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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Regarding the convincing/brainwashing Orochimaru thing, are we attempting to do it somehow using pure logic and the content of our plans, or are we actually going to level Rapport for it?
 
Hm. I have an idle thought.

We know that suicide missions are allowed in Leaf, but that ninja have to specifically request them from the Hokage, who may deign to deny a ninja their request (which may drive said ninja to simply commit suicide, without a mission, which may or may not carry a stigma of "you weren't productive in your death" or "you denied the Hokage" or perhaps even "the Hokage denied you the right to be of service to Leaf in your death, this is a bad look for the Hokage" depending on cultural norms).

Asuma was an experienced ninja before he became Hokage. Meatgrinder being what it is, it is likely that he had many friends and family die/choose suicide missions before he became Hokage. And, with the Collapse and the War, likely became inoculated to the tragedy of suicide mission requests soon thereafter.

Naruto, however, is young. He's a jonin, certainly. S-rank, even. However, he's a teenager without Aura. And he values agency so much that he has a unique relationship with normal, non-cognitively independent Shadow Clones. And he has a unique history with suicide (or at least "failed attempts at forced personality drift via Shadow Clones").

I predict that this aspect of the Hokage's responsibilities will weigh on Naruto the most. How will be balance out "Leaf needs manpower," and "maybe this person just needs a communal support and care" with "right to suicide" and "if I deny them a suicide mission, will they just off themselves on their own?"

It's interesting, at least, and in ways that are unique to Naruto, when compared to Hiashi and Asuma... or even Jiraiya, who was a spy master extraordinaire, and thus likely knew how to maximally leverage such a "trade."
 
Rafin said:
Regarding the convincing/brainwashing Orochimaru thing, are we attempting to do it somehow using pure logic and the content of our plans, or are we actually going to level Rapport for it?
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Same way we did with Ami, I'd imagine. Well, not exactly the same way -- they're different people and have different buttons to push, but. Don't need social stats for that.
 
Cariyaga said:
Same way we did with Ami, I'd imagine. Well, not exactly the same way -- they're different people and have different buttons to push, but. Don't need social stats for that.
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It's very doubtful that there will be no social rolls whatsoever involved.

Regardless, we had many more social levers to work with on Ami. She wasn't about to kill Kei's family unless she had no choice. She wanted to belong to a family, etc.

Oro feels no such compunctions and desires.
 
So the thread has come to the rough conclusion that Orochimaru is the best place to place our efforts right now, yeah?

I propose we research a two element Rune. Each Runic element is made by a different runemaster. The two sides are incredibly similar; the differences only obvious if you have a copy in your brain, or (some difficulty examination check) after seeing both rune elements.

The runic array allows for the minds of the infusers to join, to better understand each other, etc etc. It's the forged in fire stunt copying thing, built to give Hazō a significant edge if Orochimaru betrays Hazō (snuncle would never!)

This is the research project we are willing to give him primordial sealing with: to give anyone primordial sealing. Let's make it fully conditional on having a copy of the forged in fire stunt, by fiat of refusing to teach anyone any other rune.

Considering his esoteric physical prowess, he really doesn't have anything to fear physically from Hazō... until we make any single runic weapon more complicated than Boom. I think his pride, greed at having Primordial sealing and general underestimation of Hazō would lead to him accepting the deal. He might not even cheat! He does have the pride of a xianxia Young Master lol
 
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    • DanZapman said:
    In the sense that I want to kill him and consider cooperation a bad idea, yes. But the thread consensus seems like some form of Oro trade is happening.
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    The thing about monsters like Oro is they're usually pretty willing to turn that edge against themselves if their world view demands it - he promised himself he'd be immortal, not human.

    If we show him his anti-social tendencies decrease the chances of him living forever, he'd be willing to change. IRL that wouldn't do anything without a decade of therapy and a whole bunch of other stuff, but we have magic. Primordial magic based on emotions and communication, even! He promised himself he'd be immortal, not a monster.

    We use his current world view to get him in the FiF pod, then trust his TYS to turn him into a Very Proactive force of good lol

    It's like killing him, except we also get a probably either guilty or emotionally numb good guy mad scientist on our side.
     
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    OliWhail said:
    I have no idea what this is getting at, let alone what it would look like in practice.
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    I'm describing a runic macguffin that allows people to copy bits of their personality over to each other; mechanically it'd let us share Forged in Fire with anyone we want. I really really want orochimaru to have a copy of Forged in Fire.

    We'd try to give Oro forged in fire, Oro would go along with it to get primordial sealing, or possible to get a perfect assistant to join him in immortality.
     
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    Wouldn't it make sense to wait for team Lee to get us some substrate before engaging with Orochimaru? As far as I understood we can neither research new seals nor demonstrate already researched ones.
     
    Twinnstars said:
    I'm describing a runic macguffin that allows people to copy bits of their personality over to each other;
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    Aaaah, I thought you meant doing this just by talking to him and thus was quite confused.

    After all, Orochimaru would presumably feel he has abundant evidence that his current worldview is *very* successful at keeping him alive; I don't think there exists an argument that could overcome the weight of that evidence by sheer force of logic or rhetoric.
     
    Rafin said:
    Wouldn't it make sense to wait for team Lee to get us some substrate before engaging with Orochimaru? As far as I understood we can neither research new seals nor demonstrate already researched ones.
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    We buried the Rune in a hidden Gouketsu facility. So we can just show it to Oro anytime. And Tsunade can confirm it. It also tells Oro we told him asap (as soon as the prototype we made was shown to work, before acquiring sufficient substrate for more), which is helpful for goodwill.
     
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    OliWhail said:
    Aaaah, I thought you meant doing this just by talking to him and thus was quite confused.

