Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Dictator4Hire · Oct 27, 2021

Noumero said:
So have someone give it to Oro in written form, then. Or have Asuma/Tsunade stand in the room making sure Oro isn't being mean or the agreement is void. Come on.

I'm not opposed to trade with Orochimaru unilaterally (especially if we can do so through intermediaries) but I was not in favor of trying to barter in person in the next update since Hazou is still grievously injured mentally and physically.

Inferno Vulpix said:
Given the contents of the last update, we have good reason to believe that Orochimaru mainly left us alone not because of forgetfulness or a long to-do list but because he didn't think the Iron Nerve was particularly worth investigation, at least relative to the inconvenience factor.

Also in that update, we gave him reason to be more interested in the Iron Nerve. Not full 'I can download seals' interested, but interested enough that Mari had to press an emergency button to get him away from us.

Hoping for him to just forget about us or for him to have too long a to-do list to get around to us is a fool's errand. If our situation is already too inconvenient for him to pursue us then we don't need to do anything, but as it stands that's a gamble I'm not confident in, and the entire quest is the stakes. It'd be criminally lazy of us to not try and stack the deck in our favour one way or another because we're hoping that if we just ignore the problem it'll go away.

I agree that we need to have at least one plan or better yet a series of contingencies.

If we survive the upcoming update we need to gather as much information on Oro's history and known decision making processes as possible. Then we need to see what the other clans' plans are for dealing with Oro coming for their secrets. We aren't the only ones in Leaf who have something that Oro wants and surely before Oro was let back into Leaf there were convincing assurances made to the clans that despite his reputation Oro would not be a problem again because X, Y, Z, etc.

Oneiros said:
As I see it there are five basic strategies to make sure we don't end up on a slab in the basement

Make the cost of abducting any of the Goketsu to high for Oro to pay

Cut some sort of deal with Oro

convince Oro that we have no value as experimental subjects

Run away so we are outside of Oro's influence

Kill Oro

If anyone else has ideas for broad strategies to handle keeping us from getting ultra-murdered would love to add them

6. All of the above

We have to delay Oro initially because we do not have any other worthwhile means of defending ourselves.
If we sell our bodies' secrets all of the other clans will hate us for setting that precedent. Oro might decide to lean on them just as he did so to us: when the clan head is vulnerable and cannot beat Oro's intimidation.
I don't think we can make him forget about our abilities and if there is one thing that drives Oro, it's curiosity.
Leaf and Oro are a package deal, unfortunately. Maybe we could find a way to have Oro exiled again if we don't think we can beat him but we can prove he has committed an unforgivable transgression?
Having the ability to incapacitate him would be enough in the medium term, but since he is always researching the fundamentals of how this universe works eventually he will come across something capable of challenging us. Maybe we can find a way to fundamentally change his Telos?

Shrooms said:
Get back in favor of Naruto so he protects us
Alternatively, find some way to power up Asuma so he can actually pose a threat to Orochimaru. (Seals of some kind, more than likely).
Mari should be capable of handling him in a year or two...

Honestly, we should give FOOM to Asuma so that he can stand up to Oro on his own. Asuma would be extremely grateful to no longer have to fear the implications of refusing to appease Oro and it would go a long ways towards restoring his good will with us.

Alternatively, does Mari know SC? Could we empower her enough that she could act as our last line of defense against Oro? We really should ask her if she would even be interested in the possibility of facing Oro in full fledged combat (she did want to retire after all).

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

Dictator4Hire said:
Alternatively, does Mari know SC? Could we empower her enough that she could act as our last line of defense against Oro? We really should ask her if she would even be interested in the possibility of facing Oro in full fledged combat (she did want to retire after all).

She does, and learning Shadow Clone was contingent on her leaving retirement, something that she, Asuma, and Kei were all aware of but apparently not Hazou for a while. Mari wanted to retire after getting all her kids to safety, but again and again life has demonstrated that they aren't safe. She was useless against Hidan. She could only distract Orochimaru. When Itachi or whoever the fuck turns up next, I'm pretty sure she's going to want to be able to throw hands with them to protect Hazou and the others. She won't let Hazou direct her training though so for all we know she's just going for rapport 100 or something lmao

Dictator4Hire · Oct 27, 2021

Shrooms said:
She does, and learning Shadow Clone was contingent on her leaving retirement, something that she, Asuma, and Kei were all aware of but apparently not Hazou for a while. Mari wanted to retire after getting all her kids to safety, but again and again life has demonstrated that they aren't safe. She was useless against Hidan. She could only distract Orochimaru. When Itachi or whoever the fuck turns up next, I'm pretty sure she's going to want to be able to throw hands with them to protect Hazou and the others. She won't let Hazou direct her training though so for all we know she's just going for rapport 100 or something lmao

Perhaps it's time we had a talk with her about the needs of the clan coming before her personal preferences. It's a shitty thing to do but it would be even worse if she could have made a difference when we needed her to protect us from our Snuncle.

