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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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CaramilkThief said:
Dog territory houses bison (?) herds that have hundreds of thousands of bison in them. I think Cannai was willing to let us take enough meat to make a sizable dent in Leaf's food shortages a while back, while also saying that it's sustainable for them. I think there's quite a lot of food we can import if we really try, but we'd need a shit ton of storage seals to carry them all and ninja to oversee logistics.
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It made a dent in Leaf's food shortages, which IIRC is a town of ~10000 people. We'd need a lot more food to feed Fire Country as a whole, much less make a difference for the Elemental Nations in general. Distributing that food to thousands of tiny villages would be a huge logistical challenge.

Also, I think the Elemental Nations are basically stuck in the malthusian trap, and importing more food will after a decade or two probably result in a larger number of people living the same near-starvation lives (and maybe also a new class of people living comfortably by siphoning off food imports, because we cannot possibly avoid corruption if we do this at scale). And then if any of those trade deals fall through, or we loose a summoning scroll, there's a sudden food shortage and thousands of people starve.

So plausibly we could cause more people to not starve in the short term, and a larger population in the long term, if we spend some large quantity of resources to import food and accept a more fragile food supply. Which might be worth it, but I don't think it comes anywhere close to actually solving the problem in any meaningful way.
 
Sir Stompy said:
It's a good idea and I'm down to research this. We have a considerable Sealing backlog and I'll advocate for a prep day to investigate the difficulty of this seal.

The way the Sealing mechanics work, however, means that (off the cuff) I'd estimate this is probably 1-2 weeks of Sealing time. Basically, the only seals that can be completed in a day are utterly trivial.
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My impression was that changing the colour of seal-light is sufficiently trivial that (IIRC) Hazou did it offhandedly with the HOWSS.
We have(mediocre) flashbombs already, I assumed we'd start by modding those.
But I don't know the sealing rules well, and a day of assessment is a small cost.

RandomOTP said:
Don't we already have the Strobelight seal, which serves a similar role?
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Sir Stompy said:
It's kind of ass. Should be called Flash seal, it's single use, provides a single tag.

We want something that actually strobes, and lasts ~10 Rounds, plus we can probably jack the brightness up and increase the (pitiful) range.
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I absolutely want to make a much stronger constant strobe, trying to get mechanics similar to the sonic seals.

It is unclear to me exactly how the current strobelight seal mechanics work, but they do seem like we can do better.
A Jounin-level red-spectrum continuous-strobe retina-destroying light seal would rule.
 
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There's reasonable reason to believe that the 7th path has an easier time doing agriculture than the humans do, Let's try to setup some trade deals and see how we can go.

Also, we were in an malthusian trap at the beginning of the industrial revolution. We got out of it by improving food production faster than the population could grow (among other things) using innovations such as the seed drill. It's a lot easier to solve our problems if we can have more people working on stuff that isn't food. If it takes 99 people to make enough food for 1 to not make food, then enough food for 100 people appearing out of thin air suddenly creates a 100x increase in the people that can work on not food. It has an outsized effect.


[X] Action Plan: A Cause for Competition
 
coldcutconvict said:
@Inferno Vulpix Do you have a rough guess how many miles of wall the Ministry could have put up? Good chunk? Drop in the ocean?
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I don't think I know enough to calculate that, sorry. I don't keep close track of the timeline, and wrt the MARI roads all I know is that the most efficient casting strategy is to use up all of your reserves on one cast and then come back on subsequent days (or bring in subsequent ninja) to flesh the road out to 3 MARI wide with further 'all of your reserves' casts.

I recall someone on discord saying that getting one or two main roads (i.e. between Leaf and Tanzaku Gai) complete by now sounds plausible, but you'd want to ask them to get the full breakdown.
 
PSA:
I removed all of the Naruto clone and Hazo clone hang out scenes, since they didn't seem popular.
I also removed the "do the minato seal chain" stuff since he has a mild consequence.

Please take a look at the plans.
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
It is unclear to me if the current strobe seals are a targeted thing, an AOE, and a bunch of other questions, but a red-spectrum jounin-level continuous-strobe retina-destroying seal would rule.
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I refuse to call them S----e seals and will be referring to them as Flash seals. Since calling them by their official name causes no end of confusion as to what they actually do.

Currently they apply a fragile Aspect and the user gets a free Tag on it. It's unspecified (IIRC) but I believe that you need to be in Melee Range for it to work.

