I believe the qms said that we could do whatever we wanted now that they have Jiraiya to assign us missions. That may no longer be true, but in any case I don't think the party would go for hiding in the woods for months with nothing to do.
@faflec, I find replies like these much more helpful than 'just no.' Thank you for going through the hassle. Before I dig into the rest of what you wrote, I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not defending the mission the party is doing right now. I'm interested in figuring out future goals that straddle the line between too dangerous and not difficult enough to appreciably raise our social and combat skills. A failure in accomplishing that that put us where we are now.
You're very good at explicitly stating definitions and generalities. I tend to rely on ambiguities and implication. Doing the former takes more time for me, but I'll work at it. My point is that I completely agree with your well put definition of utilitarianism.
The main appeal for me of splitting the party isn't speed, but making smaller challenges more challenging so we can stick to things that fail harmlessly. I would weigh the danger of chunin going together, in groups of 3, 2, or 1 vs the inflexibility of each based on local ninja density. It's important to remember that a failure in any decently sized village would necessitate leaving since eventually a big fish would come by to see what's going on. I'm sure there are some undeveloped towns being exploited for rare resources by merchants that travel to bigger places. We stand to gain something there. There might also be some undiscovered rare resources like the chakra infused porcupine spikes we encountered trade could be based on. Small towns also allow us to practice planning and get in-character acumen with less dire consequences. I would still like to hear your thoughts on picking off caravans(nonlethally) or impersonating local inspectors.
You address some of my statements dead on literally, but then go on tangents you've misconstrued. It's jarring, unproductive, and laborious to have to address false accusations. In one breath you're accusing me of wanting to hole up forever and in the next of going leroy jenkins when I advocate neither. I'm going to assume this is directed at the players in general and the most recent plan. If being the target of these posts is what's necessary to incite them, I'm more than happy to, but if it's avoidable, I'd prefer not being singled out.
Happy to table this if it's getting off topic, but I suspect it'll be a nonissue once the update hits.
Sorry if some stuff made no sense to you, it made no sense to me either upon reread. I tend to write...really weird stuff sometimes.
always
I'm generally referring to you when I talk about the low reward with going to a small town (more on this later). The note on hiding in a hole was an made-up-out-of-my-ass example of why your definition of utilitarianism (we have to do something!) isn't a complete view, and not a comment on your views specifically. I know (hope) you don't want to turn in Kagome. My break on the current situation kinda bled through into my response, and the earlier confusion about small villages vs. larger towns kinda bled into that.
In ANY case, I still disagree with you that going to smaller villages, even individually, has merit. I do not believe the challenges inherent to successfully helping any such village (having Diplomacy 4, Combat 10...) are such that pose any sort of worry for any of us, except maybe Kagome. In the beginning, having Akane and Noburi take the lead on a mission to familiarize themselves with the "how-to" can be useful for them. But after that it's just a monotonous routine on Helping Villages 101, and doesn't gain us much in terms of physical reward (items/money), information reward (contacts, rumors), or meta reward (XP). The only thing it'd give us is a moral reward (happy faces at helping people), which admittedly might be needed to keep us from sinking into pits of despair and etc., but that's not quite enough to justify it. I just feel that smaller villages won't give much of a challenge even if 1 person does things at a time.
Villages with exploitable resources are a thought, but I don't think we'd want to be a single ninja working here. I get the feeling that once the merchants realize that the village has grown too strong for them to exploit enemy ninja will get hired to...remove...the leadership, to fully replant the village as dependent on the merchants. Beyond that I'm grasping at straws since I can't directly respond to the concept if I don't know how they're being exploited: are they a small village who harvest Element X only and sell it to the merchant for food/supplies; or are they more of a slave camp being actively watched over/shit on?
I don't think there will be any rare resources
ninjas haven't discovered, because
ninjas aren't stupid. They've lived some hundreds of years, the only real secret we've found (Hillbilly Mountain) required an active ninja conspiracy to keep secret and I doubt that a rare resource like that would exist without being protected by ninjas. And we
really don't want to poke that nest.
Picking off caravans(nonlethally) strikes me as being Stupid Evil. Beyond the moral reasons, I honestly cannot see what we gain from it beyond physical goods, which aren't that hard to get.
Impersonating local inspectors is possible but risky, since they'd only really be relevant in larger towns where inspectors would be needed, and at that point there's a lot more things to do that are faster and equally safe. Having a bit of trouble picturing this, since the goal seems a bit vague.
My personal opinion on how to progess is to gain XP and advance our in-character goals (contacts, helping others) at the same time. The easiest way, and also the safest way, to do this is to go to a larger town, get info, and start helping people based on the local rumor mill.
I may have gone on tangents here, so apologies if I have.
I see your framing and raise you "Four children and their adoptive older sister, on a mission to save the world, are confronted by a man who has devoted his life to supporting the cycle of death that is slowly choking the human race into oblivion with no demonstrated remorse"