Although it might cut into her ability to be our spymistress if she can't train herself as she pleases. For all we know she is struggling to keep up with her contemporaries in social stats and if we lose her ability to haggle we'll be dirt poor without any chance of recovering from our financial position.

Provided we survive and have a moment to ourselves after the next update, I believe we need to call a clan meeting discussing what we can do regarding Oro, our medium term plans wrt dragons, and the war with Rock. Doubly so if people are serious about wanting Hazou to offer his body up to Oro for !!!SCIENCE!!!

If I were a betting sort, I'd wager that Akane would slap him for even contemplating such a course of action.

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

Dictator4Hire said:
Although it might cut into her ability to be our spymistress if she can't train herself as she pleases. For all we know she is struggling to keep up with her contemporaries in social stats and if we lose her ability to haggle we'll be dirt poor without any chance of recovering from our financial position.

I doubt this will happen. We make 10 million Ryo annually just from the Wakahisa deal. The 7th Path Trade only gets more lucrative as time goes on and we were already making like 250,000 ryo a month off of it or something like that. When Kagome joins we will get an even larger share. Our loans expire in a few months, but I think the Tower debt will take some more time to pay back. The Bison Meat forgave some of it, but probably not much. I get the impression the Tower debt is just another leash more than anything though, as the Tower could financially ruin us at any time if they wanted, which is further incentive to not do anything that disturbs the status quo. ~~Which we will ignore anyways because screw that~~

Oneiros · Oct 27, 2021

Shrooms said:
I doubt this will happen. We make 10 million Ryo annually just from the Wakahisa deal. The 7th Path Trade only gets more lucrative as time goes on and we were already making like 250,000 ryo a month off of it or something like that. When Kagome joins we will get an even larger share. Our loans expire in a few months, but I think the Tower debt will take some more time to pay back. The Bison Meat forgave some of it, but probably not much. I get the impression the Tower debt is just another leash more than anything though, as the Tower could financially ruin us at any time if they wanted, which is further incentive to not do anything that disturbs the status quo. ~~Which we will ignore anyways because screw that~~

Also at any time after Hazō's severe consequences are healed we can initiate sky walker printing press to pay off all debts to the tower

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

Oneiros said:
Also at any time after Hazō's severe consequences are healed we can initiate sky walker printing press to pay off all debts to the tower

our debt to the tower is like 1 billion ryo minus a few million from Bison Meat (this is probably a bit generous). Assuming the value of skywalkers didn't diminish (also probably a bit generous) how many would we need to print to pay it off completely?

Dictator4Hire · Oct 27, 2021

How are we printing seals? Is that a metaphor for Hazou constantly producing seals?

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

Dictator4Hire said:
How are we printing seals? Is that a metaphor for Hazou constantly producing seals?

yeah, just make a bunch of Shadow Clones and produce dozens of seals per day. We'd need to bump up Calligraphy first to do that safely with Skywalkers (which are currently the most valuable seal we can produce) but we're intending to do that anyways.

FaintlySorcerous · Oct 27, 2021

Shrooms said:
yeah, just make a bunch of Shadow Clones and produce dozens of seals per day. We'd need to bump up Calligraphy first to do that safely with Skywalkers (which are currently the most valuable seal we can produce) but we're intending to do that anyways.

Wouldn't this impact FOOM?

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

FaintlySorcerous said:
Wouldn't this impact FOOM?

More than likely yes. That's why I was asking how many days it would take. If it's like a couple weeks that's not really a big deal in the long run, but if it's a month long endeavor or more, then...yeah I'd rather just have the debt

I guess it could be argued that that's Sealing/Calligraphy training? Seems a bit of a stretch though

Dictator4Hire · Oct 27, 2021

Shrooms said:
yeah, just make a bunch of Shadow Clones and produce dozens of seals per day. We'd need to bump up Calligraphy first to do that safely with Skywalkers (which are currently the most valuable seal we can produce) but we're intending to do that anyways.

eaglejarl said:
Confirming Cariyaga: Shadow Clones do not have the Iron Nerve, no.

Iron Nerve helps with the Calligraphy roll, not the infusion roll.