So it is AOE, but it's pitiful, anyone in Melee Range gets a fragile Aspect (probably something like 'Blinded!' or 'What the -') w/ a free tag.

charlesrwest said:
Also, we were in an malthusian trap at the beginning of the industrial revolution. We got out of it by improving food production faster than the population could grow (among other things) using innovations such as the seed drill. It's a lot easier to solve our problems if we can have more people working on stuff that isn't food. If it takes 99 people to make enough food for 1 to not make food, then enough food for 100 people appearing out of thin air suddenly creates a 100x increase in the people that can work on not food. It has an outsized effect.
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You can't take the EN and project IRL humanity on it and expect it to make sense. In human history right up to the middle of the Indistrial Revolution, per capita income remained basically the same everywhere (within a factor of 2 or so). The instant GDP improved it was absorbed by population growth.

This is just not the case with the EN, the population is shrinking because of repeated extremely destructive wars. The land is literally more fertile than anything in human history and it is going fallow because everyone is dead. Outside of the 30 Years War and the Black Death, shit like this does not happen, and when it does, it is striking how different things are for decades afterward.

If we crash food prices with cheap 7th Path food, I expect more harm than good will come of it. Imagine that the tax collectors cannot sell their grain for the price they were expecting, so they take more than their alloted share, and now people are starving. We know how to make life better for civilians. Building walls, digging wells, cheap steel for better weapons.

Fucking with food prices is a bad idea unless there is a serious shortfall.
 
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[X] Action Plan: Economic War Council
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We've got money. Let's figure out how to use it in the most productive way and include our fellow clan members rather than just deciding without their input.

[X] Action Plan: Money CAN win elections
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Other people have run smear attacks on us. Why not use money to sway public opinin in a good way? Make plays where dastardly villain ninjas abuse civilians while good ninjas treat them with respect. Make books where a cunning civilian love interest helps a dumb but strong ninja hero save the day. Make a festival that celebrates ninja contributions to the community... and also civilian ones. Subsidize the printing of uplift aligned books that already exist so that they are read more commonly. Buy books for the library that show civilians as people. Create a cultural revolution which leaks into other villages.

Bid more on adoption tickets and see if anyone bites.

See if we can blur the distinction between civillian and ninja to make it harder to see them as other.

[X] Action Plan: Every Dog has it's day
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Humanize the humans to the dogs. Find trade goods that they value so we can get food. See if they might be willing to share jutsu that would help fight the chakra beasts. And hang out with a ton of dogs.


[X] Action Plan: Talking to Toads
Did you know that the toad sages are S rank TH people? I found that out yesterday. They also have massive chakra pools and a trick that (probably) allows rapid refilling of said massive reserves.
They could potentially massively improve the fertility jutsu, create custom jutsu that might vastly improve genin survivability and would be extremely good at MARI style projects... if they cared to. Right now, they don't. So let's build a personal connection and try to see if there's anything we can offer them that might motivate them to use their awesome power to help.

[X] Action Plan: I am Iron Man
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Honestly not my favorite of the plans, but it's trying to make our ninja more survivable.
 
Sir Stompy said:
I refuse to call them S----e seals and will be referring to them as Flash seals. Since calling them by their official name causes no end of confusion as to what they actually do.

Currently they apply a fragile Aspect and the user gets a free Tag on it. It's unspecified (IIRC) but I believe that you need to be in Melee Range for it to work.

So it is AOE, but it's pitiful, anyone in Melee Range gets a fragile Aspect (probably something like 'Blinded!' or 'What the -') w/ a free tag.


You can't take the EN and project IRL humanity on it and expect it to make sense. In human history right up to the middle of the Indistrial Revolution, per capita income remained basically the same everywhere (within a factor of 2 or so). The instant GDP improved it was absorbed by population growth.

This is just not the case with the EN, the population is shrinking because of repeated extremely destructive wars. The land is literally more fertile than anything in human history and it is going fallow because everyone is dead. Outside of the 30 Years War and the Black Death, shit like this does not happen, and when it does, it is striking how different things are for decades afterward.

If we crash food prices with cheap 7th Path food, I expect more harm than good will come of it. Imagine that the tax collectors cannot sell their grain for the price they were expecting, so they take more than their alloted share, and now people are starving. We know how to make life better for civilians. Building walls, digging wells, cheap steel for better weapons.

Fucking with food prices is a bad idea unless there is a serious shortfall.
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I disagree. If 99 of 100 people are working on food production, you need to get more people able to work on not food production. We got out of our trap by improving our food production rate at a faster rate than our population growth. It's the same here and we have the tools to do it.
 
charlesrwest said:
If our enemies can hire theater troupes to do plays about how terrible they are, why can't we hire theatre troups and writers that have ninja heros that treat civilians like people and villains that (among other things) publicly abuse their power over allied civillians. Make mistreating civillians become the "kick the puppy troupe". It doesn't have to be a religion. Just a narrative that shows up more often.
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We need someone to hire the troupes and pay attention to what they're doing, or people will figure out they can take our money, put on a crappy play, and continue taking our money. In order to purchase propaganda which is effective, someone needs to pay attention to what is effective.

