Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Twinnstars · Dec 30, 2019

Rhodes said:
Right, except that we have to work with these people. I'm not saying that the goodwill of the other clans is worth more than any of the prizes, I'm just saying that it ought to be factored in as a cost to pursuing two.

1. So long as we go into this with a plan and preparation to spin it that way and are prepared for accusations of arrogance/grasping, that's all I ask.
2. And that might be enough for clanless ninja on the whole, but the average clanless ninja won't be competing in this competition anyway. I was more talking about the ones who are competing - they probably won't be thrilled with the Goketsu trying to take home two prizes, even if they benefit regardless of whether they win. (Imagine, for instance, that we were clanless and the Hyuuga went out and took two of the prizes, pushing us out of the running).
3. It's not so much that clans are treated as a single person, but rather that I expect the expectation to be that each clan will either choose a single representative to claim the prize, or that they will pool their efforts and resources to support a single individual within the clan.
3a. When I say that Leaf treats 'everyone within the clan as the same person' I mean to say that I would expect that if Akane turned in a list of pangolin jutsu and Noburi turned in proof of germ theory, the natural assumption of people within Leaf is that both would count towards the 'Goketsu' prize, rather than being considered separately as the individual contributions of Akane and Noburi - unless they specifically asked that they be counted that way.

The entire point of this competition is it benefits everyone, including those who don't compete.
There's three major outcomes if we split our inputs: either we win with 1, 2, or none of our inputs.
If 0: we're not announced as winners, all we lost is the stuff we gave to leaf I.E. nothing since we've been looking for excuses to share stuff anyways
If 1: only really matters if we didn't get the top prize, and even then this is the only time splitting our stuff would hurt us. Dumb gouketsu over reaching, govong more up than they need to etc.
If 2: only negative is we make the other clans look bad by severely outlcassing them in generosity. Asuma is big on the will of fire, he'll be happy if we give enough to win twice, since that means we gave enough to win twice. I know that's tautological but I don't know how else to say it, cooperating more is rewarded. This is a competition about cooperating more. Therefor, we should cooperate more. Getting on the Hokages good side is very very very good.

faflec · Dec 30, 2019

This is a shitty Action Plan which basically lists all the stuff I'd want to get feedback on. Note that I haven't actually voted for it, because it's that shitty.

[] Action Plan: Strategizing
Word Count: ...

Private clan meeting:
- How hard should we go for rewards? Should we go for just one?
- Hazou's ideas on contributions:
  - Jiraiya's stuff:
    - Sealing notes: Really big once decoded, but they're worth a lot to us...
    - Spy notes: They're not as good, but given Leaf's stuff got Tower'd...
  - Isan: Does this even count? Who'd get the reward?
  - Skysliders: Kagome, we discussed this yesterday, what's your thoughts?
  - Semaphores: We discussed it with Jiraiya, but it seems to have not been implemented.
  - Elemental Mastery: Indirectly stack EM to liquify air and produce hurricanes.
  - ???

Rhodes · Dec 30, 2019

Twinnstars said:
The entire point of this competition is it benefits everyone, including those who don't compete.
There's three major outcomes if we split our inputs: either we win with 1, 2, or none of our inputs.
If 0: we're not announced as winners, all we lost is the stuff we gave to leaf I.E. nothing since we've been looking for excuses to share stuff anyways
If 1: only really matters if we didn't get the top prize, and even then this is the only time splitting our stuff would hurt us. Dumb gouketsu over reaching, govong more up than they need to etc.
If 2: only negative is we make the other clans look bad by severely outlcassing them in generosity. Asuma is big on the will of fire, he'll be happy if we give enough to win twice, since that means we gave enough to win twice. I know that's tautological but I don't know how else to say it, cooperating more is rewarded. This is a competition about cooperating more. Therefor, we should cooperate more. Getting on the Hokages good side is very very very good.

The case where we win two prizes is the one I'm worried about, namely because everyone seems to just be straight up ignoring that we'll be making the other clans look bad. Now, once again, I'm not saying that it's not worth it in exchange for one of those prizes and Asuma's goodwill, those are pretty big plusses after all. What I am saying is that we should recognize and treat the (probable) increased tension between ourselves and other competing clans both during and potentially after the competition as a cost, rather than wholly ignoring it.

The main reason I'm not wholly comfortable shooting for two prizes is that we're the underdog here - we lack the generations of stored techniques that most other clans have, and a two month time limit is too short for us to pull ahead via original research.

Kiba · Dec 30, 2019

faflec said:
This is a shitty Action Plan which basically lists all the stuff I'd want to get feedback on. Note that I haven't actually voted for it, because it's that shitty.

[] Action Plan: Strategizing
Word Count: ...

