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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Zampano said:
The Hivemind's deliberations are a poor barometer for Hazo's moral judgment. We have only very course control over his actions and the iterative plan making process hammers out most outlier voter beliefs. The various [] Armageddon Initiative votes do not even rise to the level of (Watsonian) intrusive thoughts, imo.
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I dunno, the vote to go to Rain with Itachi rather than remain in Leaf failed very narrowly, with record voter turnout and could feasibly have won. Of course the situation has since changed with the playerbase by and large resolving to oppose Akatsuki, so far, but we have yet to even make concrete steps in that direction. Similarly, cooperating with Orochimaru is seen as an option, just as going missing is one. A lot can change within the time it will take us to be ready to leave and make the final call to do so, and Hazou-the-character has hardly decided on anything beyond grasping at possible keys to power and seeing what happens.

Plus, its a quest, expecting the protagonist to stay the course and follow a sole overaching plan indefinitely runs contrary to the very idea. Agreeing on what Seal research to do in what order can already be problematic, to speak less of comitting to multi-thousand XP build plans or major decisions that shape the story at large.
 
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OrthernLight said:
Also,

Things I'm currently worried will come back to bite us:
  • Orochimaru
  • Ami (?)
  • Naruto isn't actually that good at politics, leadership or administration?
  • I don't know how Jashinism is next going to cause us a problem, but I bet it will
  • AMITY members find out about the destruction of Isan
  • Yuno finds out about the destruction of Isan
  • Rune failures
  • OPSEC on ES probably will be breached eventually
  • OPSEC on FOOM probably will be breached eventually
  • Isanese survivors who might know Elemental Mastery
The doomsday clocks:
  • Akatsuki reopens the afterlife rift
    • If Pain can't do the ritual again this might actually be a good thing, though
  • More dragons emerge from the Seal
  • Current dragons get impatient and attack the Seal and/or the Arachnid Clan
  • Orochimaru's research reaches a point where he's ready to unleash a plague or something
  • The slow decline of humankind
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Updates to the list of things I'm concerned about:
  • Removed:
    • "Orochimaru". He's a monster and his research may be a X-risk, but we've earned his respect and have a good working relationship, so I'm no longer concerned in the short- to medium-term
    • "Naruto isn't actually that good at politics, leadership or administration?" He seems to be handling it fine.
    • "Yuno finds out about the destruction of Isan". Kei is on it. Which is good, since we sure weren't.
  • Added:
    • Bad things might happen if the dragons are killed, since the Sage must've had a reason for sealing them instead
    • Boss casualties during the Dragonwar are likely even if we win
 
Eisenhelm said:
it seems i was really tired and defaulted to violence. my rationale was that this thing it's what takes memories and experiences from the dead. putting a time limit on how long we have to save them.
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Yeah the vibe does seem like those two things are related but lore sources are also fallible and setting out to kill a god(?) is a big commitment to make based on something we inferred from what a cool old guy was reasonable to explain to Hazo out of what he knew.
 
eaglejarl said:
Five minutes farther on, they were attacked by Ken, Bosatsu, and Mirai. The three genin were still genin and Team Uplift were now hardened warriors with support from the terrifyingly skilled Yuno and Satsuko. They cut through the phantoms like soft cheese, barely slowing down in the process. Kei didn't even have time to attack before the enemy were all dead.
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eaglejarl said:
"Were you able to harm the shades?"

Kei hesitated. "My initial attack was unsuccessful," she admitted. "I have several ideas for followup attempts."

"Such as?"

"The shades are highly resistant to physical damage," Kei said reluctantly. "They are harmed primarily by chakra-based attacks: in this encounter that meant Noburi's Water Whip ninjutsu and the attacks of the summons."

"Satsuko bit them!" Yuno said, raising her axe and her eyebrows at the same time.

"Hence why I say 'highly resistant' instead of 'immune'. Although my kunai were ineffective on their own, they may be more successful if I use ones with tags attached. This space is too small for explosives, but the chakra embedded in the tag should still be sufficient to cause damage as it passes through them."
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@eaglejarl was Satsuko able to damage shades in the first two fights in the cave?

Suggested Possible Answers:
  • Yes, but that was retconned after a convincing argument from @Paperclipped.
  • Yes, but it was chakra being weird and it didn't happen again.
  • No, Yuno meant something else in fight one and she supported the team in non-DPS ways in fight two.
EDIT: Yes, I saw this. That's why I'm asking about those two quotes. A purely doyalist answer is perfectly fine @eaglejarl.
eaglejarl said:
This is reflected in the narrative
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It was a lil annoying to read Kame-boss dialogues in all caps in this and the previous chapter. I imagine it might have been a lil annoying to write it like that as well.
 
Zampano said:
snip
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Crunbum said:
I dunno, the vote to go to Rain with Itachi rather than remain in Leaf failed very narrowly, with record voter turnout and could feasibly have won.
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I agree with Crunbum here; the 'join Akatsuki' thing was hardly a flight of fancy. Nearly a majority of voters went for it.