charlesrwest said:
Regarding Kagome safety, there's the taggable "And the dances" aspect that can be used to do sealing research slowly but safely. I think that is sufficient evidence that there is something there.
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For all we know other clans have something similar.

charlesrwest said:
Yes. Like the tower contest but with civilians contributing too. Money is useful for making good prizes :)
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What are civilians actually going to contribute that we can't trivially purchase from them directly?

charlesrwest said:
The big reason why burning macerators could be useful is that you can use it in a trap 100+ times. That means something like a 100x improvement in chakra beast killing throughput compared to a disposable trap. And I think that might be enough to make it worth using with civilians setting them.
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This does require infrastructure to reload the burning sand. Which is just a sufficiently hot furnance, right? The big cities should have those, but probably not the smaller villages closer to the chakra beasts. It could be worth it.

charlesrwest said:
The dog plan has two major strategic goals. "humanize" the humans to the dogs so that they might be onboard with sharing jutsu with the Humans and identify trade goods that dogs would value.
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I am skeptical that being 'humanized' is the relevant barrier to jutsu trade. Identifying trade goods that dogs would value... don't we already have a system for this? Isn't that what the 7th path trade network is all about?
 
charlesrwest said:
I disagree. If 99 of 100 people are working on food production, you need to get more people able to work on not food production. We got out of our trap by improving our food production rate at a faster rate than our population growth. It's the same here and we have the tools to do it.
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If the main barrier to civilian survivability is chakra beasts, then the only thing civilians are going to be able to do about that is progress the tech tree until they get advanced firearms, which is not going to happen anytime soon without our handholding, in which case we can do it ourselves.
 
Sir Stompy said:
I refuse to call them S----e seals and will be referring to them as Flash seals. Since calling them by their official name causes no end of
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The Strobelight Seals as I originally proposed them were literal strobelights. I think a QM decided that a flash was sufficient for the intended mechanics of debuffing enemies.

[e: Although the intention was for the strobe to be a continuous multi round effect that would make the wearer constantly difficult to aim at, not a one-off thing, so I'm not sure I agree with said QM]
 
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Shrooms said:
Hey, we're a spec jonin! Let's celebrate.
  • Get a few folks together and host a party on the Goketsu estate.
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I don't really like partying for Hazou. It's only been two weeks since Akane died.

That's all.

[X] Action Plan: Sitting and waiting
  • Wait for headache to pass.
  • Enjoy your time
  • Do some Clan head work
  • Wait for an S-rank person or Mori Ami to show up
 
charlesrwest said:
I disagree. If 99 of 100 people are working on food production, you need to get more people able to work on not food production. We got out of our trap by improving our food production rate at a faster rate than our population growth. It's the same here and we have the tools to do it.
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We did this slowly, over generations, not, I remark, by buying a bunch of buffalo meat from the Seventh Path and crashing the price of food permanently.

If we do that, a bunch of people are going to die. I am not opposed to incrementally increasing food production. By all means, sponser a committee, those Goketsu engineers need something to do. I'm very opposed to importing lots of food from abroad and permanently destroying agriculture as a productive activity in Fire when 95% of the population are farmers.

What do you think is going to happen? Are people going to magically learn how to cobble? Or are they going to starve when their crops are all stolen by the tax collector trying to make up for the low price of grain?
 
Paperclipped said:
Given that the highest TN was 60 against Hazō's 74 Sealing, he could not fail even if the dice gave him straight -12s. So that could be a start. The fact that he could afford to sandbag is a good indicator that it wasn't very hard for him.
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[X] Take the actual jōnin exam even though it totally does not exist and it is treason to suggest it does
 
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Sir Stompy said:
Are these typos? I understand how Hazou can roll a 53 and a 56, but I'm not aware of any way for him to roll a 54 with 50 base Sealing.
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They were, yes. Fixed.

Inferno Vulpix said:
smh doesn't even check that we can do the little squiggles.
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Oops. Added a line about this: (EDIT: I meant to put Calligraphy checks in there as well and forgot. They would have been TN 40 and he's got an effective score of 43, so we'll assume he passed them.)

Lysbeth Succubus said:
I hope this doesn't come off as rude, but shouldn't that be "deosil?"
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Yup. Fixed.

Lysbeth Succubus said:
Random bloop, but have we enquired about any Arachnid jutsu we could trade for?
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So far as I'm aware, you have not. Someone else might remember something I don't.


CaramilkThief said:
Also hey guys I finally created an account. I'm usually more active on the discord server though.
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Welcome! Nice to have you here as well as Discord.

acidshill said:
It made a dent in Leaf's food shortages, which IIRC is a town of ~10000 people.
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You were going for OOM and got it right, but if you want to be precise then it's 30,000 in Leaf.

