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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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MMKII said:
(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.)
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That's only if you aren't risk adverse (small chance of doing great good), think we have at least a one in a million chance of doing that, or think that trying to get the infinity gauntlet won't increase the chances of everlasting cosmic horror.
 
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I just want to do interesting and challenging things. No need to time skip when you can just do them
 
Orisha91 said:
As far as PR goes, didn't Ami basically do that with KEI and on the failed proposal we got her? Heck, we have favorable status with civics after the Nara Seal incident. Thats not even counting the training Ebisu will provide.

Our reputation should be stellar with them.
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1. AMI belongs to Ami and we have little to no control of it if she will decide to backstab us.
2. It gives positive PR from clanless nins (who have no voting power) and negative one from clans.

Newspaper describing brilliance of clan-nins in non secret stuff can mitigate that. Praise how their kids excel in academy, what brilliant jobs they do in normal business ventures, how strong and/or beautiful they are and clan-nins will love us too much to kill us when we start publishing pro-uplift articles or blame Hiashi for whatever we would like.

Kiba said:
I rather not experiment with seals when it's perfectly feasible to do mundane technologies and not die
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Kiba said:
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.
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Yeah, that's why both of these are marked "plan B" :)

Still, raising literacy seems like a good idea regardless of anything else. We wouldn't be able to start proper Reneissance without literate middle-class people, who don't need to work their socks off to feed themselves.
 
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TarzanNn said:
Newspaper describing brilliance of clan-nins in non secret stuff can mitigate that. Praise how their kids excel in academy, what brilliant jobs they do in normal business ventures, how strong and/or beautiful they are and clan-nins will love us too much to kill us when we start publishing pro-uplift articles or blame Hiashi for whatever we would like.
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That sounds like an excellent idea.
 
eaglejarl said:
What qualifies as interesting and challenging? It's hard to get people to vote for them / get me to write them if we don't know.
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The first thing for me is that a project needs to have a defined goal. If it's something vague and poorly defined like uplift I have little interest in it.

Secondly it needs to something that is uncertain if it is possible. The chunin exam dramatically failed in this for me. We had zero chance of failure when we started.

Thirdly a thing needs to have lots of possible ways to go about achieving the goal. Lots off opportunities for discussion and various strategies. If an arc is largely just follow through with initial instructions or act like NPC's I'm not interested. The basement and courier mission illuminate arcs that failed in this way for me

some current schemes that I'm interested in that I think would fulfill these for me are the following
  1. Help Mist Yakuza take over Fire's underworld
  2. Convince Ren to initiate Kurosawa printing press
  3. Start a branch of AMI in sand
  4. Remove Hiashi from power
  5. Negotiate peace through superior fire power in the summon realm
  6. Take over Orchimaru's medical groups
  7. Instate Kei as supreme leader of Isan
  8. Join Akasuki
  9. Bijou/summoning scroll hunt
 
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Oneiros said:
The first thing for me is that a project needs to have a defined goal. If it's something vague and poorly defined like uplift I have little interest in it.
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I'm down with that, except with the specific example. I think uplift can be defined fairly straightforwardly -- it's the process of achieving a state of well-being for all humans. Still, that's a different question and I'm being pedantic so I'll leave it for now.

Oneiros said:
The chunin exam dramatically failed in this for me. We had zero chance of failure when we started.
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That's fair. I understand (I think) where you're coming from and it's a reasonable point of view. Allow me, however, to suggest a reframing: The Chūnin Exams (TCE) as an event were about genin punching each other in various dressed-up ways. There was no real danger of death or permanent injury, and therefore the stakes were low. On the other hand, TCE (the arc) could be framed many different ways:
  1. The recitation of actions and events necessary to get from the start to the end of TCE-the-event
  2. The opportunity to:
    1. Make deals with civilian purveyors of good in order to build a merchant empire
    2. Make friends with ninja throughout the other nations which could then be leveraged into opportunities to visit those villages as part of a diplomatic mission
    3. Recruit civilians with useful positions to form your own intelligence network
    4. Make deep connections with the underworld
TCE was a chance to interact with almost all of the most powerful and important people in the EN. All the Kage were there, as were all of the richest and most important merchants in the EN, almost all of the elite jōnin, and a large fraction of the jōnin and senior chūnin.

