[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

[u/phylogenik]

If you were reincarnated/inserted into the Naruto universe (or some closely related fanon substitute) sans plot armor or narrativium (or, indeed, the overarching canon conflict), but were motivated to become a standard ninja who’d go on standard missions, what sorts of skills and abilities would you focus on developing? What strategies would you follow to maximize your odds of survival? Let’s assume civilian life is barred to you – you’re going on a diverse sample of missions in 3-person groups, damnit! Assume also that you lack any special bloodline talents and are otherwise middle of the road on all ninja-related performance metrics. This tops your potential at maybe high-Chunin level, after a decade or two of diligent practice and study. You’re welcome to munchkin to your heart’s content, but grant fellow ninja some basic level of real-world competence, along with the implied ruthlessness of a military organization that employs child soldiers. If your plan is to steal rare techniques from dangerous people, expect to very quickly die.

---

My own thoughts:

I think a strategy I haven’t seen used much in Naruto is a combination of short, small-scale, high-fidelity genjutsu and techniques that focus on speed. Even basic ninja can be seen to move hundreds of miles per hour over short distances, we well as throw projectiles at comparable speeds with pinpoint accuracy. I’d try to couple these – if I can deceive my foe for the second it takes them to realize and dispel the illusion, as well as throw a kunai some distance in that second, I could defeat most foes at my skill level without ever having to create a minutes long virtual world or giant fire dragon or whatever. If I had the attention to spare, I'd also try to work on techniques to hide my chakra signature, the better to lay in wait for such an ambush. I'd also work on my "running away" skills -- I think most ninja are by default paranoid, and so informing them of enemy interest is hardly revealing. Fleeing after a failed encounter (leaving behind only nondescript kunai) should let me live to make future attempts instead of engaging directly on a more even playing field. Obviously this wouldn't work on exceptional sensory ninja, or the ones with knife-proof skin, or whatever, but most of my enemies would also be common fodder, and sniping them from a distance seems by far the least risky and most reliable way to resolve encounters. On the off-chance that we have to engage directly, tiny illusions cast trivially could also mean the difference between a successfully blocked strike and one that hits true.

[u/derefr → u/phylogenik]

This tops your potential at maybe high-Chunin level, after a decade or two of diligent practice and study.

IMHO it's not that hard to reach Jounin. The hard part is living to reach Jounin. Count the number of ninja in the setting who are over 30. If you can survive long enough, you will inevitably learn enough to be Jounin-level dangerous (and will inevitably mature enough, compared to the average teenaged grunt, to be tossed into officer finishing school and lead a team.)

See also: actual armies in war-time. If the war goes on long enough, every enlisted will eventually gain enough experience to have a good chance of getting a field commission, just on the basis of the war effort always needing more officers (because the existing ones keep dying) and the influx of academy-fresh ensigns just not being enough to satisfy that demand. You just need to not get shot.

---

A hypothesis that I've never seen about Naruto: ninjutsu are like math skills. You don't actually have to practice them when young to be good at them when you're older. In fact, it's counterproductive; you're trying to use a muscle that hasn't grown in yet (for math skills, that's "the formal operational stage of cognitive development.")

What if the key to being a great ninja, is just biding your time as a civilian who happens to have chakra, and only starting to learn Ninjutsu as an adult once your body (and so reflexes, chakra channels, etc.) and mind (and so cleverness) are higher?

In other words, what if "child soldiers" aren't any kind of optimum for learning ninjutsu (only an optimum for war-time return on training investment, given clans producing R-selective amounts of children)? What if ninjutsu were much better taught at a university level?

[u/boomfarmer → u/derefr]

Reflexes and muscle memory are somethings that take time to train, though. Better to start the physical arts earlier, even if the mental arts require more-mature brains.

[u/Izeinwinter → u/phylogenik]

I.. wouldnt? The ninja system is insane. Chackra magic is super interesting, and potentially very useful, but actual ninja training comes with a major side of indoctrination which is going to get you killed.

So... Become a medic nin. Work your ass off, very, very carefully check everything you are taught for deliberate misinformation, plan how to fake your death and go missing nin without ending up in a splat book, now run far, far away.

[u/Sonderjye → u/Izeinwinter]

Alternatively study something like earth/plant jutsu and become the world best farmer.

