"Purelands"
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
"Purelands"
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
Do we have any reason to believe that that's how it works beyond Kagome's words and maybe a few niche religious writings? Jiraiya is exceptionally famous, yes. But that is in no way whatsoever the only way he is exceptional in. And we also haven't scried anyone else to compare their deterioration speed to Jiraiya's. All we know is that there must be one if the Naraka path has geography and distances comparable to the real world, because it is filled with mostly trees instead of mostly people.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
I don't believe so. But Kagome predicted memory deterioration in advance of us actually observing it, which makes it pretty likely that he's right about how it works as well.
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- a
That sounds very abusable for low deceit characters. I mean, people can tell if other people are lying only if you know them well enough. With this mechanic, everybody basically can do that.
Also from a mechanical perspective, you are telling the truth so why the heck would you roll your deceit if you aren't using them?
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- a
Did you miss the part where TLiTF probably have negative consequences for her? Using TLiTF willy nilly like that won't lead to good outcomes.
Also, I'm not 100% sure but this question was asked ic and Mari said she won't use it unless it's like emergency. Need to find the chapter to that tho.
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- Location
- UK
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- He/Him
It will be hard for Hazou to ramp up the exit velocity of macerators by throwing his bignumber sealing at it.
That matches our understanding. If you had a seal which had the same function in combat, you could swap the seals without changing stunts.
Both are chūnin. Kagome advises you that they are both quite hard for chūnin-level seals, and that you should use full prep days.
Not with Hazō 5 deep and Kagome 7.
Well it's just the other side of the coin of how it works now, which is "a high Empathy/Deceit character can always tell if anyone else is lying".
HAZOU: I ate pancakes for breakfast today. [Deceit: 24]
ASUMA: [Empathy: 57] Bullshit you did.
HAZOU: ???
It's kinda weird, but it's what is currently being done.
For your second question: Mechanically, you roll Deceit to demonstrate that if you were lying, they'd beat your roll and be able to tell.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Honestly, I don't really think the socials rules model reality particularly well. It... would not be difficult for me to lie even to people motivated to figure out I was lying, depending on the subject.
Do we want to ask Reo too? IIRC he was working on becoming a TH'er and might have completed the stunt.
Well the alternative is "anyone can lie and expect not to be found out unless later caught red-handed or unless they have contextual clues to arouse suspicion, in which case they can strongly suspect forever but never have proof", which is essentially what happens irl. Its why lying is so attractive, it certainly wouldn't be if every lie to an equally social person were a 50/50 chance of them figuring out you lied without having any extra contextual clues to that whatsoever, and if you could always successfully lie to someone slightly less socially apt.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Well, it's not like they didn't already do that with henge before...
Honestly I don't think Deceit has much a place as a stat. Lying really just falls under Rapport, realistically, because its about Persuading people. They can suspect you of twisting the truth due to contextual clues and/or prior knowledge and be harder to persuade with your bullshit if they have reasons to believe that they are being lied to and be unfavorably disposed towards you if they catch you on a lie, but its still persuasion.
Its not like situations of no real importance require a roll. If you tell someone you ate an apple for breakfast they have no real way of finding out if its true or not, and mostly no real reason to suspect you didn't, but at the same time it really doesn't matter or change their behaviour.
The social situations which do require a roll are really rolls of Persuasion, aka Rapport, which essentially answer the question of "can you successfully convince someone of something, which will lead to them acting in a way that you want them to act going forward", and you just so happen to try and achieve that goal by bullshitting them, which is not really that different an area of expertise from just socializing.
If it were up to me, I'd just fuse Rapport and Deceit together into Persuasion, because both of them are the same skill really, Deceit is nothing but a sub-category of Rapport in every situation I can imagine.
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- USA
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Yes, asking a family member to give herself brain damage so you can have a meeting sounds entirely reasonable. /s
I have a commission that's hanging fire right now but I would be happy to take this one afterwards. Yes, I'm going to increase my rates to $0.08/word, which is the bottom of the standard commercial rates of $0.08-10 /word.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Unfortunately she refuses to tell us anything of what she can or can't do or her capabilities in general, and actively seeks to conceal these things from us.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
I continue to question why we even need social rules. The point of modeling combat is clear: human minds aren't very good at in-depth physical simulations, so figuring out what actually happens given everyone's different skill levels and positions would be difficult, correctly directing training on our part would be difficult, and so combat outcomes et cetera would be heavily subject to bias. Hence we abstract combat away.
But what humans are good at is modeling human behavior. And indeed, the social layer of the quest seems to be modeled directly, at a high level of fidelity. To the extent that the social mechanics are often straight-up not used, and when they are used, they arguably detract from simulationism. In exchange, they add... what? Why do we need them?
I mean, I guess I can make the case for having stats, in the sense that we get quantified estimates of where our characters stand on the civilian-to-social-spec ladder. But actually rolling these stats to determine social outcomes? Why?
@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped: would be interested in your take on that.
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- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
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No, I did not miss this. You'll note that I said 'if we could', which fairly clearly communicates an understanding that we can't, and the brain damage part is the reason we can't.