The QMs can put plot hooks out there, but the players need to pick them up, and part of that is choosing a goal that makes the plot hook relevant. I submit for consideration the idea that the hivemind chose not to pick up any of the plot hooks available in TCE. It should have been one of the most exciting arcs in the entire story and a plot driver for many arcs going forward.

Oneiros said:
The basement and courier mission illuminate arcs that failed in this way for me
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You are absolutely right about the courier arc. That one took too much agency from the players, and started to drag.

On the other hand, I don't think the time in the basement was long enough to call it an arc. :p

Oneiros said:
some current schemes that I'm interested in that I think would fulfill these for me are the following
  1. Help Mist Yakuza take over Fire's underworld
  2. Convince Ren to initiate Kurosawa printing press
  3. Start a branch of AMI in sand
  4. Remove Hiashi from power
  5. Negotiate peace through superior fire power in the summon realm
  6. Take over Orchimaru's medical groups
  7. Instate Kei as supreme leader of Isan
  8. Join Akasuki
  9. Bijou/summoning scroll hunt
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Some of those are more interesting to me than others (in particular, I'm not super stoked about going back to Isan), but I could probably find a way to be interested in any of them.

Two questions:

Why help Mist's underworld take over Fire's instead of the other way around? You live in Fire.

What is the "Kurosawa printing press"? Is it simply "get lots of Kurosawa and put them in a sealing sweatshop"? If so, what about that interests you?
 
eaglejarl said:
Why help Mist's underworld take over Fire's instead of the other way around? You live in Fire.
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We already have a good relationship with the Yakuza in mist and I out a high value on developing existing relationships instead of bouncing around. We also know that Mist yakuza have interest in reclaiming part of fires underworld and have no confirmation that fire Yaks are interested in upsetting the status quo. Also making moves around mist could have larger geopolitical implications
 
Oneiros said:
We already have a good relationship with the Yakuza in mist and I out a high value on developing existing relationships instead of bouncing around. We also know that Mist yakuza have interest in reclaiming part of fires underworld and have no confirmation that fire Yaks are interested in upsetting the status quo. Also making moves around mist could have larger geopolitical implications
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One thing I note with this is that you have yet to address what I think are many people's primary concern (and likely why I expect EJ was asking about that) - this is almost certainly very explicitly treasonous while we remain leaf ninja.

Thus, this is an explicit goal that includes an unstated premise of "first, go missing-nin again" (which pretty strongly contradicts Hazō's displayed characterization, as well as a significant chunk of the player base's goals) without a strong argument being made as to why that state of the world should be preferred, either in or out of character. (The in-character reasoning would be significantly more interesting to me, as I have a much harder time imagining what that could be.)
 
Icehawk78 said:
One thing I note with this is that you have yet to address what I think are many people's primary concern (and likely why I expect EJ was asking about that) - this is almost certainly very explicitly treasonous while we remain leaf ninja.

Thus, this is an explicit goal that includes an unstated premise of "first, go missing-nin again" (which pretty strongly contradicts Hazō's displayed characterization, as well as a significant chunk of the player base's goals) without a strong argument being made as to why that state of the world should be preferred, either in or out of character. (The in-character reasoning would be significantly more interesting to me, as I have a much harder time imagining what that could be.)
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I am very confused what part of working with civilians do you think is treasonous?
 
1234qwerty said:
Ideally, Hazou doesn't think about assassination plans until he can get Mari to TLitF him, rattle off some plans, then have them wiped from his memory. Leave Mari to execute.
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Brilliant!
Hello! Some people were interested in poisoning Hiashi? How would we go about doing that?
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Research the cannibal seal. Arrange for Hiashi to be surrounded by powerful ninja at some meeting from which he'll be unable to leave; ensure there are no other Hyuuga with active Byakugans present. Bring the seal within his sphere of sight, mask its activation by pretending it does something else (a spy seal?). Done. Collateral damage should be minimal.