And its not a matter of whether we are opposed strongly to someone's goals. Yes, we rather disagree with Hidan killing a bunch of people and probably a lot of things that everyone else in Akatsuki does, and a lot of things Oro does, etc. It's that you specifically said that 'evil' is the category you put people in when it's "Delende Est", or no-holds-barred, or just-kill-them, etc.

Zampano said:
The label "evil" is a useful demarcation line between the class of people Delenda Est and the class of people who are complex enough to be included in negotiations.
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Evil people are people we don't negotiate with, we don't work with, we don't do anything but oppose to the maximum extent possible; that is my best understanding of what you said. By that strict definition no one in MFD is evil because we've literally almost started working with everyone who has been brought up in this discussion. We actually asked for a apprenticeship with Oro, we very nearly joined Akatsuki in full knowledge that we'd be working with Hidan, and we actually did work with Oro just a few chapters ago.

Of course we're going to oppose him later. We're going to oppose anyone later who isn't literally us; it's just a question of how much. It just so happens that we're going to have to oppose Oro and Hidan quite a lot, quite possibly to the point of killing them. But we've factually not put them in a different category like this.
 
eaglejarl said:
XP AWARD: 2 This update was only a couple hours.
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SC XP for this update

Hazou: none, since he's on the 7th Path

Kei: (2*1.7)*0.8=2.72xp
Kei: 2*1.7= 3.4xp

Edit: forgot about Kei's combat stagnancy, rip. Fixed.
Edit2: idk if we have to account for stagnancy in the thing, so I've included both.
 
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Personally got to disagree, all caps is very nice on my dyslexic brain. Considering stealing the turtle scroll just for better boss communication skills (hey I've left jobs for that very reason before. Whack)
 
Crunbum said:
I dunno, the vote to go to Rain with Itachi rather than remain in Leaf failed very narrowly, with record voter turnout and could feasibly have won. Of course the situation has since changed with the playerbase by and large resolving to oppose Akatsuki, so far, but we have yet to even make concrete steps in that direction. Similarly, cooperating with Orochimaru is seen as an option, just as going missing is one. A lot can change within the time it will take us to be ready to leave and make the final call to do so, and Hazou-the-character has hardly decided on anything beyond grasping at possible keys to power and seeing what happens.
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In fairness, my understanding of things is that basically all the players agree on two things:
  1. "We want to open the rift and recover Jiraiya and Akane."
  2. "We want to prevent Akatsuki from having power going forward"
With item #1 there are at least some of the players who append "and a bunch of other people" to it, but that might or might not be universal.

I think item #2 could be rewritten as "we want to kill Akatsuki" but that seems to be an implementation issue and not the actual goal. I suspect that if it was found that "banish them to another dimension where there are no people" was found to be easy and "kill them all" was found to be very hard, people would be fine with the banishment option.

My impression is that joining Akatsuki was a purely instrumental action in pursuit of objective #1. I don't think anyone wanted to be in Akatsuki long term, only for as long as it took to work with Sasori on getting the rift open with the intent to dip and proceed to objective #2 immediately thereafter.

EDIT: Typo
 
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eaglejarl said:
I think item #2 could be rewritten as "we want to kill Akatsuki" but that seems to be an implementation issue and not the actual goal. I suspect that if it was found that "banish them to another dimension where there are no people" was found to be easy and "kill them all" was found to be very hard, people would be fine with the banishment option.
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I think you can summarize most folks' interpretations of Item#2 as "Remove Akatsuki as relevant opposition on the game board" in most cases. I would settle for a lot of things that fit that descriptor, though my first choice is closer to "Banish them to another dimension for at least a decade or something".
 
eaglejarl said:
I don't think anyone wanted to be in Akatsuki long term
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Hello, nice to meet yah!

Hanging around and making sure Pain is on the right track sounds fun, though I'd want to eventually head back to Konoha to make sure MARI is continuing its Uplift work while he remains enforcing AMITY in his super-group.

Does that count?
 
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eaglejarl said:
My impression is that joining Akatsuki was a purely instrumental action in pursuit of objective #1. I don't think anyone wanted to be in Akatsuki long term, only for as long as it took to work with Sasori on getting the rift open with the intent to dip and proceed to objective #2 immediately thereafter.
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I'm not so sure about that. Personally, I don't much care *where* we are, as long as our friends are safe and we get to work towards meaningful goals that are aligned with the endgame we want to achieve, whether we achieve them by going missing or cooperating with Orochimaru/Akatsuki or finding a way to do it while remaining in the village.

To that end, I view our multi-year stay in Leaf as purely instrumental towards that goal, just like I would joining Akatsuki - in fact the latter would probably have us dealing with less bullshit on the way and offer a better risk to impact ratio on our efforts, hence why I originally voted for it. So yes, joining them would be an instrumental decision, but not any more than anything else because at the end of the day we only really care about two things - our goals and the people we meet along the way.
 
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I also viewed akatsuki as well aligned (relative to the alternatives) to uplift and good to ally with. Although recently worried if without Pain's guiding influence they will not be uplifty enough.
 
RandomOTP said:
Hm. Okay, so this probably holds somewhat true for the minatoseal chakra batteries we plan on making. If nothing else, it gives us a starting point to plan from.

