- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That was Chapter 604.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- 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
We had a full debriefing on Hidan when we thought he was sticking around and we were figuring out what more we wanted to get out of him. That was chapter 604. I guess I would have expected if this was such a time sensitive and important thing, for Mari or someone to have mentioned there that we needed to get in front of the narrative as soon as Hidan left, and try not to move around too much publicly until we have done so. Instead there was a one line mention in a Q/A post, not an update. That said, obviously we should do what we can now and immediately, as everyone is screaming at us to do, including the husband of the woman some people want to put in front of this. The QMs even explicitly presented Noburi's thoughts and the question directly and he still thinks making a statement is important.
Maybe a compromise can be had if we get out in front of this now, since it seems like a lot of people think it was unclear how important this was? Not no consequences for the whole thing, but also not having clan members abandon us to give our secrets publicly and other things of such a nuclear level?
Maybe a compromise can be had if we get out in front of this now, since it seems like a lot of people think it was unclear how important this was? Not no consequences for the whole thing, but also not having clan members abandon us to give our secrets publicly and other things of such a nuclear level?
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
This is the exact phrasing of what we agreed to:
Now, as agreed, I will not complain about this situation (provided that this course of action is something Hazou believed is sensible, of course), but I strongly implore you to consider how you are approaching the meta-discussion of this agreement. This vote was not so narrow as "protect you from worldbuilding knowledge gaps" and it was not so vague as "Hazoupilot should save us from bad things".
What we voted for, specifically, was that Hazoupilot can and will yank control away from us when he disagrees with what we're doing, as evaluated by 1) the QM estimation of what is inappropriate for Hazou-the-character to do, and 2) what the GMs think is sensible for him to do instead. It's right there in the vote, and that vote was and is binding on both parties.
What I say next is more to give context for my conviction on the specificity of this than anything else: I, as a rule, do my best to remember and adhere to even old rules and regulations, and I despise the practice of diminishing their importance or twisting their meaning as time goes on. I say this not as threat, accusation, or warning, but simply because it's the root emotion of why I care enough to dig up the exact wording to compare it against this situation, and I hope to minimize confusion about my epistemic state here.
Ultimately, you do have all the power here and this vote is specifically cultivated to operate off of your judgement instead of ours. If you have established amongst yourselves that the vote as we agreed to it is being satisfied, then everything is fine. But if you've let the meaning of that vote, the bindings that we both agreed to, accidentally warp into something different, then I strongly encourage you to re-center your understanding of it. As for myself, I will also make sure I keep this vote handy so I can remain centered on what we agreed to.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So fmpov things have been pretty, er, spicy from players lately and I'm very much not eager to add to the pile but I'll admit this latest chapter mostly just leaves me confused, from a meta standpoint I suppose.
So, I guess it would be easier for me to buy that Hazou did like, a token denouncement that took him a few minutes and went back to sealing, and like, that was insufficient. The Hags are calling him a heretic or something, whatever? But nah it seems like since we didn't make a "denouncement" plan we kinda just have to Deal With This now for the next several updates. (Would QMs have found a "go around spreading denouncement" plan fun? I don't really see that being interesting personally.)
And like... People already thought he was worshipping a fish sex god or some other Mist tradition and people just chalked it up to "he's just crazy." Shikamaru didn't even know who or what Jashin was, so I assume the schmucks of Leaf without Lore know jack shit about it either. Which leaves me confused as to why this matters so much more than any other crazy thing someone has said about Hazou.
But even more than that... is this, like, really a direction we as a community are interested in exploring? Personally, I just kinda don't care about this "Hazou's reputation is bad, again" plotline and am mostly just interested in getting past it. I don't really look forward to spending the next several plans going around and salvaging our leaf reputation (his Leaf reputation being of some, but not much value to many of the things players want to accomplish like necromancy or dragons.) So it's like, we're kind of just doing a chore now for the next few updates, the plans are probably going to be pretty straightforward approach to doing this thing we feel we need to do but aren't like, excited to do. I can only pray such plans will actually be interesting to write, but they probably won't be which will then make the authors grumpy again... etc. Idk. I'm just concerned this is drama that harms the collective enjoyment rather than adds to it. If I could vote for "Skip past Mari/Hazou/etc handling this crisis and Hazou's reputation is worse and people like him less but things are mostly stable as they were before," I would probably vote for it.
