Potential training plan brainstorming. No plans yet, would love to hear others' thoughts
Also, please check my math, it's 2:30 AM and I certainly messed something up somewhere.
I tried to go through these several times, but I go cross-eyed two-three lines in. Please use line breaks, Oli. I love reading training plans, long- and short-term, but current formatting makes it near impossible for me :\
Actually, Mari's Stealth and Awareness are not exceptionally high for a jounin. At some point my estimate was that she has 18 Awareness and Stealth, that would be pretty low against Jounin opponents. That's more of an educated guess, if someone wants to prove me wrong by digging out all the instances of Mari using those skills and putting them through one of those dice probability thingies people have made, feel free.
18 Awareness is confirmed, info comes from sweet sweet times rolls weren't hidden
Her Stealth was once rolled at 21, though that might or might not have included bonuses. It's consistent with other Stealth rolls we saw from her, fwit.
Deception is confirmed at least 21 dice, saw it rolled with 22 once, again mods unknown but souonds about right.
Mari's Taijutsu is a mystery for effin-ages, because her rolls on it are made by Spiders Georg or something. 18-20 is my best guess, but hard to know for sure since she either rolls 800-something, or 1000+ but while both injured and on chakra. Go figure the mods there :\
Almost forgot about this. I'm not really sure what kind of feedback you want so I'll just ramble on about what in my opinion went wrong with the mission:
The failure happened after we did the room scouting and Yami showed up. At that point we had basically three options:
- Abort the mission
- Spy some more
- Make moves and do something
I don't really feel like arguing about option 1 again, suffice to say I don't regret taking the mission or our attempt to go through with it.
Option 2 would've been the careful, sensible choice. Just wait a day and see what happens.
Option 3 is what we went with. It was the high risk, high reward option and the most dangerous of the three.
Looking like this, the option 2 is definitely better than option 3. So why did we pick option 3 over the safer option 2? My reasoning at the time went something like this:
We didn't really know what was going to happen between Joutaro and Yami, suddenly our deadline moved from
maybe three days to
maybe ten minutes. Our moves thus far had been pretty passive and preparing, so that definitely pushed towards doing something here and now. Just look at the plan before that. It was very scouting oriented and careful, which lead to EJ stating that he can't write it as an update and gave us 1 XP for it. Maybe I shouldn't have let that influence my own thinking, but I couldn't really see us following that with
another scouting plan.
The plan itself could've been better. We tried to take into account all the likely options of what would happen next, and I think that diluted our efforts so far that our actual break-in part of the plan wasn't that good. I think we could've aced the thing had we just put in more effort and made a better plan with a more detailed break-in section.
(
@Muer'ci I'm not trying to single you out as the planner. The plans are team efforts no matter who writes them and that particular plan did have my personal seal of approval. Everyone who contributed, didn't contribute, voted for the plan, or didn't vote at all shares the responsibility for the plan as usual.)
TL;DR: We should've been either more careful and gather even more information after Yami showed up OR made a better break-in plan.
So the discussion wandered away from "what did we do wrong" topic, but I wanted to drop my 0.02$ before the next chapter.
I'm not sure how true this is for everyone else, but I, at least, got carried away by writing (that's a compliment
@eaglejarl )
So much in fact, that I forgot that Mari is not entirely reliable as a narrator.
There has been a lot of talk on why we didn't go with "wait and see" approach when Yummy arrived. In retrospect, I went with the action-heavy plan because the vibe I got from Mari's internal dialogue was "there's little time left, we do this now or never". Deadline going down from days to hours made an impact, too. There was this urgency, and I got swept away, when in truth, waiting for J to leave would've been much better. Intercepting civilians alone would've been if not easier, then at least less risky.
Though speaking of civilians, Mari caught me here as well. Her description of Yummy combined with musings on how easy it is to deal with civilians left me so convinced Yummy wasn't a ninja that when ch63 dropped I didn't make Yummy=Yami connection until it was spelled out. I thought it was another guy. The uncannily fitting nickname actually made it harder to realise they are the same person
I guess one of many lessons learned here is that if they look civilian and act civilian we don't assume they're civilian untill Nobby cops a feel with his tentacle.
Re: break-in plan, I still believe that outlining several approaches was a good idea, since leaving details to our team tend to lead to sub-par results. Kei is great at improving our ideas, but when we give her nothing to improve, that backfires.
That said, plans absolutely could've been better. Like, we knew J had caltrops in his room. It wasn't that much of a stretch that civs would have them too, and plan for it. So instead of sneaking around Mari&Kei would clean the floor first. Would've rid us of those pesky mass combat maluses just fine, too.
Should've planned for battle as well, before going in. This way we'd have a discussed plan prepared, and not force Mari to improv. We knew she's not good under pressure from Liberator's fortress. We should not have forgotten.
That kind of thing.
Incidentally, this is why I'd rather write a longer plan and have half of it cut off, then plan for one moment and leave us flailing in the next. Thinking ahead is good, and adjusting ideas is better than not having any at all.
The way I see it, all questers have a responsibility to their QM's to be interesting. EagleJarl and Velorien are putting in something like 10+ hours a week here. Voting to be boring would be disrespectful of both their time, and ours.
I don't have a strong opinion for or against the merchant empire, but I do know that I will always vote against being a boring coward.
I.. suppose TPK would free up quite a bit of their time. So, it's kind of a responsible thing to do from a certain point of view???
???
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