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
Am I hallucinating this or did you guys not say at one point that starting work on a sufficiently challenging seal would be enough to unstagnate Hazō? Because if not we have the issue that challenging seals will inevitably take a long time to research, and it may not be possible to prevent Hazō from spending a substantial portion of his time stagnant.
(Also, it really seems like you're basing the sealing-domain unstagnation entirely on the sealing skill—the rift seal 0 calligraphy is said to be 'fairly tough', will it count for anything if we finish that? Will it count for anything if/when we finish our first primordial seal? Does it count for nothing that Hazō is already challenging himself quite a bit relative to what he can do without SSA* (i.e. literally his own inherent sealing skill) or FP? Are FP going to just be the price of admission to ever unstagnate sealing?
* (I realize you guys probably don't enjoy listening to me being salty about this, and it's unlikely to change your mind, but I feel like I have to point out: if stagnancy is supposed, in some regards, to represent the increased amount of training required to maintain your skills when you aren't challenging yourself—Hazō doesn't need to maintain his SSA-related sealing knowledge! It's eldritch bullshit caused by an interaction between the Out and his bloodline. He shouldn't need to train to maintain that knowledge, only to maintain his base sealing stat, which has already been well-challenged.))
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We made the following statement:
Hazō indeed did not take stagnancy penalties on the XP earned in this chapter -- but if he wants to be done with the stagnancy barrier for good, he will need to do more than just start a challenging project.
We are considering both, but Sealing is more important. When judging whether a seal is challenging, we'll use Hazō's SSA-adjusted score and we don't account for any FP expenditure -- the same way that we don't adjust for prep days. In other words, using prep days or SSA or FP doesn't affect how much progress on stagnancy a project grants.
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That makes sense, my bad.
He had 4FP going into this chapter, right? And it looks like he only did 2 invokes with the sages, so he should have had 2 left, before spending one on the 4FSoP research roll, leaving one unaccounted for.
I am now more confused about where exactly Hazō's FP went, but if I could travel back in time (and also into a fictional universe) I would tell him: either talk to the Toad sages before you start doing any challenging research, and then abort some or all of that research if you don't have the FP to do it safely because you spent them talking to the Toad sages, or don't spend any FP on talking to the Toad sages and accept that you may not persuade them. Researching 4FSoP without SSA was a big dumb dumb mistake we should not have made, but it would have been easier to avoid this sealing failure with more FP (you can spend multiple FP to reroll the same thing multiple times, right?).
This experience has been extra unfun for me because I mostly don't understand the rules (nor, frankly, do I care to) so I often get confused about sealing research mechanics and don't know how to assess the risk we are under at any given time. Not to mention a large part of playing this quest well involves unwritten knowledge about how the QMs interpret plans—which, to be fair, they are already unreasonably predictable relative to normal human standards, but it's still very frustrating when they do something unexpected.
Which is to say: I am not equipped to figure out how to avoid this mistake in the future. My hope is that the players who do understand the rules in depth, and have years of implicit knowledge about how the QMs act and interpret plans, can put together a new sealing SoP and some best practices for plans which can make sealing failures less likely.
This last chapter has been unreasonably frustrating for me, so I'm probably going to take a step back from participation in the quest for a while. I'll undoubtedly return at some point, but I need a break.
- Location
- Texas
The short of it is that some of the player base really wanted to get 4FSoP right now instead of waiting for an SSA slot to open up, so we did the roll with prep and no SSA. It was demonstrably not enough. I probably should have argued against it harder, but I was tired of having the "Just wait, we'll do it after RRB" conversation.
In the future, we should only do genin seals or chuunin seals we have notes for on non-SSA slots. Not a jonin seal with notes, as we know now that it's definitely not enough
- Location
- USA
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- He/Him
Option 1: Train slightly slower (i.e. use one or two fewer training blocks)
Option 2: Ask your adopted mom / big sis to suffer brain damage to protect you from your own decisions
Sure, why not.
This is (largely) my mistake. I got overconfident after Chapter 510. In the future I absolutely agree, chunin or lower.
- Location
- Texas
I hope the frustration goes away, we thankfully didn't lose much this time and know Hazo's limits a bit better now.
We lost:
- A few SC slots from wasted time on 4FSoP.
- The notes to 4FSoP.
- (Gained) a medium mental consequence.
Mainly just lost a bit of time, not a huge deal. I think the victories in the chapter were bigger. Ma and Pa take Hazō seriously as a sealmaster and may be actively working on an earth element make-infusable jutsu for us. That's pretty big, considering our only other long-term solution was to level ES another AB.
I just wanted to chime in that you've been a pillar of plan-making recently and I (for one) really appreciate it. Thanks for the time you've invested.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Unrelated, but I'm making a mental note that this sealing failure would have 100% been an instant death no-save if we weren't using a Shadow Clone to do it. Granted, we only failed because we were using this in a non-SSA SC slot, but I'm still counting this as Shadow Clone saving our life. Even with the devastatingly strong clone feedback we had to survive, that's still leagues better than being at ground zero of the failure.
Truly a phenomenal jutsu. It may not make sealing research safe, nothing can, but this is the kind of failure that would have brought any other sealmaster's career to an ignominious end. And yet, here we are.
Truly a phenomenal jutsu. It may not make sealing research safe, nothing can, but this is the kind of failure that would have brought any other sealmaster's career to an ignominious end. And yet, here we are.
- Location
- Texas
[X] Sealing SOP: Research rolls not intended to remove stagnancy should be made by shadow clones.
[><] Sealing SOP: Ask your adopted mom / big sis to suffer brain damage to protect you from your own decisions
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- Yes.
[X] Sealing SOP: Ask your adopted mom / big sis to suffer brain damage to protect you from your own decisions
- Location
- Liverpool
Honestly, this is the biggest and best pitch I think we have for getting other good sealmasters SC.
- Location
- USA
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- He/Him
You can indeed spend multiple FP to reroll multiple times.
The confusion you're having over the FP is on me, not you. I bodged it up.
Regarding the 'unfun and confusing' parts...I'm sorry for that. :/ You've been a real pillar lately, and a delightful member of the community. I hope to see you again soon.
How do you figure? If Hazō had been doing the research he would still have gotten the no-save Mild, still have been hit by the strength 70 psychic attack, and still be hit by the follow-up attacks as his clones popped. What would have been different?
- Location
- Texas
The will of Jashin, of course. The most important part of research is propitiating Jashin for better RNG.
Given that *any* damage totally destroyes a shadow clone, "it destroyed a shadow clone" isn't much evidence for how much damage something does.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I mean that we would've rolled with SSA if we were using Hazou Prime, and then we probably wouldn't have had a sealing failure at all. That SSA is valuable for Fourfold research was never in question, it does a great job of finishing seals faster, our mistake was only in assuming it wasn't necessary, that we could get away with having a clone beyond our two SSA slots do it.
Counterfactual no-SC Hazou only works on one sealing project at a time and always uses SSA unless the seal is genin-level or below, and so he wouldn't have failed his Fourfold Seal of Preservation roll. But counterfactuals only mean so much when reality is what actually happened, and the reality is that a clone took the lethal hit and Hazou Prime made it out with his mind intact.
- Location
- Texas
How about the fact that the facility around it was also atomized?
And here I was thinking Jashin himself delivered us a dungeon to let us unstagnate combat (and possibly get [bark] crystal at home??)