Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- 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
There's been talk about how we've basically "won" the game and the GMs are having trouble maintaining challenges. This might be an ideal time to just timeskip ahead to new-but-related characters.
Is firewood really enough of a concern to spend a fate point on?
Noburi agrees and is very sympathetic. As are Naruto and the half dozen other sudden-child-clan-heads...
Something I've been meaning to bring up, but, mail. Regular service once a week or even once a month would be a huge deal in forging the nation together. Not to mention, if the Gouketsu were behind it, the opportunity to become the mail-order Sears of the Elemental Nations.
I've mentioned this before, but it can be increased orders of magnitude by simply replacing atmosphere with reactant...
Mari will break into a thousand pieces the moment she doesn't have a mission, but beyond that I totally support telling Noburi that the clan had a party without him but, hey, we found some weird bugs we thought he might be interested in along the way...
Ask Naruto if he would like to build a snowman.
Soon, at the Gouketsu compound...
(To be filled in later due to software mischief.)
I recall somebody saying that a sufficient quantity of releasing seals would inevitably count as a solid object and trigger a seal failure instead of allowing any sealmaster capable of designing the second-simplest seal in existence to create an arbitrarily large explosive.
Anyway, no big deal, it should be fine.
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- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's almost as if I've been literally suggesting for months to start this but hey no big?
Oh, hell, it looks as it the antimemetic works both ways. I'm so sorry.
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- Location
- London
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
What would you think of a plan that says something like "Plan: Hazou acts according to his established characterization and best judgment for the next 6 months"?
For that matter, @eaglejarl, how would you react if we ever voted for something like that?
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm not advocating for this and there are plenty of plot hooks currently in the wind that I'm excited to write. Still, it's worth at least considering.
I would suggest that, if we were going to do this, then the way to do it would be to consider this a shift into a parallel world where history had been very similar to that of MfD but perhaps not exactly the same. This would allow us, players and QMs as a team, to step back, take stock, and make any changes we want to rules, world, etc before starting up again.
That said, see next point.
As always, if you vote it then we will write it, but this is very much a case of "Do not call up what you cannot put down." What you're basically saying is "hey, QMs, go simulate the world and have Hazō act the way you think he should for a long period of time with no input from us." It is essentially guaranteed that under these conditions there will be SOMETHING in the output which works out to be not perfectly optimal for Hazō and the players. Possibly, perhaps even probably, because the QMs forgot something or made a mistake during the simulation process. Regardless of the cause, there would then be a lot of bitching about "well why didn't we stop that by X?!" and "But things would be more perfect according to our preferences if Hazō had Y, and he totally would have thought of it and the QMs are a bunch of literal genies who just want to fuck us because they're adversarial and a bunch of big mean poopyheads and I'm very angry!!!"
I note that the above has already happened once, when we timeskipped the week before the elections. The QMs made a good faith effort to simulate the players and your allies being smart and the enemy also being smart. Afterwards, we got a ton of whining about how we'd been unfair because the result wasn't what you wanted.[1]
In short: If the players vote for it, we'll write it. But you better REALLY mean it, and I don't want to hear one damn word of bitching about the outcome.
[1]
Us: Hiashi wins because he bribed Tsunade and Asuma was happy to take a "very powerful but not top dog" position instead of tearing the city apart with internecine infighting.
Players: But we wanted to bribe Tsunade! It's not fair!
Us: Hiashi had waaaaay more resources for the bribe than you did. Also, extra resources like being able to assign cheating eyeballs. Also, a track record with Tsunade that told her he would keep his promises, was competent, and that he had a reputation with all the major actors in the world as being worthy of respect. As opposed to Asuma, who is a nice guy and a powerful jōnin but also young and with little experience with politics or administration in Leaf and little to no experience with international politics. Or the Gōketsu, who Tsunade has known for a few weeks and are rehabilitated traitors with a breathtaking number of psychological issues among them
Players: But Naruto would totally have had a regent and we thought to get one and so he should have too! It's not fair and you just want to fuck us because you're mean and don't want us to have nice things!
Us: The QMs talked about it a lot and decided that, as the wildly popular hero of Leaf who was the protege of the wildly popular Hokage, Naruto would have been voting his one-person clan for years, since that would have been to Hiruzen's advantage. On the other hand, it also was not technically legal based on the age of majority, and that was a loophole that Hiashi could crawl through with Tsunade's help.
Players: But we don't think it should have worked like that and the outcome is not what we wanted!!!!1!11!!!!!
Us: *sigh*
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
No. No more (relatively short) time skips. No.
The "jump a couple generations and rework the field" would be fine, because we would only be marginally attached to the individual outcomes. Jumping 6 months while sticking with Hazou is a really bad idea, as EJ just reminded: Last time we did it we missed a couple things that caused... events we very much objected to, at least at first. It would not surprise me if we try a 6 month time skip if we wake up in the middle of a war.
Frankly I would hope if we hadn't done that time skip someone would have formally made sure Naruto was old enough, and had him fix it when we found out he wasn't. Spilled milk, but the point is a time skip lets small mistakes run out of control without us being able to sanity check them.
If you want a "timeskip" have a plan that has Hazou devote a few months to sealing, allowing for interruptions for interesting events.
