"Taking the lead" after action report

## simulationist

If Noburi was so concerned about keeping it a secret, he could have whacked Hazou on the back of the head and told him to shut up, then made a fuss about not revealing anything more.

[Minamis] fast implication of the plan could be just how badass Noburi is with his water whip and using the mist to boost his stealth.

Also how did Kagome manage to hide this from Hazou? He has no deception and hazou has 24 dice. So Kagome kept this murder plot a secret for the entire night without anyone on the team discovering it?

## Interface

Yeah it's a context issue. Thread participants not actually living in the Narutoverse either don't realise or forget things that would be obvious if it were actually your life.

The idea is that for the most part there are so many of us that somebody will catch these things, and that this downside is balanced by the enormous benefits that a Hivemind of out-of-universe provides.

When that doesn't happen, either the QMs must give Hazou the benefit of the doubt since no normal person in these situation wouldn't realise these things (possibly by rolling in this extra competence under a "diplomacy" stat or something), or have Hazou act abnormally as per our instructions.

I think there are massive downsides to making the nature of the quest control so onerous for the PC, and I think it's less fun to play Hazou as an idiot savant. Personally, I would rather we get more leeway on these kinds of mistakes and more restrictions on the OOC exploits, but that's just my preference.

We control Hazou for tiny little bursts that span anywhere from minutes to weeks. We don't get his memories. Our window into the world you've made constitutes a minute fraction of the information and instinct that a reasonable model of Hazou would have. There's a gigantic amount of context that we simply don't have access to, or which is computationally difficult to reliably generate. (We might be able to do it with 20-30 active contributors on every plan, but we don't have that)

On the other hand, as authors and world-builders, you've built up general models of how this world functions. They are clearly nowhere near as complex as those of an actual person, but you can do that trick where you build up your general model of the world ("If <event> happens what are the major likely outcomes?") and then a significantly simpler filter for each character ("Which of those outcomes would <person> notice and react to?"). That, or analogous tricks (even if they're mostly subconscious), let you write realistic characters who make good decisions.

So we have this situation where the players get to be higher order thought processes of a character, but we get minimal access to the instinctual models of the world that normal people use to make decent decisions quickly. That lack of access isn't insurmountable, but it would take more people actively contributing than we have. (Or a much tighter feedback loop where QMs actively contribute on thread discussion with what Hazou would say if he could read it.)

Basically, as the system is now, Hazou can only ever really act like someone with a pile of deep neurological deficits that range from "absurd levels of forgetfulness" to "basically multiple personality disorder". I don't know how to fix that, or if the correct response is just to say "The player base should just learn how to deal with it." But, I will be very annoyed if you don't acknowledge that the issue is real or present a case for why I'm wrong.

We've tried to compensate for that in the past, but the fact that we the players weren't raised in this world is going to keep on causing that kind of friction. If we can't rely on Hazo having common sense, we need to account for that by either putting in a whole lot of extra work (which will make work for the QM's), relying on our team mates more, or forming habits that compensate for it.

I don't think it can be prevented, barring us having Hazou run his every possible action past Keiko, which wouldn't be possible or fun. This is going to continue to happen because we as the hivemind don't have the same training or thinking that a ninja would actually have, and unless we want Hazou to have more agency in rejecting portions of our plans based on his own training and memories (which I'm perfectly fine with) it's going to continue to happen. Some piece of minutia that we haven't entirely considered or remembered will fuck us over again, and it'll happen again after that. There's no way it's not going to happen again. And if we're constantly trying to plan around every minute detail then plans themselves are going to be huge walls of text that the GMs hate, and we're going to hate making them because it becomes too much like work and not like playing a fun game.
---\*It's a basic part of ninja life to check everything you do or say through a huge checklist of "basic ninja sanity".

* We must explicitly specify everything Hazo does when we have control.
* We're explicitly not supposed to make huge checklists.

It causes mistake after mistake that just aren't reasonable in the fiction, and are a form of "fake difficulty", i.e. difficulty from the interface not the problem.

Now difficult interfaces can be fun. But in this quest it feels distracting and unfair and drives the players into modes of play that both you and they don't enjoy.

There can still be mistakes. Things that are clearly errors in hindsight.

I just want to cut down to zero things that are clearly errors in *foresight*; or rather, in the foresight of the sort of person Hazo should be. Unless we really do want to do the "Hazo is a cripple" route.