So, I guess it would be easier for me to buy that Hazou did like, a token denouncement that took him a few minutes and went back to sealing, and like, that was insufficient. The Hags are calling him a heretic or something, whatever? But nah it seems like since we didn't make a "denouncement" plan we kinda just have to Deal With This now for the next several updates. (Would QMs have found a "go around spreading denouncement" plan fun? I don't really see that being interesting personally.)
And like... People already thought he was worshipping a fish sex god or some other Mist tradition and people just chalked it up to "he's just crazy." Shikamaru didn't even know who or what Jashin was, so I assume the schmucks of Leaf without Lore know jack shit about it either. Which leaves me confused as to why this matters so much more than any other crazy thing someone has said about Hazou.
But even more than that... is this, like, really a direction we as a community are interested in exploring? Personally, I just kinda don't care about this "Hazou's reputation is bad, again" plotline and am mostly just interested in getting past it. I don't really look forward to spending the next several plans going around and salvaging our leaf reputation (his Leaf reputation being of some, but not much value to many of the things players want to accomplish like necromancy or dragons.) So it's like, we're kind of just doing a chore now for the next few updates, the plans are probably going to be pretty straightforward approach to doing this thing we feel we need to do but aren't like, excited to do. I can only pray such plans will actually be interesting to write, but they probably won't be which will then make the authors grumpy again... etc. Idk. I'm just concerned this is drama that harms the collective enjoyment rather than adds to it. If I could vote for "Skip past Mari/Hazou/etc handling this crisis and Hazou's reputation is worse and people like him less but things are mostly stable as they were before," I would probably vote for it.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
The O.G. Hidan chapter (603) happened on an EJ update, and Vel's chapter happened on 604.0, but didn't even cover the meeting. EJ's 604-proper had an end-of-day summary update with Gaku.
The hivemind had discussed doing the "Not a cultist" speech prior to [EJ's 604-proper update], but were afraid to do this while Hidan and Kakuzu were within Leaf. It was the only reason we didn't include it in an action plan.
The playerbase only found out that Hidan and Kakuzu had left Leaf during EJ's 604 chapter, which happened at the end of the day.
It would have been fortunate if Hazou-pilot had gone "you mean I won't die by blood cultist scythe if I make that statement today? Heck yeah, let's do it." But he didn't.
Then, in 605, the hivemind sought to put out the fire in front of us: Yuno's radicalism and Hazou's uncharacteristic meanness (which I can and have disputed at length, but will drop for the sake of conversation). We did that, and were confronted with another, more immediate fire: Yuno stating outright that she was going to try and convert all of the Goketsu, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
[It would ring hollow, after all, for Hazou to make that speech, and then for Yuno (Hazou's sister-in-law), to go around Leaf yelling about how valuable Hazou is to Jashinism, or for her to go around, making our own clan members doubt Hazou's statement.]
In chapter 606, there were several plans tied. With four votes. [Two] of those were "Interlude, we trust EJ," and "Anything Wholesome." The action plan that EJ chose to write "tied" with four votes. Which reflects player turn out and burnout (especially when compared to the plans that it tied with).
Further, the plan that EJ wrote 606 for actually called for Hazou to have this meeting before doing sealing practice. It was listed before that. The planmaker even tries to make allowances for EJ's writing preferences in the action plan itself by saying "this meeting doesn't have to be onscreen, it can occur offscreen."
It feels a bit raw to ding the playerbase for both days Hazou delayed, since one day was spent correcting a perceived deep error on Hazou-pilot's part (rather than any wrongdoing on the playerbase's actions), and the second day had been accounted for in the action plan that EJ drew from for chapter 606.
I know that interlude votes are always at risk of being ignored (that's a risk we choose to take when voting that way), and I know that we did vote in "EJ can write what he wants," but to turn around and punish the playerbase for that second day when it had already been accounted for?
It feels unfair.
The hivemind had discussed doing the "Not a cultist" speech prior to [EJ's 604-proper update], but were afraid to do this while Hidan and Kakuzu were within Leaf. It was the only reason we didn't include it in an action plan.