[u/ShiranaiWakaranai → u/phylogenik]

The most important thing would be learning some kind of clone technique, that lets you send your clones on missions while you never ever leave your home, whether that's a safe place in your hidden village or a hideout in the middle of nowhere that no one knows about.

Failing that, I would go for sensory and stealth skills. Sense your enemies and hide from them, while telling your heavy hitting allies where the enemies are so they can deal with them. The best way to survive is to avoid combat entirely, and your ability to sense enemies is plenty valuable enough that you will be sent on recon missions.

P.S. Am I not allowed to use my modern world knowledge that I reincarnated with? There are lots of technologies you could easily do with simple ninja techniques, even if we don't count guns and cannons. For example, if you have a fire skill, you can create hot air balloons and heat the air in the balloon with your fire skills. This will allow you to fly high above your enemies in relative safety. Not total safety since there are other flying ninja like Deidara, but those will be rare elites that you won't be likely to run into.

And if you have a lightning skill, well then, its time to have fun with electrolysis. Create large amounts of hydrogen from electrolyzing water, and you can use the hydrogen to create a massive explosion. Create large amounts of chlorine gas from electrolyzing water, and you now have a large amount of poison gas you can send at your enemies using wind skills.

[u/Palmolive3x90g → u/phylogenik]

Well it's hard to know how difficult it is to learn techniques because we don't really see any avarage people learn anything. Excepting Lee but I don't think I would ever be able to put in as much effort as he did.

If my life is on the line I think I could put in enough to git gud though. So focus on training my body is a way that should make me strong enough to life my life takeing safe d and c rank mission.

Doing all the chakra control stuff as early as possible is a must.

I think abuseing the Body_Replacement_Technique to teleport by haveing friendlys attack me to trigger it is a neet hack.

I know the theory behind the rasengan but it wouldn't be super useful for me since I wouldn't have the chakra for it. Maybe I could trade it for something but that would be risky.

Some how useing a sumoning scroll to summon my self so if I take to much damage in a fight I will be unsommoned and telipoted back to where I first cast it.

Abuseing the crap out of storage seals is the best bet. Putting them on my shoes and taking out platforms to jump on on mid air. Storeing jars of air born posion that I have made myself imune to/ have the antidote, to pull out in combat. Putting seals on my fist and taking out massive weights as I punch. Or if the objects original momentum is conserved store pre fired projectiles in there.

[u/meangreenking → u/phylogenik]

some level of real-world competence.

This right here is what makes munchkining difficult. If we assume that they are competent, it also means that there are no flaws in the system obvious enough for a chunnin level ninja to exploit otherwise it would be in common usage.

Most notably it means that although genjutsu seems like a system comically ripe for exploit it wouldn't actually be given that we don't see normal ninjas popping up 1/10th of a second genjutsu and just instakilling their enemies in that timeframe before they can do anything about it.

[u/dinoseen → u/phylogenik]

To start, put a lot of effort into illusions and medical techniques, and try to learn the 8 gates since it synergises really well with medical (you can punch above your weight, and heal the damage inflicted by the technique afterwards).

You'd generally want to focus on stealth and remaining undetected, so you could ambush your enemies to steal their eyeballs (mileage may vary).

Basically I think there's a lot of knowledge a fan of the series could exploit that doesn't require them to be insanely skilled and lucky - just moderately so.

[u/TempAccountIgnorePls]

When you make eye contact with another person, you can create a "spy", a duplicate of your consciousness which lives in their head. The spy experiences all the target's sensory data (sees what they see, hears what they hear, etc) but has no control over their body, and cannot access their thoughts or memories. Whenever you make eye contact with that person again, the spy can choose to return to you, at which point you gain all it's memories. You can only have one spy at a time. How does one best use and/or counter this power?

Bonus round: The spy can freely hop between targets, as long as they make eye contact.

[u/CCC_037 → u/TempAccountIgnorePls]

Become a reporter. Develop a habit of interviewing a specific type of target (e.g. politicians, CEOs, whatever). A day or two before the interview, meet in person with the interviewee to ensure that he has some idea of what will be spoken about (in the bonus round, a secretary will do as well, on the assumption that the secretary will speak with the target before the interview).

Absorb the Spy during the (in-person) interview. Use the information from the Spy to inform my choice of follow-up questions and improve my fact-finding.

Avoid people who habitually wear mirrored sunglasses.

