Monday, October 24, 2011

Draft: The darkest secrets

If the current Dynasty is a Metadynasty, create a new rule named “For the Greater Good”, reading as follows:

Players may join Masonic Lodges in the way specified in the Code of Conduct of every Lodge. If a Player who is part of a Lodge acts against its Code of Conduct, they are no longer part of that Lodge. Every member of a specific Lodge may change the Code of Conduct of that Lodge but only in the ways specified in the Code of Conduct itself.
Every Lodge has a unique Name and Code of Conduct, that shall be tracked in the BlogNomic wiki and must include the list of all the members. If a Player is the only member of a Lodge, the Lodge ceases to exist.
Three Players that have not Founded a Lodge in the last month may Found a Lodge by creating a wiki page that shall host its future Code of Conduct (that may or may not be blank) and each adding themself as a member. As soon as 3 Players are in it, the Lodge starts to exist, and the Code of Conduct to affect the members. When a Player Idles, they stop being part of all the Lodges they were previously part of.

I got this Idea after saying that I wanted something diifferent than factions. What do you think?

Comments

Amnistar: he/him

24-10-2011 21:06:00 UTC

Would need to include a public announcement about them coming into existance I think?  perhaps in the rule we can create a wiki-page that is a list of all the Lodges, and upon creation of the lodge per the rule they have to link the lodge to that list.

I think that would make the lodge wiki part of the gamestate?

omd:

24-10-2011 21:06:43 UTC

against

scshunt:

24-10-2011 21:07:01 UTC

against

Ely:

24-10-2011 21:14:12 UTC

The point is, they’re secret. It’s hard to make gamestate secret or not universally known, so I posted it as a protosal.

Amnistar: he/him

24-10-2011 21:21:10 UTC

I can’t see a secret lodge proposal working without an emperor present to monitor the gamestate and inform people when they’ve joined the lodge.

arthexis: he/him

24-10-2011 21:22:33 UTC

against I think the same as Amnistar

ais523:

24-10-2011 21:35:35 UTC

I don’t really like the flavour, and it’s hard to make a mechanic like this work (it seems somewhat scammable). I remember that in Agora, something similar to this was set up via contracts, but interestingly, it wasn’t part of the rules; the players set it up themselves. (And the amount of secrecy involved was such that most of the details still aren’t public.) That sort of emergent gameplay is always fun when it happens; encoding it into the rules, however, is unlikely to work well.

Amnistar: he/him

24-10-2011 22:22:14 UTC

WE actually had a secret society mafia, where the societies themselves were known but their membership, rules and requirements to become a member were kept secret by the emperor until the end of the dynasty.  It was before my time but people spoke highly of it.

Pavitra:

24-10-2011 23:16:01 UTC

“Players may join Masonic Lodges in the way specified in the Code of Conduct of every Lodge.” should read “Players may join a Masonic Lodge in the way specified in the Code of Conduct of that Lodge.”

Wiki pages aren’t secret.

Ornithopter:

25-10-2011 00:02:49 UTC

Agreed with Amnistar. Secret rules require someone to know the secret rules, or they can’t be enforced.

Kevan: he/him

25-10-2011 09:03:37 UTC

[Ornithopter] Only if they need to be enforced. It would be possible to play a game where all actions were legal, but you could only win if you could show - at the end - that all your actions had been within the confines of your secret rules.

Prince Anduril:

25-10-2011 11:56:21 UTC

Kevan - What you say is true, but I’m not sure I like the mechanic. I remember playing Illuminate (card game with friends) that often we found ourselves saying - oh, I won 4 rounds ago. That sort of uncertainty made the game much less fun.

Kevan: he/him

26-10-2011 13:02:55 UTC

Illuminati is okay so long as you know what sort of scope the secret rules are going to have. As I remember the game, it has a lot of speculative “wait a minute, if he’s representing the Bermuda Triangle then he only needs three more Power to win - we should block his attack just in case!” stuff.

Masonic Lodges whose secret rules were drawn from a visible pool of possible rules would work. Maybe with the requirement to post an MD5-encoded description of all your rules to the wiki when you found it, so that you can’t change them to whatever fits your past behaviour.

Pavitra:

26-10-2011 14:18:29 UTC

If the secret rules both are drawn from a limited pool and have a public hash, they can be deduced by brute force.

Kevan: he/him

26-10-2011 14:23:42 UTC

Well, you’d salt it.