The playerbase only found out that Hidan and Kakuzu had left Leaf during EJ's 604 chapter, which happened at the end of the day.
It would have been fortunate if Hazou-pilot had gone "you mean I won't die by blood cultist scythe if I make that statement today? Heck yeah, let's do it." But he didn't.
Then, in 605, the hivemind sought to put out the fire in front of us: Yuno's radicalism and Hazou's uncharacteristic meanness (which I can and have disputed at length, but will drop for the sake of conversation). We did that, and were confronted with another, more immediate fire: Yuno stating outright that she was going to try and convert all of the Goketsu, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
[It would ring hollow, after all, for Hazou to make that speech, and then for Yuno (Hazou's sister-in-law), to go around Leaf yelling about how valuable Hazou is to Jashinism, or for her to go around, making our own clan members doubt Hazou's statement.]
In chapter 606, there were several plans tied. With four votes. [Two] of those were "Interlude, we trust EJ," and "Anything Wholesome." The action plan that EJ chose to write "tied" with four votes. Which reflects player turn out and burnout (especially when compared to the plans that it tied with).
Further, the plan that EJ wrote 606 for actually called for Hazou to have this meeting before doing sealing practice. It was listed before that. The planmaker even tries to make allowances for EJ's writing preferences in the action plan itself by saying "this meeting doesn't have to be onscreen, it can occur offscreen."
It feels a bit raw to ding the playerbase for both days Hazou delayed, since one day was spent correcting a perceived deep error on Hazou-pilot's part (rather than any wrongdoing on the playerbase's actions), and the second day had been accounted for in the action plan that EJ drew from for chapter 606.
I know that interlude votes are always at risk of being ignored (that's a risk we choose to take when voting that way), and I know that we did vote in "EJ can write what he wants," but to turn around and punish the playerbase for that second day when it had already been accounted for?
It feels unfair.
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is what I said above: the 'people need us to denounce Jashinism' is a problem that is:
- Diffuse, not localized to a specify person or place
- Far away
- Happening almost entirely among people Hazō doesn't care about or think about
- Political, which Hazō doesn't care about except grudgingly
- Location
- Texas
I understand that it doesn't feel like a big jump to you, but doesn't it say something that none of the players made that jump?
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Why wait? Ditch the Scroll and head back to Mist.
Hazou was a world-famous sealmaster when be was a genin. Now he's a spec jonin. They'd welcome him.
Or we could go all the way to Snow, and lighthouse until we feel like it.
Heck, let's pull a Mareo and just kick it on the Dog Path for a long while. Kei's done it before.
Surely, Kei will respond with the same compassion and empathy to Hazou that we gave to her.
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Noumero
Omit Needless Words
In the interest of calling out good predictions, it very much crossed @RandomOTP's mind. They were pushing for doing reputation-management the moment we left Hidan's immediate presence, and while I'd still argue doing it while Hidan was still in town would've been a bad idea, that appears to have been the right attitude to take.
So kudos for having an incrementally better model of MfD's reality, @RandomOTP.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I am... definitely feeling some feelings as a result of this update.
Threnodist
occupying Haudenosaunee & Osage land she/her/hers
- Location
- Pittsburgh
I understand what you're saying EJ I just have a few questions, comments, and points of clarification.
1-2. Make sense to me especially re: your example with Orochimaru so thank you for that.
3-4. However are where, again, I think we come back to where the hell are the clan's social specs when this is all going on because there ARE people who Hazo thinks and cares about (the Nara, clanmates, I'm sure others) who are concerned with the situation and to me that raises the issue to the level that Hazo DOES care about politics if he knows what's going on which we depend on our clan social specs to tell us about which they didn't do.
My clarification question is, did Hazo ever actually announce he was a Jashinite in public or are people simply reading into his actions/association and assuming. I tried to go back over the previous few chapters and the closest I could find was this section in 602 where Hidan publically claim's Hazo is a Jashinite.
This isn't to argue that Leaf gossiping about us is unfair (I also anticipated this being a problem, just not so big), I'm just trying to evaluate what we need to talk about when we do address this publicly.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Note that I did not actually look at the vote. It was declared to be an interlude so I wrote what I felt like writing, influenced by things I had seen in the thread but not bound to any particular plan. At the end I put a chapter number on it because it fit nicely into the timeline and worked well with current discussion, but I didn't link a plan because I wasn't writing a plan.