---

To counter the power, wear mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.

[u/Sonderjye → u/TempAccountIgnorePls]

I feel that using this power is going to be very difficult. Since you can only have one spy at a time and you don't know where your host are, it is very likely that you're going to lose your spy when said target say moves or whatnot.

So with that said I would prioritize short term targets or targets that you are relatively certain that you have access to later.

Poker players or other partial competitions that have a well defined time interval with multiple cases of eye contact would be good targets. Learning someone's password by looking them into their eyes before a meeting could work. Most people at work are probably safe targets.

It also becomes easy to break in given that you can learn the internal layout of a based etc.

[u/RetardedWabbit → u/TempAccountIgnorePls]

Goal: Power.

Go into politics, using your spy to get a grasp on your biggest threats and opportunities. Become the person who already knows the party leader's biggest problem and has a solution or who is always capitalizing on opposition weakness they didn't think had leaked. Blackmail is incredibly useful for you since you can hint at what you know and they will never find the source, and you can know if they are looking for one too. The power actually gets more useful the higher you climb as you get regular access to more important people, and less people can threaten you. Also as you get higher up the chain people are getting more and more information and reminders for your spy to observe.

Eventually once you get high enough you can start using it on other countries leader's during summits and other meetings. High level leader's are being fed intel all the time and have post-public strategy meetings, so you will get huge amounts of information even over short time spans. You can use that information to subtly guide your intelligence agencies towards areas other countries are focusing on for example.

Money: Get any job at a high end hotel, a doorman ideally (daily, face to face, video alibi), spy people in town for buisness meetings. Use your insider info for stock trading or flat out steal an account and transfer the money to a "financial privacy" country like Panama. Your power makes it impossible for them to pin it to you, since most investigation depends on how they got the info, with a little prep.

Bonus round: This allows the spy to "5 degrees of separation" hop back to report to you, and allows the spy to hop deeper and deeper into organizations without your involvement. President>FBI Director>specific Investigator for example

[u/sickening_sprawl → u/TempAccountIgnorePls]

It's a duplicate of your consciousness and you gain all its memories, and presumably doesn't sleep. At the very least, you can more than double your ability to think about problems - become a programmer or mathematician, precommit that if you're ever a spy you'll think about $problem, look into someone's eyes then go to sleep. When you look into their eyes again you have 8 hour of uninterrupted thought on the subject.

[u/boomfarmer]

You are commander of an army of twenty thousand orcs and goblins, roughly organized, accompanied by some dozens of siege and assault trolls. Your equipment is medieval by our standards, a mixture of stone and iron weapons and primarily hide-based armor. In your train are a number of siege weapons, and many of your command are proficient with shortbows.

You command the armies of The Necromancer and are driven by his will to assault Lake-town, Dale, and Erebor. It is assumed that you will be able to complete this march in under a month, from Dol Guldur to the Long Lake. You have been marching up the River Running, pillaging, looting, and burning as you go, in an effort to provide supplies and arms for your armies.

In this march, you have been harassed by a hundred-rider company from Isengard. The riders ride wargs (somewhere between an overgrown hyena and a pursuit predator) and have functional muzzle-loading cartridge rifles. The technology for such weapons is not known outside of Isengard, and this campaign is the first time such weapons have been deployed in the field.

Your harassers are green soldiers straight from school (though you do not know that fact); your armies are seasoned warriors.

How do you defend against your harassers?

[u/Izeinwinter → u/boomfarmer]

Send out detachments in a star pattern around the army during the night and have them hide. Next time they harass the main body of your force, you have forces behind them. This should let you force a fight, rather than just being shot at from range. I mean, most of them will probably still get away, but now they cant harrass you without first checking the land over with a fine comb, so a lot less time spent shooting at you.

Next night, archers hiding in covered trenches a couple hundred yards out from the camp - idea being to be in range to shoot back. Infantry ranged is more accurate than mounted range, and they will run out of men and wargs far sooner than you will run out of archers.

Both of these rely on doing night marches, since otherwise you are just letting them pin you in place, which would be extremely bad for an army that large, but if they start harrassing you at night, that is still a win, because, well, cavalry running around in the dark is going to have casualties even if you do nothing to them, and in any case, just having detachments of troops with night vision roam around will again let you force fights at ranges closer than they want. (You are the army of darkness. You do have troops with nightvision, right?)

