodline purge
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Ah, actually, in the Naruto discussion thread on SB, they actually disproved that the purges ever happened. there is nothing in canon about any government sanctioned purges of bloodline users in Kiri, just random civilian hatred due to the violence caused by the Kaguya clan and a pervasive belief (among civilians in Kiri) that Ninja Clans are the most responsible for all the death and war in the Naruto world.
 
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Rihaku said:
Well, the total ninja population is 1000, so it may have just been that 12+ jounin were necessary to serve as siege engines for breaking the enemy fortified position. Maybe they felt like such overwhelming numbers would have translated into lower losses.
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That makes me think it's more likely this whole "suicide mission" description is a giant trap. Short of the majority of the Jounin who were sent on the trip actively planning village sabotage (which seems unlikely, given that they literally fought to the death over it), I can't think of any reasonable explanation for voluntarily decimating your military forces by 25%-50%.
 
Radvic said:
I agree. My main thoughts on personal safety is less on developing overpowered defenses (though I'm all for it if someone figures one out), but simply avoiding combat altogether. If we make ourselves a strategic resource, it's no longer in the village's interests to send us on dangerous missions, and we have a much lower chance of dying. If we get a sealmaster, this should be pretty easy to do, since our blank production is pretty useful, and both our companions have bloodlines which can have strategic value (checking plans for errors and managing people's chakra). So long as we're doing something, we should get some experience, even if it's not quite as much as from combat, the fact we aren't risking our lives for it seems good. Note that it's possible there are other exploits for the Iron Nerve bloodline which make us a strategic asset, though I haven't though of any.
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I do think we should be basically perma-Stealthed whenever we're in the field, as practice if nothing else. But I don't think it's realistic to assume we'll be able to reasonably avoid combat in the mid-term, given our situation. The value of a resource-generating ninja scales with the number of combat ninja their resources can supplement, and if we constitute a significant fraction of our faction's combat power, we'll be more useful in the field. Deliberately aiming for low combat power / high utility is just asking to be killed by accident or captured and enslaved.

I have thought of a lot of exploits for Iron Nerve, some of which we can use once we get some downtime. But most of them are jounin-tier tricks. Our mom is probably really fucking scary to fight.
 
Icehawk78 said:
That makes me think it's more likely this whole "suicide mission" description is a giant trap. Short of the majority of the Jounin who were sent on the trip actively planning village sabotage (which seems unlikely, given that they literally fought to the death over it), I can't think of any reasonable explanation for voluntarily decimating your military forces by 25%-50%.
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It's not the ninja pop that was reduced 30%, only the jounin pop. Which is arguably the most relevant demographic, but eh. I agree it looks shady, but maybe Yagura's finally snapped, or some large number of jounin actually were planning sedition.

The documents thing was weird, but we did think of a legitimate reason why they might be there. Secondly, some number of jounin did side with Shikigami, enough to win with a surviving margin of 4/12, which implies a significant numerical / competence advantage. Unless they were all in on it too (improbable - conspiracy difficulty scales exponentially with number of high-level members), they must have thought about the document issue like we did and derived some reason to side with Shikigami. Either the documents are that hard to fake, or evidence of similar strength and consistency. If they weren't completely convinced, it would have been an easy matter to gang up 10 v 1 on Shikigami and safely return to Mist to report the incident.
 
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