How effective will our clones be at making Skywalkers without the boost to the Calligraphy roll? Do we know the TN on Skywalkers so we can calculate our clones' odds of success?

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

Dictator4Hire said:
How effective will our clones be at making Skywalkers without the boost to the Calligraphy roll? Do we know the TN on Skywalkers so we can calculate our clones' odds of success?

It's a mere +3, which is notable but not critical. We don't know the TN, no. Hazou has already passed the scribing TN, but has not yet passed the Infusion Roll, so he has to give them to Kagome to infuse at the moment, so it's probably around where his abilities were previously (He was at Callig 14, so perhaps a Callig TN of 20 or so)

On Discord, Paper said:
"1 order of magnitude higher, actually. A skywalker seal element sells for 3k ryo, we can produce 12 per hour. Working a simple 10 hour day (w/e he's an Iron Nerve user), that's 360k per day, or ~130M per year".

This is without any help from clones, but even with them it's probably going to take over a month to completely pay off the debt, especially since he doesn't have SC 40 yet. Of course, we do have other sources of income so it would probably end up being less than that, but those are mostly abstracted so it's hard to say how much faster.

Oneiros · Oct 27, 2021

@Inferno Vulpix has a spread sheet of how to successfully grind mastery for SC seal printing which can be found here: Mastery Grinding SOP

Sir Stompy · Oct 27, 2021

Noumero said:
Well then Oro can very well just do it right now, no? He'd probably really like to study the Sharingan, why's Sasuke still alive? Why is anyone still alive, why didn't he vivisect all of Leaf yet?

Naruto might not care about Hazou personally, but he would obey Asuma's orders.

Orochimaru will obey Asuma's orders if he thinks he can't get away with breaking them. I don't know why he hasn't acted towards Sasuke, maybe he doesn't want to exterminate the bloodline. Maybe he has acted and we just don't know about it.

Noumero said:
I specifically ruled out this sort of outcome with point 4.3. Edited for clarity now:

This assumes Asuma will follow through with the deal once signed. My point is that things like contracts and treaties are about power, not whatever is written in the document. The enforcement will be dictated by the whims of Leaf's other S-Rankers. One of which hates Hazou, and the other sold us out to the Hyuuga during the election "for the good of Leaf" it wouldn't take much for her to do it again. Neither of them feels any significant amount of loyalty to Hazou. Orochimaru knows this, and he can act accordingly.

There's a huge difference in optics between kidnapping and murdering a Clan Head vs. that Clan Head volunteering for a bizarre risky procedure and dying by accident. I'm fairly confident that Oro can minimize the fallout from murdering Hazou if we put him in Oro's clutches like that no matter what contingencies we put into place beforehand.

Inferno Vulpix · Oct 27, 2021

Oneiros said:
@Inferno Vulpix has a spread sheet of how to successfully grind mastery for SC seal printing which can be found here: Mastery Grinding SOP

Yeah if we wanna have a go at this, the first part we'll need is the TN estimator, where we pick a rather careful strategy and painstakingly inspect every seal we make until we're reasonably confident we know what the TN is, and then we can use the other pages to pick a strategy that gives us a 95% chance of completing enough Skywalkers to master the seal without ever hitting a sealing failure.

If we start carefully and maintain safe margins of error, we should be able to essentially guarantee safe SC factories.

Oneiros · Oct 27, 2021

Sir Stompy said:
There's a huge difference in optics between kidnapping and murdering a Clan Head vs. that Clan Head volunteering for a bizarre risky procedure and dying by accident. I'm fairly confident that Oro can minimize the fallout from murdering Hazou if we put him in Oro's clutches like that no matter what contingencies we put into place beforehand.

Once again you might not agree with this line. That's fine however I would like it if you could begin to describe an alternative line. We need to consider all possibilities. So just pitch whatever you can think of so we can start working on refining them into something workable

roobee · Oct 27, 2021

Sentient Tree said:
Asuma can too.

Also oro calls asuma boy, which could denote some affection towards asuma. Similar to hazou's nephew

Shrooms said:
She does, and learning Shadow Clone was contingent on her leaving retirement

That was Kei's opinion, which I disagree with

Shrooms said:
as the Tower could financially ruin us at any time if they wanted

Questionable. Given all the time that has passed to liquidate/leverage the numerous assets we went into debt to buy

Shrooms · Oct 27, 2021

roobee said:
That was Kei's opinion, which I disagree with

Do you mean the Shadow Clone part, or that Mari hasn't come out of retirement? Because we already spoke to her about the fact that she's being deployed in the war

roobee said:
Questionable. Given all the time that has passed to liquidate/leverage the numerous assets we went into debt to buy

I doubt we had a billion ryo worth of assets though.

roobee · Oct 27, 2021

Shrooms said:
Do you mean the Shadow Clone part, or that Mari hasn't come out of retirement?