If the first line of the winning plan is "Publicly denounce Jashinism to the Clan and Leaf as a whole, do whatever else Mari recommends" then we're fine to have it happen offscreen and simply have a reference or two clarifying that it happened. That may or may not be sufficient to clean up the entire mess, but you won't have to do the whole thing in a plan. If you want to engage in more detail then it will need to be part of the plan.
I take your point, but my experience with the players is that socials and politics are things they don't engage with or think about very much unless there is a compelling reason forcing them to.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Give us a minute, we're talking about it now. Our understanding was that there was nowhere in the timeline that Mari could have caught up to Hazō since he was away from the estate for both days while she was busy putting out immediate fires. Still, we're going back and reviewing it especially in light of her being a Shadow Clone user.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/They/Them
Ow you don't pull any punches, do you? Straight to the heart.
*is in the middle of the Mari-is-broken-because-of-Hana part of their reread* so this is how Kagome feels when the timelines look similar but are different and he doesn't know what's going on...
Oooh, it's time for the Drama Popcorn!
Side note: the sentence "The flame of anger inside Noburi burned a little brighter" is beautiful
HAZŌ: In my defence, I had a very stressful couple days. And I may or may not have that thing with the brain?
NOBURI: Being a dumbass?
HAZŌ: Yeah, being a du- wait, no. The thing with the attention span.
KEI: Since when do you have an attention span?
HAZŌ: Exactly.
Incidentally, maybe we should add the caldera to the shipping chart, Kei loves it so much
Well, this was always going to happen, but still. Shit. They'll find out about Jashin probably not being a fish sex god.
RANDOM NINJA: You Nara don't know half of what you think you do! If you do know anything, you better be ready to tell us!
NARA: *leans in, mutters to her ear in sounds that the human brain parses as unknowable colours, scents that carry orders, and directions that are neither visible nor understandable but could very well be more real than any physical sense*
RANDOM NINJA: aagh...
RANDOM NINJA #2: did you just turn her brain into soup?
NARA: Just gave her a glimpse of what we know. She'll be back to normal and have forgotten all about it in three days, give or take. She'll doubt us again, but all you bystanders are welcome to give her, and everyone else, a very thorough run-down of what just happened. Question the Nara's knowledge at your own peril.
Bah. Up until recently, the Nara had at least as many Jashin symbols on their clan grounds as we did. Now they have somewhere between half as many, and many more, depending on how deep the rabbit hole goes. Assuming we got rid of the Yuno-marriage stuff with His symbols.
I was about to bounce on the funny lack of expectation to even know things about your lover, but then I remembered she got married to Shikamaru without actually knowing all that much. Huh. That's an interesting perspective she has from this.
Not that I wish to oppose the WOF, necessarily, but both of these things were great.
"It's so stupidly evident that we're not Jashinist to anyone who's not motivated to believe we're into Jashin, do we really need to spell it out for you?" and/or "like we can trust the nebulous entity that is 'all of Leaf including civilians and people who hate us' not to inadvertently - or worse, advertently - get it back to Hidan that we publicly denounced his god?" are... not perfect, but perhaps viable.
Edit: caught up with reading the discussion, this seems like a reputational hit that we'll have to manage and all, but we can totally be excited about it instead, no? Hooray, we get a new fun thing to do! And yes, we're having to deal with many, many of these at a time, and there are interdimensional kaiju of several types out to get us and the world. STILL. Perhaps we could do a clan meeting, knowing people will send out spies, and say reassuring things like "didn't expect the senseless rumours" "when a god-like kill-machine says 'say yes' I say yes but his beliefs make no sense and clash with Uplift, the WOF-inspired philosophy I have for bettering everyone's lives rather than ending any"
Honestly I'm no good at politics, and I get the feeling that many of us are likewise and that's why we tend to overlook politics entirely, because the clan politics are a weird world that we keep getting burnt in, what's more in a fashion that fits within the world as it is but feels out of the blue to us. That's on us, but at the same time there's not a lot we can do on that front if we don't have the knack, as it were. Unless we-Hazō trade Goo Bombs for political training with Ino, hopefully giving us-the-players political lore we could come back to and get in the correct mindset when political things are involved?