Left-Hand Mutant said:
My impression was that changing the colour of seal-light is sufficiently trivial that (IIRC) Hazou did it offhandedly with the HOWSS.
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The HOWS seal allows you to choose the color at infusion time, no modification required.
 
acidshill said:
Also, I think the Elemental Nations are basically stuck in the malthusian trap
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Funnily enough, only a few people could tell - the Thinkers, probably, and Kakuzu.
But just as much as malthus was quite going off of ideas and fairy dreams with his theory, I'm not sure this is an issue here. Leaf famines don't seem super common, and that's when taxing farmers a rate applied after subsistence.
 
I will never understand why people want to futz with infrastructure and agriculture. None of the gains will pay off in the timeframe the quest operates in. Plus we have all the tools to create a post scarcity civilization and soft launch a singularity.
 
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Oneiros said:
I will never understand why people want to futz with infrastructure and agriculture. None of the gains will pay off in the timeframe the quest operates in. Plus we have all the tools to create a post scarcity civilization.
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After we defeat the Dragons and revive our loved ones, timeskip twenty years of peace where we make it to a comfortable S-rank, revolutionise agronomics, reinforce the Third's, Jiraiya's, Shikaku's and Asuma's trust in us, become filthy rich and learn the 5 elements.
Then we can destroy Orochimaru for the win.
 
Will vote for any plan that offers a sufficiently large ryo bonus to any member of our clan for learning Earthshaping, as well small upgrade in pay for knowing Earthshaping.
 
Kiba said:
Will vote for any plan that offers a sufficiently large ryo bonus to any member of our clan for learning Earthshaping, as well small upgrade in pay for knowing Earthshaping.
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From what I can recall, Atomu and Reo are the only Goketsu who know Earth Element, and Atomu is missing fingers... I suppose we could trade with Orochimaru to get Atomu some new fingers?
 
Adhoc vote count started by RandomOTP on Jun 6, 2023 at 11:38 AM, finished with 176 posts and 21 votes.
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Status of the Voting Cycle
 
[x] (Goketsu Estate): With a Population Like Ours, We Need a Town Unto Ourselves
Words: 298

  • Sanity Check everything (and vet businesses) with Gaku, Mari, and Kei
  • Design:
    • Hire Shikamaru-recommended architect from NFF (flatters Shikamaru ; spotlights program).
    • Blend elements from other compounds (represents our connections within Leaf):
      • Uchiha (Hazou's ancestors, highlights bloodline connection to Leaf).
      • Nara (Kei's marriage to Shikamaru).
      • Senju (Jiraiya's teammate, and Noburi's role model).
      • Sarutobi, (Jiraiya's sensei).
      • Yamanaka (Hazou/Akane's relationship with Ino).
      • Aburame (budding business relationship).
    • Require architect collaborates with...
      • Kagome (maximize trap-setting potential).
      • Noburi (medical checks).
      • Mari (general I&S defenses)
      • Kei (sanity checks/optimization/logistics)
  • Construction:
    • Hire KEI-recommended construction crews from NFF (spotlights program ; increase KEI connection).
      • Monitor for corruption.
    • Using Earthshaping, fix structural faults in (and hyper-condense) all building materials (increases defensiveness).
      • Work with construction crews/engineers to ensure Earthshaped material is safe to use.
    • ES-Condensed Corundum windows (Main Family Building)
    • Glass windows (important buildings).
  • Details
    • Therapy Building (grief counseling)
      • Soothing aesthetics
    • Wooden facades (nod to Leaf's architectural styles)
    • Kagome-approved Underground Evac Buildings (civilians)
    • Goketsu Event Building
      • Huge dragon skeleton carving.
      • Relief carvings of Summon Clans we've contracted.
    • ES-Reinforced walkways (QoL improvement)
    • Hide Koi pond for FOOM OPSEC training.
    • Lampposts (increases visibility at night)
      • Marble statues, holding seals? (Leaf's heroes. Include fallen Goketsu?)
      • Without compromising effectiveness, Replicate light placements within Nara compound (Nara Homage)
    • Gardens with water features, flowers, and fruit trees (Yamanaka homage, supplements Food Bank)
      • Subtly incorporate defenses.
        • Examples...
          • Benches that're comfortable, but also reliable cover
          • Brick Facades over MEWs around garden/park perimeters
    • ES gold filigree into important buildings (use shapes reminiscent of sealwork)
    • ES relief carvings that resemble sealing on surfaces, hiding real seals in the noise.
    • Private monument to clan's fallen in the heart of estate (provides solace).
    • With Mari, Hazou Earthshapes fully anatomically accurate Jiraiya Colossus. Clothe in Arachnid Silk garments.
 
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