Shadow clone

Edit:
Huh, Is the tower charging interest for the debt? If not we essentially achieved our goal of introducing script to be able to borrow money and pay it back later without paying interest . Except using debt instead of script now

Sir Stompy · Oct 27, 2021

Oneiros said:
Once again you might not agree with this line. That's fine however I would like it if you could begin to describe an alternative line. We need to consider all possibilities. So just pitch whatever you can think of so we can start working on refining them into something workable

Currently we are running and screaming to our allies, I think we should hold off on proposing solutions until after we hear what they have to say. That said, I think maybe bribing Tsunade to defend us might be a decent strategy.

Oneiros · Oct 27, 2021

Sir Stompy said:
Currently we are running and screaming to our allies, I think we should hold off on proposing solutions until after we hear what they have to say. That said, I think maybe bribing Tsunade to defend us might be a decent strategy.

Another thing to remember is that since Kei is being targeted as well that bringing Naruto on board should be very doable. Ami is supposed to have him wrapped around her finger and she would be willing to manipulate him to save her sister

RandomOTP · Oct 27, 2021

QMs: "We unleashed the S-ranker on the player character, so why is the discussion turning back to ECONOMICS???"

Player base: "...Denial?"

Sentient Tree · Oct 27, 2021

RandomOTP said:
QMs: "We unleashed the S-ranker on the player character, so why is the discussion turning back to ECONOMICS???"

Player base: "...Denial?"

Sufficient amounts of money solve most problems, similar to sufficient amounts of explosives (especially since you can *buy* explosives with money).

If we had fuck off levels of money we could have talked to Oro about giving him more funding to pursue his research instead of distracting him with bloodline stuff and the great seal. He was ~~abducting~~ rescuing people during the collapse to get leverage over Asuma for more funding, so he probably wouldn't mind even more funding than he has.

Dictator4Hire · Oct 27, 2021

RandomOTP said:
QMs: "We unleashed the S-ranker on the player character, so why is the discussion turning back to ECONOMICS???"

Player base: "...Denial?"

MfD Playerbase during a crisis:

Noumero · Oct 27, 2021

Sir Stompy said:
This assumes Asuma will follow through with the deal once signed. My point is that things like contracts and treaties are about power, not whatever is written in the document. The enforcement will be dictated by the whims of Leaf's other S-Rankers. One of which hates Hazou, and the other sold us out to the Hyuuga during the election "for the good of Leaf" it wouldn't take much for her to do it again. Neither of them feels any significant amount of loyalty to Hazou. Orochimaru knows this, and he can act accordingly.

There's a huge difference in optics between kidnapping and murdering a Clan Head vs. that Clan Head volunteering for a bizarre risky procedure and dying by accident. I'm fairly confident that Oro can minimize the fallout from murdering Hazou if we put him in Oro's clutches like that no matter what contingencies we put into place beforehand.

Then Asuma will tell us he's not going to enforce the deal the way we want him to, and we never go through with it. The line of possibility you're suggesting is that Asuma is given a choice between telling us this deal is a bad idea or promising it'll be fine and he'll enforce it, he tells us the latter while expecting Oro to kill us, Oro figures all of this out and kills us, and Asuma reneges. Why would Asuma screw us over like this? If Asuma positively wants to screw us over like this, why doesn't he just go to Oro and tell him he's free to vivisect us?

FaintlySorcerous said:
Severe consequences. Any time dice roll, we fail and Orochimaru gets to pick what comes next.

Oh, I see. And there are no ways to account for that shtick and minimize its effects, and he really can make us do whatever he wants. Everything since Chapter 295 needs to be retconned then, I guess, since Hazou, Ino, Shikamaru, Chouza, Hinata, and Shino should've willingly went into Oro's basement after signing their clans over to him by now. We can't even assume he simply hadn't though of that, since we pretty explicitly floated that idea by him during our first one-to-one meeting. The Gouketsu should've absolutely become the Yasha at minimum.

Seriously, some of the objections to the idea are really... poorly thought-out. I get that you hate the idea of working with Oro, but at least spend a moment to think if maybe your opposition doesn't consist of complete idiots incapable of thinking of the most basic failure modes, and what the obvious countermeasures to them might be?

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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