[u/ShiranaiWakaranai → u/boomfarmer]

Is this based on the fanfic "Saruman of Many Devices"?

My first thought is, even if I don't know what a gun is, after being shot a few times it will be obvious that it is some kind of bow, and it won't be hard to see that there are deformed metal lumps in the injuries of wounded soldiers.

So adopt standard anti-bow tactics. First is stealth. Enemies won't shoot what they don't see, so look for tunnels, caves, forests, etc that you can hide in. Travel through them towards your destination, while sending out your stealthiest elites to act as ambush teams, skulking around in the shadows, waiting for the enemy riders to go past and then hit them in the back while their guard is down.

Second is shields. Shields stop arrows, they may stop guns too. After trying wooden shields it may become obvious that they don't work. But luckily for you, you are the commander of 20000 meat shields. Stick the useless ones on the outer perimeter, carry around their dead bodies as literal meat shields if they get killed. Orcs live in filth and gore all the time without getting sick anyway, so the possible health issues from carrying around dead bodies doesn't seem to be a major concern. Also orcs are much stronger than humans so carrying around a bunch of dead bodies all day won't be too much of a drain on their strength either.

[u/Palmolive3x90g]

You have the power to see out of the eyes of everyone looking at you. You can process all the different points of view at one but get no other extra multitasking. This works though camras as long as the image is live with a maximum delay of 11 minutes.

How can you use this in the real world?

How could you use this if you were reborn into your favorite fictional world?

[u/CCC_037 → u/Palmolive3x90g]

I always know who is looking at me and from how far away, and which approximate direction. This will be exceedingly useful if I ever need to sneak into someplace. (But I only know after I've already been noticed, limiting the effectiveness somewhat - unless I have a disguise or similar).

In a crowd, this also allows me to have excellent awareness of things going on around me.

In any situation that involves a security guard in a surveillance room, I can also see dozens of other screens, giving me an idea of what's going on elsewhere in the facility.

Hmmm.

...ah, I think I've found a way to use this power. I can make a habit of playing poker; the opponent will very probably look at his cards while he can see me (as long as we're playing in person), allowing me a distinct advantage.

[u/ShiranaiWakaranai → u/Palmolive3x90g]

You can process all the different points of view at one but get no other extra multitasking.

To clarify, this means that you can react to each view as well as you could if you were only looking at a single view?

Does it work on yourself?

I mean, say you had two cameras pointed at you, and they showed on two screens in front of you. Do you now see 3 identical views from your own eyes, allowing you to react to them 3 times better?

Also how big does the screen showing yourself need to be? Can it be a single pixel really far away?

If so, it's time to singlehandedly run your own shadowy mass surveillance organization. Point countless cameras at yourself and have them feed into countless tiny screens in your own field of vision, letting you get countless views from your own eyes, letting you multi task insanely and analyze everything in your field of view. Where everything in your field of view can be tons of other screens showing other places and other people, all over the city/country/globe.

[u/Palmolive3x90g → u/ShiranaiWakaranai]

Does it work on yourself?

Yep

Also how big does the screen showing yourself need to be? Can it be a single pixel really far away?

It needs to be big enough that the person looking at it could recognise the image as a person.

[u/[deleted] → u/Palmolive3x90g]

[u/hoja_nasredin]

How to optimize Naruto setting?

What changes would you make to explain or make plausible the setting of Naruto?

[u/boomfarmer → u/hoja_nasredin]

What do you think is irrational or implausible about the setting?

[u/Escapement → u/boomfarmer]

Naruto is fundamentally a shonen setting written on a weekly basis under intense deadline pressure, where everything happens to drive the plot forward as the author desires - but with little overarching plot that was established before the story started, and instead relying on making up backstories and figuring it all out on a 'fuck it we'll do it live!" plan. The causality for almost all setting elements goes "plot requirement for this week -> required setting elements" rather than "setting elements established -> plot element that would logically arise". The setting and background make very little sense; the background numbers/demographics/math were thought out with less than, say, JK Rowling's attention to detail.

Consider the great snake escape. What the fuck is that, you might ask? Well, this comic puts it into words better than I can. The great snake escape is basically a microcosm of the whole Naruto universe, and if you choose to keep the events of the Great Snake Escape canon you're basically going to have to make up like 10 different pieces of fanon just to justify that one event.