    After all, Orochimaru would presumably feel he has abundant evidence that his current worldview is *very* successful at keeping him alive; I don't think there exists an argument that could overcome the weight of that evidence by sheer force of logic or rhetoric.
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    Then he utterly fails as a scientist, or even a person with a spark of curiosity

    Kakuzu's methods of keeping himself alive were *also* very successful at keeping him alive, until they didn't. Kakuzu's method towards immortality had some giant blind spots, where practically anything is an out of context problem. Orochimaru should be perfectly capable of understanding that his own methods have their own blind spots - his mindset is entirely based around finding and removing them, after all. He needs someone to spell the long term consequences out to him. When he's anti-social he's constantly opening himself up to threats, both from lacking knowledge and by actively creating enemies.

    Also we could totally unnerve him a bit by making constant references to that conversation about Kakuzu's death, then present it as just the most obvious recent example to talk about. Keep up, Oro

    We are a social immortal, who will absolutely outpace him as a solitary immortal. Being a one man island simply doesn't matter if a coalition of less powerful immortals eventually banishes you to the Out. That means that right now, already, Hazō is just as much of an existential threat to Oro as the Dragons are.

    Right now, he thinks that individual people fundamentally don't matter, because they'll cease having an impact on his agency within a negligible portion of his life. We want everyone to be immortal. Those two ideas are absolutely completely incompatible, and if Oro isn't careful he'll only realize that as we're sealing him away


    Yeah, in short I'm looking at Oro the same way he's looking at Kakuzu: sure you're personally powerful and hilariously resilient against esoteric threats, but he's going to die to a coalition of allies within the century, or just to the gradual end of the world since he doesn't see the need to do anything about it.
     
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    I don't remember exactly what the QMs have said about this, but would increasing Orochimaru's Empathy stat (as through FiF) actually change his personality?
     
    Jaedar said:
    I agree that this is probably the highest impact concession we could get out of Oro. But I also doubt we will get it. The man/monster cares first and foremost about time to further his own research and understanding. He would likely consider "wasting" 25-200 hours of his time/effort to be too expensive, especially if he is already close to figuring out lithosealing on his own.
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    We might be able to more easily secure a lesser but still viable angle of approach, perhaps something along the lines of "when we collaborate in the future, promise not to aura-blast me into oblivion if I say something stupid". It doesn't, on the face of it, cost much from him, and we can justify it as a minor line item by talking about how our idea-generation process involves a lot of "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" (this was even how we figured out skywalkers, it was one idea in a whole sheaf of papers we showed Kagome one day, shoutouts to the "sky pogo stick" we came up with in the same batch).

    Once he's agreed to it, we now have much more leeway to raise the topics we want to discuss on our own. The promise only stretches so far, of course, but there will be some degree of Orochimaru consciously reigning back his temper because he promised to be patient with us, giving us opportunity after opportunity to say things that contradict his worldview and sow the seeds for changing his mind on things.

    This works best if we pair it with some more general request to collaborate with him more, most likely on lithosealing topics as we both learn and explore the field. In all honesty, "maximize collaboration on lithosealing" was already a shortlist item for me, because even if we mutually agree to not share our best rune ideas, the ones that we'd want to actually turn into secret weapons, I am very confident that we'd get a lot of value just by seeing what directions Orochimaru's taking his research on any given day and piggybacking off of what projects proved worthwhile or not for him[1]​, to say nothing of the value we'd get from having Orochimaru of the Sannin boosting our research rolls. And as asks go, it should be relatively inexpensive, since he would naturally gain from our own expertise as well. Really, putting such an ask into our list of requests would more be described as "setting expectations and ground rules for our future collaborations" than anything else, and I think that's something we can very much achieve and leverage to lay the foundations for changing Orochimaru's mind.

    [1] One of the biggest constraints on our approach to sealing research is that we don't know what's possible or not and so the majority of our thinking is spent on adjusting and refining effects that we already know are possible. We hear of LBF and think up ARS, we add a chakra adhesion trigger to Air Domes, we take directional explosives and make rocket boots out of them, etc. If we're good at utilizing sealing effects that we know about but bad at discovering new ones, Orochimaru is the opposite: time and time again he just has the most ridiculous seal effects that we would never have tried on our own, but he never turned Air Dome upside down in all the time he had it. Just being near Orochimaru while he makes some insane rune effect we never thought of would be immensely beneficial to our own research.
     
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    The problem is we do think of those novel seal ideas, but the only things that ever get voted through are the things that the thread agrees seems

    1. Within our skill limit
    2. Strong enough to be worth our time
    3. Reasonable in setting

    Variations of existing seals easily satisfy 2 and 3, leaving all the bickering over 1, which is solvable with a prep day.


    The only way to get novel research through is by doing ALL the novel research, since otherwise the various blocs all invested in one specific seal never get any traction.

    I'm just waiting for Hazō to have enough SC hours that I can direct my own research *haughty sniff*
     
    acidshill said:
    I don't remember exactly what the QMs have said about this, but would increasing Orochimaru's Empathy stat (as through FiF) actually change his personality?
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    FiF isn't an aspect, which honestly it probably should be due to how much of an impact it has on Hazō, so it doesn't have an inherent tie to a characters personality via the mechanics

    That being said, the mechanics exist to model the simulation; losing the psychological effect that makes you more violent and isolationist from trauma and gaining the one that makes you more and more desperate to connect with people should absolutely have a strong moderating influence on Oro's behaviour.
     
    Tbh, I think our current capabilities and IC information can do alot within the setting. For instance, we have speculated on artificial chakra metal synthesis and should have all the tools we need to try it. If anything, our desired research location, time, and planning for risks would seem to be the only thing holding us back.
     
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