The "jump a couple generations and rework the field" would be fine, because we would only be marginally attached to the individual outcomes. Jumping 6 months while sticking with Hazou is a really bad idea, as EJ just reminded: Last time we did it we missed a couple things that caused... events we very much objected to, at least at first. It would not surprise me if we try a 6 month time skip if we wake up in the middle of a war.
Frankly I would hope if we hadn't done that time skip someone would have formally made sure Naruto was old enough, and had him fix it when we found out he wasn't. Spilled milk, but the point is a time skip lets small mistakes run out of control without us being able to sanity check them.
If you want a "timeskip" have a plan that has Hazou devote a few months to sealing, allowing for interruptions for interesting events.
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- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
For the record I totally believe we deserved to lose and you where super generous by not actually making our situation difficult at all
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Personally I feel that the best way to simulate a timeskip is to have a bunch of 'points' for use for stuff players want (Ex: Sealing Progress) , and which could be bought by agreeing to more complications (Ex: War, Mari Degeneration, NPC death) . It's not quite as simulationist though.
- Location
- Under a Rock
If we are talking time skips and pacing, here are my preferences:
- No six months timeskips. We can't be trusted with them.
- Updates should start covering more time than before.
- This one is on the players; we should change what sort of plans we write.
- I want this because I want to hit Jonin at some point. I expect that to take a couple of in game years. Our rate of time compression has been below one simulated week per real week for a while now, and I want to hit Jonin sooner than that.
I would be comfortable with making plans that last 1-3 weeks so long as there's no super-urgent stuff we need to micromanage.
Whoa, I'd like to think I've been pretty consistently on the anti-bitching side, at least with regards to the GMs (and where Kagome wasn't involved...)
Ask Naruto if he would like to build a snowman.
Soon, at the Gouketsu compound:
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I fixed up the character sheets for Hazō, Keiko, Noburi, and Akane in order to get the skill pyramid calculated correctly. If someone wanted to double-check me, that would be great.
EDIT:
I very carefully did not put any names on it.
EDIT:
I very carefully did not put any names on it.
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Still have a tinge of bitterness that we lost, and in any case almost die afterward or at very least almost suffered downer episodes. I found what I want in a quest to appears to be diverging from what other questers want.
I am very interested in the nitty gritty details of uplifting, but others simply want to assign minions and move on. I paid attention to things like construction book and feedback from users, because I care about doing a good job. I was delighted when one of the winning plan included.
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Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I'm fine with testing new ways to use Sealtech to fix the planet (and quasi-relatedly with testing Sealtech to create weapons of unparalleled destruction). Spending 3-4 updates on trying to figure out a new concrete recipe is boring to me though.
Related:
The amount of personal involvement need not be any larger than we'd like for good characterization. Managing the EN equivalent of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and/or organizing an effort to eradicate Chakra Smallpox are ultimately better uses of our time (if our goal is to actually fix the world instead of playing at fixing the world) than doing chores for farmers.
(Though I would argue that the BEST solution is to acquire enough resources, experts, and Forbidden Lore to leverage the settings magic system into granting us functionally unlimited power and subsequently use the settings version of the Infinity Gauntlet to Fix Everything. Its not even marginally orthogonal to staying in Leaf and fucking around with Uplift from the economics/top-down side of things, for Jashin's sake.)
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Personally building walls and stuff is good PR given that the first step in spreading Uplift is convincing everyone that no really we're actually taking this 'radical ideology' seriously. If Hazou, the Uplift man himself, is out there building walls and helping farmers then you know that at least he's honest about his intentions.
PR only gets us so far, of course, so the bulk of Uplift will inevitably have to be in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-type stuff, but I'm not going to discount PR-building as an important stepping stone to getting initiatives like that off the ground.
PR only gets us so far, of course, so the bulk of Uplift will inevitably have to be in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-type stuff, but I'm not going to discount PR-building as an important stepping stone to getting initiatives like that off the ground.
- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
I vaguely recall something about Leaf having comparatively high literacy, so how about creating our own newspaper? That can handle all the PR we may need + we can shift public opinion as we will see fit. And since it doesn't matter much, Hiakage wouldn't be very alarmed by its existence. Granted, it doesn't matter much yet.
If literacy is not high enough, we can publish newspaper in form of manga. Even those, who cannot read still can get the general idea from drawings.
If Nara will not allow to use their printing press we can either try to reverse-engineer it or try to invent seals that will replace the thing. Black-and-white image copying shouldn't be that hard to do.
Or there could be existing jutsu for this, since I imagine it would be very useful for spies to copy documents near instantly.
If literacy is not high enough, we can publish newspaper in form of manga. Even those, who cannot read still can get the general idea from drawings.
If Nara will not allow to use their printing press we can either try to reverse-engineer it or try to invent seals that will replace the thing. Black-and-white image copying shouldn't be that hard to do.
Or there could be existing jutsu for this, since I imagine it would be very useful for spies to copy documents near instantly.
Manga is going to be much more expensive than a printing press since each manga page(s) will be unique. Better to start night school or something like that, or even invent our own version of Hangul to facilitate literacy development.
I rather not experiment with seals when it's perfectly feasible to do mundane technologies and not die.
I am much more interested in better concrete and civilian tech than new way to blow things up. I have nothing but disinterest in the whole SINs thingie other than it's a necessity.
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Manually counting the number of skills per tier, Hazou's sheet is good, Keiko's is reporting one fewer 10 than it should, Noburi's is reporting two fewer 30's, and Akane's is fine too.