Private clan meeting:

How hard should we go for rewards? Should we go for just one?

Hazou's ideas on contributions:

Jiraiya's stuff:

Sealing notes: Really big once decoded, but they're worth a lot to us...

Spy notes: They're not as good, but given Leaf's stuff got Tower'd...

Isan: Does this even count? Who'd get the reward?

Skysliders: Kagome, we discussed this yesterday, what's your thoughts?

Semaphores: We discussed it with Jiraiya, but it seems to have not been implemented.

Elemental Mastery: Indirectly stack EM to liquify air and produce hurricanes.

???

Don't forget to sanity check the pox blanket. Also, I think we should take an active tone instead of being unsure about everything.

faflec · Dec 30, 2019

Kiba said:
Don't forget to sanity check the pox blanket. Also, I think we should take an active time instead of being unsure about everything.

I'm indifferent-to-disagreeing on checking about the pox blanket.

I do think we should be more active, but I haven't figured out how to get that to work. Which is why I haven't voted for the plan.

Kiba · Dec 30, 2019

faflec said:
I'm indifferent-to-disagreeing on checking about the pox blanket.

I do think we should be more active, but I haven't figured out how to get that to work. Which is why I haven't voted for the plan.

We should rank project by value effort ratio, and leave unconvincing ideas for last. EM is last because hazo only have a hunch.

faflec · Dec 30, 2019

Kiba said:
We should rank project by value effort ratio, and leave unconvincing ideas for last. EM is last because hazo only have a hunch.

If (and we're kinda waiting for the QMs on this) EM can stack, we can check to see if the hurricane-nuke works within a matter of hours, if that. So...eh?

Twinnstars · Dec 30, 2019

Rhodes said:
The case where we win two prizes is the one I'm worried about, namely because everyone seems to just be straight up ignoring that we'll be making the other clans look bad. Now, once again, I'm not saying that it's not worth it in exchange for one of those prizes and Asuma's goodwill, those are pretty big plusses after all. What I am saying is that we should recognize and treat the (probable) increased tension between ourselves and other competing clans both during and potentially after the competition as a cost, rather than wholly ignoring it.

The main reason I'm not wholly comfortable shooting for two prizes is that we're the underdog here - we lack the generations of stored techniques that most other clans have, and a two month time limit is too short for us to pull ahead via original research.

Sure we'll make the other clans look bad, but we'll have the Hokages backing, implicitly and explicitly if we win more than 1 prize. He'll use as an example to aspire to. Other clans will have to play nice with us in order to be on Asumas good side, and again, being on the Hokage aka god-emperor-fascist-dictators good side is H U G E.

It's like, imagine being made employee of the month just for doing your job. Except in this case, anyone who tries to bully you for working hard will get a rasengan to the throat.

Twinnstars · Dec 30, 2019

faflec said:
If (and we're kinda waiting for the QMs on this) EM can stack, we can check to see if the hurricane-nuke works within a matter of hours, if that. So...eh?

EM explicitly doesn't stack, which amusingly enough means the best defence to an EM nuke is a bunch of ninja with EM 1 just air conditioning the surrounding zones. There goes the action economy lmao.

faflec · Dec 30, 2019

Twinnstars said:
AM explicitly doesn't stack, which amusingly enough means the best defence to an AM nuke is a bunch of ninja with EM 1 just air conditioning the surrounding zones. There goes the action economy lmao.

Indirect stacking, as linked in my plan.

@Rhodes I think the situation should best be analogized as everyone being a group of military contractors for the US, all competing for once-in-a-lifetime contracts by producing and giving up sufficiently valuable weapons to the US military. In this situation, I really don't see the whole "increased tensions" thing as something to be seriously concerned about.

Even ignoring the analogy I just made up, I still don't see your reasoning as making sense. Yes, I do agree that there may be increased tensions, but I feel you're blowing the actual consequences of these tensions out of proportion.

Rhodes · Dec 30, 2019

faflec said:
Indirect stacking, as linked in my plan.

@Rhodes I think the situation should best be analogized as everyone being a group of military contractors for the US, all competing for once-in-a-lifetime contracts by producing and giving up sufficiently valuable weapons to the US military. In this situation, I really don't see the whole "increased tensions" thing as something to be seriously concerned about.

Even ignoring the analogy I just made up, I still don't see your reasoning as making sense. Yes, I do agree that there may be increased tensions, but I feel you're blowing the actual consequences of these tensions out of proportion.

That's fair, maybe I am being a bit too sensitive about this whole thing.

hYGP · Dec 30, 2019

Kiba said:
Fly meat experiment would be much simpler to run

Maybe, you're right.

Hm.

@MadScientist, thoughts?

Kiba said:
I don't mind being friend with Hinata, but I don't think friending Hinata count for higher priority than working on skyslider, decoding J's notes, and whatever else we can contribute to the village.