Honestly though, we need to ride hard on what we did. We handed the second-to-last World War to Leaf on a silver platter. We are in the process of saving the world. When we get to it, we will rescue the Fifth Hokage from death. And we have options - maybe we will also grab the Third. Perhaps the Fourth. Possibly the First and Second. We'll need to talk about the Sixth. That's the kind of thing that makes people think "oh wow, giving us the Hokage - the embodiment of the Will of Fire - back from death, that guy's got WOF in spades"
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Noumero
Omit Needless Words
The crux of the matter — something not unique to this specific issue, something that unifies this issue with the Threatening Plan and the Minami Fiasco and all the way to the Youthsuit Incident — is the question of player agency vs. diegetic coherency, and how and whether the QMs' preferences on it diverge from the players'.
Namely: MfD is both a game we play and a narrative we consume. Every time the QMs nudge an interpretation of a player vote towards results more satisfying to them or to us than a strict interpretation would be, the players' agency lessens, the "game" aspect lessens, and MfD becomes more of a story. Every time Hazou acts OOC (which may be bad or good — e. g., we may seize control of him to prevent him from unproductively lashing out in an uncharacteristic display of emotional maturity), every time the players are held responsible for failing to account for some detail and therefore bringing about an outcome that seems startlingly incompetent from the in-universe point of view, MfD becomes less of a story and more of a game.
There's a sliding scale between "a game" and "a story", one may say.
The question is: Is the current position of the slider optimal? Is it the one that maximizes the weighted sum of everyone's fun (with the QMs' fun weighting more)?
It seems to me that the players would prefer it moved closer to "a story". Yes, we would like the game to be unfair in our favour. For Hazou to override us when we're making a mistake, for the QMs to assume direct control when we're screwing something up, but also to not do that if we're outperforming expectations.
I'm not saying to move the slider all the way to "a wish-fulfillment narrative" — there still should be opportunities to screw up, particularly in the cases where we're consciously choosing to take a risk. But instances where a bad wording or a minute misunderstanding screws us over, or we miss something that we incorrectly perceived as a minor detail? If that stopped, that may be a strict improvement for the players' experience.
Would that hurt the QMs' fun, though? @eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped. I don't recall if you'd properly outlined what about MfD-as-a-collaborative-project you find fun. Is its nature as a game with very strict rules that the players are supposed to beat something that you enjoy, something that's central to your conception of the project such that if it were lessened even incrementally, you'd have significantly less fun with it? In a way that won't even be recouped by your getting to write more of what you want + not having to deal with player salt so much?
Note also that this is entirely a meta-level matter. It's not about MfD being a rational story or not: the events in it may still follow consistent rules if the QMs so desire, they don't have to let narrativium run the show. (Indeed, the story would likely become more simulationist as the result of curtailing some of our OOC choices.) It's purely a question of the interface between the OOC and IC stuff.
Namely: MfD is both a game we play and a narrative we consume. Every time the QMs nudge an interpretation of a player vote towards results more satisfying to them or to us than a strict interpretation would be, the players' agency lessens, the "game" aspect lessens, and MfD becomes more of a story. Every time Hazou acts OOC (which may be bad or good — e. g., we may seize control of him to prevent him from unproductively lashing out in an uncharacteristic display of emotional maturity), every time the players are held responsible for failing to account for some detail and therefore bringing about an outcome that seems startlingly incompetent from the in-universe point of view, MfD becomes less of a story and more of a game.
There's a sliding scale between "a game" and "a story", one may say.
The question is: Is the current position of the slider optimal? Is it the one that maximizes the weighted sum of everyone's fun (with the QMs' fun weighting more)?
It seems to me that the players would prefer it moved closer to "a story". Yes, we would like the game to be unfair in our favour. For Hazou to override us when we're making a mistake, for the QMs to assume direct control when we're screwing something up, but also to not do that if we're outperforming expectations.
I'm not saying to move the slider all the way to "a wish-fulfillment narrative" — there still should be opportunities to screw up, particularly in the cases where we're consciously choosing to take a risk. But instances where a bad wording or a minute misunderstanding screws us over, or we miss something that we incorrectly perceived as a minor detail? If that stopped, that may be a strict improvement for the players' experience.