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- UK
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- He/Him
Mari and her offscreen efforts may well be the reason the Gōketsu are still afloat despite their intermittent treason, blasphemy, profession of extremist beliefs, economy-imperilling experiments, etc. etc.
Yeah this is a real problem for MfD, in reality not even the most advanced lie-detection "experts" can determine if someone is lying or not. The CIA with its blank check budget in the Cold War couldn't do it. I rationalize it as ninja having superhuman senses or something. But IMO, we should be able to tell simple lies without provoking a Deceit roll every time.
Deceit would come into play when you're trying to run a long con on someone and remember all the lies you've told them. And your cover and whatever else.
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I think it's worth noting that not all social contests (maybe not even most?) are actually stat vs. stat. Very often, it's stat vs. TN. If Orochimaru is demanding to know something and you want to lie about it, you'll have to beat his Deceit. But if he's in the middle of research and you want to slip something untrue by him while he's not too determined to grill you, it's probably just going to be a TN, which scales based on how believable the lie is. We saw this a lot at the Conclave for instance. And the reverse is true too. Even Mari is going to struggle to convince a genin the sky is green and up is down (well, without using genjutsu anyways
). Socials are an abstraction of reality, and an argument that's easier to pitch is going to have an easier TN, while things your target is less likely to believe will have higher TNs.And I think they're very useful stats to have in the system for non-PCs for whom we don't know the intricacies of their personalities, and so the QMs can know approximately how skilled and experienced with speaking they are without needing to extrapolate too much. It makes sense from narratively how much time is spent by social specs training their speech and persuasion abilities, and mechanically it makes sense for balance reasons.
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It was Reo originally - the concerns were Minato OPSEC and whether he is experienced enough to recognize all the terms, so I changed it to Asuma.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Counterpoint: Social combat is mainly contextual, and depends on the "attacker" inferring the correct signals to set to cause the intended response in the target. Whether you're trying to convince someone of something, make them like you, scare them, or awe them with your speech, the question is mostly not "how good are you at controlling your microexpressions and reading others' microexpressions?" (which is the one part of social combat I see an argument for mechanizing), but "given what you know about this character and the ongoing situation, how plausible is it that you'll arrive at the correct approach?".
Which is modeled directly. Mari is a skilled manipulator, has a lot of crystallized skills for quickly figuring out people, so she can always make a decent try. But if someone's psychology is really weird, or there's something weird going on in the background, even her first-pass attempt will likely fail. Conversely, if someone is obviously emotionally compromised by something, or if you know their deep-seated secret, intimidating them into submission or awing them should be possible even you're genin and they're jounin (see: our social victories against Mari). Another example: certain kinds of impassioned speeches or arguments would be convincing to specific listeners by default, no matter how good or bad your technical delivery is; the real challenge is in picking your points, which is also directly modeled based on a specific character's context knowledge and personality and ability to infer things.
(I guess you can model all of this by adding modifiers or Consequences, or placing flat TNs as you've pointed out, but... that's just ad-hoc massaging of the mechanics made to force them to conform to the conclusions you've already reached by running a direct simulation. If you can "scale the TN based on how believable the lie is", why not just take your detailed model of how believable the lie is and see if it passes by your detailed model of the target?)
QMs directly know what sorts of social tactics variously socially skilled people would try in different context, and whether they'd work in the actual scene based on the background information. Adding social stats to it mostly just averages social outcomes out, in a way that seems counter-simulationist.
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That's so weird. Like Reo is a member of our clan, so OPSEC is not a concern. Plus, like, how is it concerning if we give him a list of words/phrases we don't recognize and ask him what he thinks lol.
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Look I'm just trying to keep voters appeased
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
You should definitely ask Reo. There's been this persistent concern that we're not involving our newly-adopted clanmates into things, and this is a prime example. We've specifically told him to work on this, and now we're just going to ignore him and go to Asuma?Look I'm just trying to keep voters appeased
No, wait, you should definitely not ask Reo. He's at best just a beginner and this is probably jounin-tier or beyond. He's predictably not going to be able to tell us anything, and that's going to make him feel useless and a disappointment. We've invested in him, arranged his training, and the one time we come to him, he's not even able to help us at the thing we told him to get good at?
No, wait, that's so patronizing and disrespectful of his agency. We should ask him. He might be able to contribute something, and he isn't an idiot: he'll be able to figure out that we're asking him as a long shot and that we understand it may be beyond him. Indeed, he'll likely be appreciative that we tried him at all.
No, wait, that's a losing political move. He's probably going to mention this to someone, and the anti-Hazou faction is going to spin this as "Hazou is trying to belittle and undermine the people outside his close-knit inner circle by presenting them with impossible challenges". Reo may handle it well, but if he doesn't, and spreads it around, it'll have an outsized negative effect!
No, wait, the same argument applies from the other side. Not asking Reo is a losing political move!
No, wait, asking Reo is a potential OPSEC breach and Asuma isn't going to be happy.
No, wait...