7.4 KiB
Marked for Death - A Rational Naruto Quest - Ch 28: Let The Bodies Hit the Floor
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Author: u/FuguofAnotherWorld Roll the Dice on Fate*
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Score: 16
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Created: 2016-03-21T20:13:09
Post:
Comments:
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+7] Roll the Dice on Fate (8 minutes later)
This chapter is all about high stakes ninja on ninja combat, and is appropriately bloody considering in this story ninja are glass cannons. The PC's team was ambushed and mostly disabled, while the PC managed to get away and circle back, just in time to see his newest team member faced with two stronger opponents.
There is a link to the player vote in the title of the chapter.
u/TennisMaster2 [+4] (5 hours later)
Who does the majority of the writing on these? I'm curious how u/Velorien and u/eaglejarl manage the process, and what role you play in it, Fugue.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+4] Roll the Dice on Fate (6 hours later)
Well at the start the four of us essentially spent a few weeks debating/arguing/tossing around worldbuilding ideas, mechanics ideas and stuff like that until we came to a consensus. We roughed out the general geopolitical situation, tech level, power levels, some history, a general theory of chakra and sealing, and then started up the actual quest. Augsphere did most of the work on the mechanics and later helped with worldbuilding while Velorien and eaglejarl each split the writing 50/50 unless they're stumped for a scene. That happens pretty rarely, in which case whoever's online at the time will help come up with possible scenarios, bounce ideas and such.
I post under Jackercracks and help out where ever it would be helpful really, at the start that was mostly worldbuilding, coming up with cool ideas and trying to figure out the logical conclusion of people having access to certain abilities. Nowadays it's more weighted towards answering the many, many questions the thread comes up with. The player knowledge doc is 31,000 words of asked and answered questions from the players, and that's probably not even half of the actual amount in-thread.
Once the quest was running we kept refining the situation for the next couple months while the quest progressed. There was a lot of "But if X can do Y, why haven't they taken over the world yet?" and "Wait, if A knew about B, doesn't that mean Z?". We try to make the world realistic, and that means figuring out the alliances of the major powers, the characters of the geopolitical leaders, the pressures they're under from their villages, the resources they have at their disposal ect ect. We also wanted the PCs to be able to influence the world late-game, and that meant we had to research a bunch of population statistics, learn a bit about farming, estimate what percentage of people would be shinobi and so on in order to make a world where they could have a real impact.
The world had to makes sense, and that means there had to be reasons for the things that happen to the PCs. We've mostly finished up with that now, though I imagine we'll have to jump back in as soon as the players move to a new country. We've got solid roughs for what the various countries are up to, but there's no sense putting most of the details in till players actually travel there.
At the start having more GMs probably made it a bit harder to answer all the questions, because we all felt the need to check every answer with each other. Now we all know each other better now and the world is more fleshed out, so we don't need to check nearly as often which cuts down on the time spent by a lot. Things run pretty smoothly at the minute.
Organising it takes a fair bit of work, which is why we've got a bunch of google docs that the four of us can see and edit as well as a GM chat set up on Glip. We make a lot of bad puns in there and talk about whatever, we've all got other projects going on and it's good to get feedback on those. One of the players was nice enough to make some great character sheet spreadsheets, which really help. I just took a look and there's ~35000 words of worldbuilding and such in the worldbuilding doc, ~14,000 more of character studies in the Dramatis Personae. Around 85,000 words in all the docs added together. We can't really let people see those: it would give away far too much.
The players only really see the tip of the iceburg on a lot of the things we've got going on in the background, but I'm hopeful they'll eventually uncover more of the things that are going on behind the scenes as the characters become more powerful, resourceful and relevant on the world stage.
Edit: formatting.
u/TennisMaster2 [+3] (6 hours later)
Thank you (and thanks to u/eaglejarl as well)! This answered all of my questions. Really impressed at how you four've organized this project. Sorry for forgetting about AugSphere.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (7 hours later)
No problem. It's been a lot of fun to help out with, though I do sometimes wish I could take part from the player's side as well.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (6 hours later)
I write on Sundays, Velorien writes on Thursdays. The three of us and sometimes AugSphere all talk in the GM chat. I'd say Velorien and I do an equal amount of writing.
u/XxChronOblivionxX [+6] (2 hours later)
Indisputably the greatest fucking update of this entire quest so far.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (21 hours later)
Thanks. For the record, you'd be dead. And yes, I would have killed you.