Would that hurt the QMs' fun, though? @eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped. I don't recall if you'd properly outlined what about MfD-as-a-collaborative-project you find fun. Is its nature as a game with very strict rules that the players are supposed to beat something that you enjoy, something that's central to your conception of the project such that if it were lessened even incrementally, you'd have significantly less fun with it? In a way that won't even be recouped by your getting to write more of what you want + not having to deal with player salt so much?
Note also that this is entirely a meta-level matter. It's not about MfD being a rational story or not: the events in it may still follow consistent rules if the QMs so desire, they don't have to let narrativium run the show. (Indeed, the story would likely become more simulationist as the result of curtailing some of our OOC choices.) It's purely a question of the interface between the OOC and IC stuff.
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- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
From the very start, there were players who were crying out for Hazou to make the statement ASAP, even if Hidan and Kakuzu were still in Leaf (namely: me). Other players wanted to wait until after Hidan left. We were only told, after the timeline had progressed to the end of day in 604, that Hazou-pilot had found out Hidan was gone, but had done nothing about that opportunity, after the fact.
Unilaterally, the timeline had moved up, with Hazou-pilot not reflecting the Will of the Hivemind.
In 605, the playerbase met with Yuno to (1), correct for an error on Hazou-pilot's fault, and (2), keep her from undermining our message.
606 was declared to be an Interlude, and the hivemind all but begged for something lighthearted and wholesome. A portion of the hivemind tried to progress the plot and have this Jashin discussion sooner, despite knowing it was set to be an interlude.
It seems unfair, then, to be punished for that second day. Interludes are typically in the past, or run "alongside" the active timeline. Very rarely do they progress the story's timeline.
And yet, the Interlude ended up progressing the timeline.This means that Hazou spent that second day on his own, without the playerbase's input.
Our input, had it been a factor, would have had Hazou address these things immediately upon return.
Instead, the timeline was once again unilaterally moved up, and the playerbase finds themselves being lambasted by Kei and Mari for not doing anything about this sooner (despite our efforts to try and do things sooner).
This is well-within your right as the QMs. I can even see how might make the claim that "the playerbase waited one day, that serves as foundational justification to wait another day."
But the playerbase went the Yuno to address a Hazou-pilot error and to keep Yuno from undermining the statement as Hazou was making it. If Hazou made a public statement, and Yuno had been in the crowd, whispering about her Jashinistic Lord of Birth, then no one would have believed it.
It feels more than a little raw, to be punished in-game for things that we either tried to address (re: the Yuno Hunt), or were literally out of our hands (re: Second Day).
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I think I might disagree somewhat with this part. The first thought my mind sprang to when I read it is our Light Relay seals and that time we tried to discover IR light by manipulating a HOWS's output. And the QMs shut that down by having Hazou's reaction to the emanating heat be "this is a sealing failure, panic!" rather than "how curious, is this indicative of something useful?" As much as this stymied our immediate efforts, I find myself fond of the open challenge to find some other way to reach that goal, and indeed I've come up with a route that I hope to one day put into practice.
The second thought that went through my head was the ruling, right after the Pure Lands rift opened up, that it was closing and would need to be re-opened if we want to do anything with it. Now granted, the obtaining of the rift was not a success on the part of the hivemind but rather a gift from EJ, but the shape of the scenario, the shape of the challenge, that making it close posed us also feels good to me. Despite it holding us back and making things harder for us, it's done so in a way that forces us to further push our limits and come up with creative new ideas if we want to progress, and that's pretty cool.
Of course, I can't entirely disagree either. It does feel bad when we put something really clever in the plan and then it winds up being said by Ami while Hazou stands there gobsmacked, which is also some form of "the QMs assume direct control when we outperform expectations", but the fact that the above examples also exist means that "I prefer to be left alone when we outperform expectations" is not true in all cases. Rather, I like it when our stumbles and roadblocks serve as greater and more meaningful challenges for us to overcome, becoming in the end an even greater testament to our determination and ingenuity should we succeed at overcoming them.
How this integrates into your broader point, I leave up to you.
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Expecting Hazoupilot to make a significant strategic decision, unprompted, when the plan didn't include it, isn't very reasonable.