I disagree on this point. We haven't chosen to spend time with our friends (or potential friends, in Hinata's case) all that often; the last time we chose to hang out with our friends was four updates ago, and the last time we chose to spend on-screen time was almost a dozen updates ago.

That's not all either; the second part of the Hinata scene is about discussing business and cooperation, which is something that I think is more valuable than another hour or two working on sky sliders or decoding J's notes (we'll have actually negative Cracking skill during the entire contest period) or anything else we could spend three hours doing.

Kiba said:
The Goketsu are high priority targets for any random village ninja simply because Hazo and Kagome are the sealmasters who invented skywalkers. I would scrap any missions that have us escorting merchants or acting as baits or having our location simply leaked.

I think Kagome is at significantly less risk than Hazou, because while Kagome's involvement in skywalkers may be unknown, Hazou showed off a genin-level armor jutsu in front of the whole Elemental Nations.

That being said, I do think that we need to do several things outside of the Elemental Nations, and many of those tasks will involve working inside cities and towns (rebuilding spy networks) and wilderness areas (testing areas) regardless; from this perspective, then, doing a merchant escort while acting as bait is just multitasking and increasing our value to the village even more.

roobee · Dec 30, 2019

I agree about sanity checking pox blanket

faflec · Dec 30, 2019

What does the fly meat experiment do, in terms of aiding the Leaf? What tangible effects does it have that directly improves Konoha's military power?

Sentient Tree · Dec 30, 2019

huhYeahGoodPoint said:
Noburi

SCIENCE

Let's test for rot formation.

He'll get credit.

Acquire two long-necked flasks.

Pour a small, equal amount of broth into both.

Make one long-necked flask into a swan necked flask.

Let sit for a few weeks.

If the swan neck and straight neck are equally rotten, we fail to find evidence to reject the theory of spontaneous generation.

If the swan neck has less rot, we find evidence to reject the theory of spontaneous generation.

Oooooh, biology!

I'm pretty sure that conventional wisdom is that broth just plain goes bad, probably because of rot spirits or something. We really should be first lookingto find out that small, living creatures are all over the place (unfortunately, we need a microscope for this), then essentially using Koch's postulates to show that those creatures are responsible for broth going bad.
Since we can't do that without a microscope, Hazō's current knowledge is that broth goes bad because of some kind of spirits. We should double check this with Noburi though, in case people think something else causes rot.

Really, what we would like to do is to do a literature review by asking Noburi to tell us literally everything he can about spirits, disease, any connection to rot or brewing alcohol, etc. Then we could base our experiments off of proving/disproving those ideas. Unfortunately, that takes update time.

Anyway, all this spoiler'd stuff is kind of a digression since we can't act on any of it without spending update time and QM spoons on stuff that not everyone is interested in.

I'll base my suggestions off of the assumption that current EN knowledge is that rot is caused by spirits, much like disease, that those spirits can be killed by heat, and that they are spontaneously generated. These are pretty big assumptions, but as mentioned in the spoiler all we can do is assume things unless we can get people to vote on asking for a huge info dump on EN knowledge of biology.

We need to kill the spirits after we put them in the flasks. I suggest either using heat or medical chakra, as we know that medical chakra sterilizes things and we know that high heat kills bacteria. Ideally, let's do both (in different flasks).
If we do both medical chakra and heat to kill the spirits, we can test whether spirits or bacteria exist in MfD. If bacteria are responsible for disease and rot, both medical chakra and heat should prevent rot in the swan necked flasks. If spirits actually exist and are not just another name for bacteria, the medical chakra will work but the heat may not.
Let's also add sealing and unsealing a swan necked flask, so we can find out if storing microorganisms/"spirits" kills them.

Therefore, here's my suggested changes:

SCIENCE

1. Let's test for rot formation.
  1. He'll get credit.
2. Acquire eight long-necked flasks.
3. Pour a small, equal amount of broth into each.
4. Make half into swan necked flasks.
5. Make groups of one swan and one normal flask.
6. Treat groups with
  1. Nothing (control)
  2. Boiling
  3. Medical chakra (Noburi)
  4. Seal/unseal (storage scroll)
7. Let sit for a few weeks.
8. If the swan neck and straight neck are equally rotten, we fail to find evidence to reject the theory of spontaneous generation.

After doing this, I conclude that typing on SV is absolutely horrible.