So, let's talk delineated boundaries, since that is going to be most useful for storage, as per Word of Kagome.

  • Personal chakra, instead of environmental. We graft a chakra battery onto ourselves, and it stores our personal chakra that we direct into it. It doesn't seek out to drain environmental chakra that might turn us into stone (or turn around and drain our chakra from us) instead. Each battery seal would need to researched to synergize/resonate with the recipient, but I feel like veterancy would pile up quickly and make that less of a problem over time.
  • Since we're limiting this to our own personal chakra signatures (the strength of which might be determined by our normal chakra capacity), it feels like such a chakra battery would be limited in capacity to the amount the recipient has at time of researching the seal.
    • This will also help our chakra coils tank the injection/infusion of stored chakra. The greater the amount of stored chakra, the greater the force of the infusion hitting your chakra coils (would limiting the output of each infusion mitigate that?).
    • If this is true, then you wouldn't want the chakra battery to be larger than your natural chakra coils... otherwise, you're coils could be hurt during the infusion process, itself.
      • This isn't too bad, since it still ~doubles our chakra capacity. We should probably assume that the effectiveness is going to be more akin to 3/4ths or 2/3rds our capacity, though. Plan for unforeseen complications, you know?
  • Containment. I feel like riffing off of Tailed Beast Seals would work, here. We would be placing the seal onto ourselves. Tailed Beast Seals can be placed on a living person just fine, so I don't see why this wouldn't also work. We're basically making an offbrand version of the Tailed Beast Seal, anyway. We're not even trying to seal away a fragment of the Tenfold Beast, we're just trying to seal our own chakra... should be far more doable, imo.
    • This would allow us to transfer our internal reserves to the battery during rest days, and build up a nice reserve.
    • It would also help take the chakra cost of FOOM down for Noburi.
  • Triggers. We know that chakra manipulations are a thing, and that handseals are mnemonics that help guide that. We could create handseals to trigger the storage of chakra into the chakra battery, and a different pair of handseals to trigger the release? Charging the battery wouldn't matter (handseals could be as complicated/long as you like), but maybe we should shoot for "supplemental action" speed for the "access chakra battery" portion? Sure, getting a free action or reflexive would be nice, but... not, perhaps, realistic.
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In light of Oro's recent lecture on how chakra works, I wonder if there isn't a different approach:
Since human chakra is everywhere, and what the chakra coils do is separate it from the other fourteen kinds, it might be more feasible to make a functional chakra battery by starting with an effect that prevents chakra mixing within a seal array or construct. Then you could probably put chakra in just by emitting it the way you normally do for adhesion/repulsion, and maybe get it back out by sitting in the construct, where the ambient chakra is somewhat pre-filtered so your coils don't have to do as much work. Might be harder to make this portable even if it does work though.
 
RandomOTP said:
> Marinate the Akatsuki in the afterlife for a few decades, and pull them out when they're genin.
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They can leave whenever they want but the ferryman charges a steep toll, e.g. Ino gets to sit down with your chakra-drained and dehydrated ass until she feels confident you've spilled all your secrets.

...I wonder if Kakuzu is wandering around there, and what he'd look like if we pulled him out. Original body?
 
eaglejarl said:
Stunt: Earth Infusion
Cost: 125 XP
Prerequisites:

  • The Sealsmith stunt
  • Sealing: 40
  • Earthshaping XX or another source of infusable material. The crystal from the cave in Honey is infusable. (We're obscuring the exact level of Earthshaping required as it is information Hazō does not have access to; nonetheless, he is confident he can imbue stone with the requisite quality for making 3D seals given greater skill in Earthshaping.)
  • Someone to teach you OR sufficient 3D seal reference material (see below)
Effect: Grants the double-cost skill 'Primordial Sealing' at level 0. This skill allows the creation of three-dimensional seals. Hazō is confident that there is sufficient overlap with regular sealing that some of his existing knowledge will be useful with three-dimensional seals. (In mechanical terms, part of the Sealing skill will be applied as a bonus to Primordial Sealing.)
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Theoretically, could Kagome learn this right now? He meets all the requirements…
 
Jashin's Breath Rune

A rune that skews probability. Inside the AoE all FD rolls are altered. The rune lets you do one or more of the following:
  • Provides a flat bonus on FD rolls
  • Reroll and take the higher roll
  • Reroll until higher than X
  • +X temporary fate points (only to be used on rerolls)
Exact effect to be determined while researching (ie. Hazou tries all of these and keeps any functionality that is remotely possible)
 
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Sir Stompy said:
Jashin's Breath Rune

A rune that skews probability. Inside the AoE all FD rolls are altered. The rune lets you do one or more of the following:
  • Provides a flat bonus on FD rolls
  • Reroll and take the higher roll
  • Reroll until higher than X
  • +X temporary fate points (only to be used on rerolls)
Exact effect to be determined while researching (ie. Hazou tries all of these and keeps any functionality that is remotely possible)
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Have it cover the entirety of Leaf and boost the rolls of people the creator deems allies while diminishing those of their enemies..
 
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