I get the major feels-bad, but specifying the hazo denounces Jashin was clearly on us. Please be fair to the QMs.
---
My main thought while reading this was "why didn't any of you talk to Hazou days ago?". EJ's comment (our voted-on plan made us unreachable) would explain this.
I get the major feels-bad, but specifying the hazo denounces Jashin was clearly on us. Please be fair to the QMs.
---
My main thought while reading this was "why didn't any of you talk to Hazou days ago?". EJ's comment (our voted-on plan made us unreachable) would explain this.
I'm unsure why we weren't reachable in the morning/evening, but trust the QMs to model affairs accurately and get back to us.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I'm stepping away from SV to remain civil. Go vote for my Noburi Training Plan. It has us raising Mednin, which we need if we want Necromancy.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I don't really want to add another message to the "Ruh roh Player Salt" pile or anything, and I'm trying not to come off that way, but I feel like its possible that this one might be beneficial as far as honest communication goes, so I'm going to try to write it out in a way that isn't that, but my apologies if it does come off that way since I'm definitely not intending for this to be the sort of message that leaves anyone feeling bad after reading it, you know?
Okay. So.
At the end of the day, does this need for the playerbase to constantly handle things of certain natures directly and explicitly in an update to update fashion not just ultimately create a pile of updates and plans that no one in thread (be they QM or Player) really wants to slog through? In the specific instance: Hazou said that Mari was running damage control on this during his mission with Yuno, for example. It is of course entirely plausible that she was incapable of doing anything substantial, but its also plausible that this is a problem she could have easily handled given the context, and the playerbase could have focused on some things that would've been cooler and more engaging/exciting without feeling like they were punished by the situation for doing so.
There is a large and consistent pattern here over the years where an update like this happens that creates some manner of significant drama and a pile of problems that ultimately tend to distract and detract from the current main focus of the story, usually as a result of something inside of the simulation that the player base handled inadequately from the lack of context. I can't help but feel like this just makes some portions of this quest an extremely unenjoyable experience (for the whole table) in both the quest and story dimensions.
And just to be clear (!) I'm not trying to argue here or be salty or ask for a retcon or anything. On the contrary, I know what its like to spend a Saturday pushing through some brain fog to bang out a few thousand words. Its a lot of fucking work, and it is hard, and I do not ever want to advocate doing something like that to someone after they put so much creative effort into something unless both parties are engaging on the thing in some sort of capacity where I have that role for some reason (clearly not the case here!). I'm not trying to throw shade on anyone's writing process or anything like that either-- I consider you, the whole QM team and a significant portions of the thread to be friends of mine in some capacity or another.
But at the end of the day I think some measure of realism is needed here. It's been about 600 chapters and almost eight years worth of story and closing in on ten thousand pages of messages going on in this thread. The playerbase has spent a significant portion of that going something to the effect of "Okay and after Insert Current Problem is done, then we can do the cool stuff we've been wanting to do!". But that doesn't really end up materializing much. We are still having chapters where a character essentially berates the PoV character for most of it for something that either went unnoticed or we thought was handled reasonably. At what point do you have to just shrug and go "Okay, well, I don't know what it is, but regardless of the object level reasons why, years of evidence suggests they just aren't going to be able to Get It and stay on top of all of this." when it comes to some of this sociopolitical stuff?
(And it's okay if that answer is "I dunno" or "Never" or whatever it ends up being too, but this does not inspire much hope for me personally with respect to this being a fun and engaging experience for me to participate in.)
There's been a decent amount of talk about mechanical rebalancing and rework and incentive structures and all that recently, insomuch as "Provide reasons for the playerbase to do things" is concerned, but I would just like to highlight this general phenomenon of "We did not explicitly address Thing in plan" => "Problems happened" as being something that (from my perspective) is at least one large cause of why that does not happen, intentionally or not: if problems happen when we ignore things and it just ends up creating a chapter where someone dresses down the PoV character for most of it, then... well, who wants that? I certainly don't, and it means that either this becomes an actually very stressful or unpleasant experience on the player side of things ("(Thing) must be addressed or there will be problems!") that tends to be pretty effort intensive for all of those involved, or it results in some boring stuff that needs to be directly handled (which sometimes means that its going to trigger a chapter thats likely to be unpleasant to read, or an interlude and then a chapter that is likely to be unpleasant to read, depending on some contextual conditions), or it causes a chain reaction of chapters that just look like "These characters talked about some stuff and managed some relationship drama stuff and some misc. social nonsense." (which is a thing that I feel is just not super compelling for most of us or most of you outside of some specific situations).