[X] Action Plan: Biological, Political, and Military Science

Benefits of this line of experimentation:

Food preservation, especially if simply sealing and unsealing food kills all bacteria inside.
Learning more about spirits, which could have benefits for med nin, especially if they don't actually know yet that heat kills "spirits."
- In particular, knowing that heat kills spirits would be invaluable for the civilian medics that Tsunade often has to train, since they can't use medical chakra to sterilize things.
- Also, this tells the Hivemind more about the world of MfD, which could be important for our model of the world.

eaglejarl · Dec 30, 2019

Jello_Raptor said:
@eaglejarl: What does the land between the Shimura estate and the Leaf walls look like? I know 2 sides of the estate are the forest of mild inconvenience, but if it's outside the walls is there any space between the estate and Leaf right now?

The south side of the formerly-Shimura land that the Gōketsu are squatting on abuts the northern wall of Leaf. Leaf is completely surrounded by forest[1], and the specific section in which the Shimura estate resides is notionally labeled the Forest of Death. The boundaries of the Forest of Death are fuzzy and change over time; it's more of a high-threat region than a defined location.

[1] In this context "Leaf" includes not just the area inside the walls but also the surrounding human-controlled areas such as the Shimura estate, and various production sites (e.g., mill, tannery, Nara offsite housing for sealmasters who recently failed an infusion, etc)

Kiba · Dec 30, 2019

huhYeahGoodPoint said:
I think Kagome is at significantly less risk than Hazou, because while Kagome's involvement in skywalkers may be unknown, Hazou showed off a genin-level armor jutsu in front of the whole Elemental Nations.

That being said, I do think that we need to do several things outside of the Elemental Nations, and many of those tasks will involve working inside cities and towns (rebuilding spy networks) and wilderness areas (testing areas) regardless; from this perspective, then, doing a merchant escort while acting as bait is just multitasking and increasing our value to the village even more.

No. Have you been living under a rock?

Hazo and Kagome are already world famous sealmasters because any village who can rub two brain cells together can deduce how Leaf got skywalkers. Our threat rating is extremely high. That is stuff Mari told us before Rock's attack on us.

If you want to go around and be a spymaster? That's fine. Our visit should be unpredictable and brief.

Not so with escort mission. We're fucking sitting ducks, because our route are predictable, and we can't walk faster than the merchants we're guarding.

Cariyaga · Dec 31, 2019

I agree with Kiba on this one. Taking escort missions is a fool's errand for clan ninja in general, much less high profile ones like us.

Emstar · Dec 31, 2019

I don't really like any of the plans at the moment.

[X] Lore Update
[X] Lore Update Suggestion : Saving Private Noburi (from Kakashi's Perspective)
[X] Lore Update Suggestion : Saving Private Noburi
[X] Lore Update Suggestion : Ami Flashbacks
[X] Lore Update Suggestion : The Missing-nin Travels of Gasai Yuno and Satsuko

Noumero · Dec 31, 2019

[X] Lore Update
[X] Lore Update Suggestion: The Missing-nin Travels of Gasai Yuno and Satsuko

Cariyaga · Dec 31, 2019

[X] Lore Update: Keiko Tells Us How Shadow Clone Works Before Cariyaga Has An Aneurysm

faflec · Dec 31, 2019

[X] Lore Update
[X] Lore Update Suggestion: The Missing-nin Travels of Gasai Yuno and Satsuko
[X] Lore Update: Keiko Attempts To Tell Us How Shadow Clone Works Before Cariyaga Has An Aneurysm But Is Distracted By Ami

Noumero · Dec 31, 2019

[X] Lore Update: Keiko Attempts To Tell Us How Shadow Clone Works Before Cariyaga Has An Aneurysm But Is Distracted By Ami

Kiba · Dec 31, 2019

I am going to be disappointed if we did a Lore Update instead of having the plot moving.

Emstar · Dec 31, 2019

roobee said:
So some ways to convince ninja to improve the world via chakra and stop killing each other seem to be:
Beat in into them with violence (perhaps first allying with someone powerful
Diplomacy them into it
Become immortal/God. Then it's easier.
Do some weird chakra think like Pain tried

To those trying to accomplish the stated goal, what ways are you all trying to do it through?

The zeroeth step is to obtain demigodhood.

One obtains demigodhood by grabbing the following in whatever order is deemed maximal for the context:

1) Shadow Clone Jutsu and the requisite chakra levels to maximize usage.
2) A Summoning Scroll of appropriate fit, and the requisite chakra levels to maximize utility.
3) The Stunt: Prophet of the Out
4) The Stunt: Lens of Violence
5) Leveling up Sealing
6) Leveling up various social skills (a bit in all of them, hyperfocus on more than others after that)
7) Iron Nerve Socials
8) Throwing XP into various combat stats to roll us up to Elite Jonin tier.
9) Throwing XP into various research stats to start OP cross discipline research [Should this be required for such-- and I believe it would be.]
10) Getting a Biju stuck in your stomach.

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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The Shining One

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Handsome Gentleperson

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The Shining One