Should also ramp up his paranoia towards us in the weeks leading up to it, make him publicly accuse us of something ridiculous-sounding, so that when he starts raving, in-between trying to eat everyone, about evil Gouketsu seals driving him insane, no-one believes him.
 
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Oneiros said:
I am very confused what part of working with civilians do you think is treasonous?
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Franky I think this is an argument in bad faith. Anything which could be seen as threatenining Leaf's national security could be seen as treasonous, and the mere fact that the mist yakuza works with missing nin would be seen as dangerous to leaf's national security. Maybe if we had a friendly hokage that didn't already have connections to Leaf's Yakuza this would be viable, but given we're dealing with Hiashi who'll take any excuse to hobble us (if not outright kill us) this seems like a suicide mission.
 
18scsc said:
Franky I think this is an argument in bad faith. Anything which could be seen as threatenining Leaf's national security could be seen as treasonous, and the mere fact that the mist yakuza works with missing nin would be seen as dangerous to leaf's national security. Maybe if we had a friendly hokage that didn't already have connections to Leaf's Yakuza this would be viable, but given we're dealing with Hiashi who'll take any excuse to hobble us (if not outright kill us) this seems like a suicide mission.
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I mean if you're concerned about that you'll be happy to know that this is part of the sit up to remove Hiashi from power
 
Icehawk78 said:
One thing I note with this is that you have yet to address what I think are many people's primary concern (and likely why I expect EJ was asking about that) - this is almost certainly very explicitly treasonous while we remain leaf ninja.
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Why is this very explicitly treasonous? Perhaps illegal, but theres no reason to let the legality of things stop us, necessarily.
 
Oneiros said:
I am very confused what part of working with civilians do you think is treasonous?
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MMKII said:
Why is this very explicitly treasonous? Perhaps illegal, but theres no reason to let the legality of things stop us, necessarily.
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I'm curious what possible definition of "treasonous" there could be that this isn't plainly and obviously in it. It's working with an organization from a foreign country to harm organizations and people belonging to our country.

That having been said, it's a fairly basic question that Hazō would easily know the answer to. @eaglejarl would Hazō expect that this course of action would be treasonous to Leaf and/or Fire?
 
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Icehawk78 said:
I'm curious what possible definition of "treasonous" there could be that this isn't plainly and obviously in it. It's working with an organization from a foreign country to harm organizations and people belonging to our country.
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Sure, but you must concede that the technical legality is ultimately irrelevant? It doesn't matter if we break laws, it matters if we get caught and punished for them.

There are multiple ways one could frame this as "Fucking over the local yakuza." without adding "...and in a way that explicitly benefits the other yakuza." at the end of it. Since the yakuza are criminals, we have de facto authority to pretty much execute them on sight if we felt like it, barring standing orders to the contrary.

You might question the difficulty of doing so undetected, but thats another argument.

Remember: one of our main antagonists and forces of opposition is now the tinpot dictator of the country we reside in, and on the books is our commanding officer. Pretty much everything we can do to undermine or depose his authority would be considered "treason" or "illegal" in some way by todays standards. Those labels aren't reason to immediately bin any plot or plan bearing them.
 
Sentient Tree said:
Since they're also civilians, wouldn't that get us executed?
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No. Thats absolutely not the presented state of affairs. Its important to remember that civilians in general only have rights on paper. This is likely not the case for criminals and outlaws-- why would these people be allowed rights in ninja deathworld?

The following is also valid to do in practice, pretty much:

"Upon seeing them do criminal things, they attacked us. We killed them in response."

Remember: We are a ranking member of this country's military and a Clan Head. We can in practice do anything we want to civilians and claim it was an accident or claim foul play/lying on the civvy side of things.

When it comes to actual criminals? We can probably get away with that without major punishment 95 times out of 100. The remaining 5 are in my mind mostly comprised of situations where someone in our opposition is heavily tied to said criminal organization --in which case my counterargument is "Okay, so this is consequently a MUCH better idea on average if we're already in a universe where Fire yakuza are really Hiashi-pawns of a certain variety of flavors."
 