There are some other vague thoughts there, but I don't really have a good way of articulating them besides saying "It's been 600 chapters and approximately eight years. At what point can we let the mechanical aspects stand, modulo the universe out by some of the petty sociopolitical drama and call it even, and just play the game out?"
I am trying not be a downer/saltposter/sadpony here but again sorry if came off that way
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Noumero
Omit Needless Words
- Point 1: Sure. If something looks completely insane from the IC perspective, it's fine if the story overrides the players even when their decisions would've led to a good result. Indeed, it's more of a...
- Imagine a sliding scale from "outcome-negative OOC behavior" to "outcome-positive OOC behavior", with "whatever is most in-character for Hazou to do" being the center. The closer you get to an edge, the more OOC it gets.
- Like: [-.......h.......+].
- Now imagine a closed interval [A; B] within it, bounding how OOC Hazou is allowed to act as the result of player choices. A "fair" interval would put A the same distance from the left edge as B is from the right edge. Player decisions can help or hinder to the same degree, and it's up to them to play well.
- [-...[A....h....B]...+]
- What I'm arguing for is moving A farther from the left edge. Put a stricter upper bound on how much we're allowed to screw Hazou up.
- [-......[A.h....B]...+]
- I'm not arguing for moving B closer to the right edge. I. e.: "if something looks completely insane from the IC perspective, it's fine if the story overrides the players". So post-switch Hazou would still freak out at IR.
- Imagine a sliding scale from "outcome-negative OOC behavior" to "outcome-positive OOC behavior", with "whatever is most in-character for Hazou to do" being the center. The closer you get to an edge, the more OOC it gets.
- Point 2: That doesn't seem relevant? "Let's open the portal to the afterlife!" is an external challenge that has nothing to do with how our choices are handled. I'm not arguing that the story's narrative should become putty in our hands; if we decide on an ambitious goal, it should remain simulationistically challenging. (Indeed, that's also the challenge I would relish, and the risks inherent in which I'm conscious of and would accept.)
Great disclaimer by the way, seconded. That's the spirit with which I also mean to engage here, apologies if that doesn't come through.
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- Location
- Yes.
And with this, we have officially solved the second of Leaf's major supply shortages!
Spector29
It Only Gets Worse From Here
I actually am appreciating the meta-narrative discussion about player-vs-QM expectations of the story. It distracts me from my general reaction of, "Oh cool, another three updates of this again." Which happens whenever someone yells at us. Except this will probably be five if we're counting from when the Yuno thing started? Anyway;
If there were a vote to turn the slider from Game to Story, I'd definitely be interested. Plan-making is intense, difficult, and honestly feels fully out of the question for a medium-casual lurker like me. I'm not the audience that even wants to play Marked For Death in the context of it being a game, because it's difficult and characters I like yell at me or are sad when I'm wrong. Looking at the discussions of some of the plans I've been around to discuss, a lot of the times we'd have to be doing complex literature analysis in order to come up with the perfect plan. As someone who isn't really involved in the Plan stuff and is solely reading this for the story, I would prefer it to be a more cohesive narrative that is occasionally steered by the players. But insofar as opinions can be invalid, I suppose I have the most invalid one of them all.
[X] Training Plan: Noburi Mednin
If there were a vote to turn the slider from Game to Story, I'd definitely be interested. Plan-making is intense, difficult, and honestly feels fully out of the question for a medium-casual lurker like me. I'm not the audience that even wants to play Marked For Death in the context of it being a game, because it's difficult and characters I like yell at me or are sad when I'm wrong. Looking at the discussions of some of the plans I've been around to discuss, a lot of the times we'd have to be doing complex literature analysis in order to come up with the perfect plan. As someone who isn't really involved in the Plan stuff and is solely reading this for the story, I would prefer it to be a more cohesive narrative that is occasionally steered by the players. But insofar as opinions can be invalid, I suppose I have the most invalid one of them all.
[X] Training Plan: Noburi Mednin
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