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Players! You may wish to take a look at a new addition to the rules doc.

Thanks so much to @MadScientist for giving us these suggestions. We ultimately accepted 4 of them, so Hazou et al will be getting +4XP :)
Seal-related Stunts
The following stunts all have 'Sealsmith' as a prerequisite, in addition to other prereqs listed.

Summoning Scroll Acolyte
Hazou has gained a deeper understanding of seals by learning from the subtle persuasions of the summoning scroll. Thinking about it hurts, but there's a spark of genius hidden in the pain.

XP cost: 100
Prereq: Be a Kurosawa who tried to read a Summoning Scroll.
  • 2x TYS applies to Sealing
  • Every time Hazō makes a roll to infuse a prototype seal (i.e., one that he is in the process of researching) he takes a Mild Physical Consequence. The penalties do not apply to that Sealing roll but they apply to subsequent rolls until the Consequences heals. The Consequence clears after sufficient rest from any Sealing-related activity, and takes an extra 24 hours to do so.
    • NB: As always, if the Mild slot is filled, the damage rolls up to the next higher available slot.
Lens of Violence
"You weren't fighting like a ninja, Hazou. I've only ever seen things that came out of a rift fight like that."

XP cost: 100
Prereq: Be a Kurosawa who tried to read a Summoning Scroll.
  1. Kill, Repeat: TYS points apply to CQC physical combat stats (Taijutsu, Melee Weapons, or Ninjutsu that serve as short-range weapons (e.g. Water Whip, Rasengan, etc) Hazō must go full-lethal while in this alien mindset.
  2. Who Cares About the Meat?: Hazou takes 2 additional physical stress if damaged while in this alien mindset.
Insight from Beyond
Hazō has been beyond the veil and the experience has left him with insight into the many ways by which seals can unintentionally breach the cobweb walls of so-called 'reality' .

XP cost: 150
Prereq: Be a Kurosawa who tried to read a Summoning Scroll.
  1. When Hazō fails an infusion roll during research, he gets a tag usable on his next research roll for that seal.
  2. When Hazō fails an infusion roll during research AND it causes a sealing failure, he gets 2 tags usable on his next research roll for that seal.
Prophet of the Out
Hazou has reconciled his visions of the truth of the universe with his personal vision of uplift, placing him on the path to becoming an eldritch bodhisattva. Humans recognize his changed nature and find it inspiring or terrifying depending on whether it is turned to their weal or woe.

XP cost: 200
Prereq: Be a Kurosawa who tried to read a Summoning Scroll.
  • Presence and Intimidation receive a half-cost discount below the level of Sealing
Hazou may occasionally forget more mundane matters such as eating or sleeping, if not reminded by those close to him. Can't they see that there's work to be done?! (This element may, at QM discretion, cause Physical and/or Mental Consequences when focused on a task for long periods.)
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Personally...I don't think contacting Mist's Yakuza is a good idea, on the grounds that the entire relationship was predicated on us being the adopted children of Gouketsu Jiraiya, the Godaime Hokage, S-rank spymaster and Sannin, etc., etc.. Which is no longer relevant, as Jiraiya is currently dead. The Oyabun's entire plan regarding currying favor with us had the goal of "work with Jiraiya", and with Jiraiya's death our use as anything approaching equal partners is gone. We don't have the political power (at least ATM) to be useful in their war against Fire's Yakuza.

I'd much rather start influencing Fire's Yakuza; their proximity allowing for faster communications far outweighs the negligible relationship we've built up with Mist's. Though, again, we'd still have the political-power issue to work out if we want to be more useful than gopher-nin. Hmm...

Wonder if Sakura's sheet descriptions are canon? If so, we may have a contact with a Yakuza group through Naruto. Dunno if they're the prevailing organization in Leaf, but having the in would help us regardless of which Yakuza group we'd side with.

Fake edit: HOLY FUCK OMFG WHAT THE JASHIN
 
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