Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Proposal: Draw

reached a quorum, final vote 7-1 - Yoda

Adminned at 01 Jan 2008 15:07:17 UTC

[ Attempting a system where each player gets their own secretly-randomised deck to draw from - I’ve written a script to generate a shuffled deck, along with a checksum so that we can verify the winner’s deck order at the end of the dynasty. It means trusting me not to abuse my position as scriptwriter, but I’ll happily pass it on to the Dealer if he wants to adjust the numbers and run his own copy of it somewhere else. ]

Enact a new Rule, “The Cards”:-

Each Player in Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon has their own battered deck of poker cards, consisting of four suits (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades), each suit having nine number cards (two through ten), one Ace, one Jack, one Queen and one King. The decks have no Jokers.

If a Player has no deck, they should pick one up from the BlogNomic Poker Deck Trading Post. This sequence of cards should be noted privately by the Player, and the “Cards printed by:” checksum must be stated in a public comment and/or noted on the Player’s Wanted Poster. Until the checksum has been stated, the player is not considered to have a deck.

[ There’s some arguable abuse in being able to reload the generator dozens of times until you get four aces in a row; it seemed fiddly to legislate against it, though. Hits are logged, and if someone seems to have reloaded the page a hundred times before picking a deck, we can always round up a posse and force them to draw a fresh one. ]

Comments

spikebrennan:

01-01-2008 16:01:33 UTC

My plan was just to use a plain old physical deck of cards and privately email people their hole cards.

aaronwinborn:

01-01-2008 16:29:15 UTC

imperial if spikebrennan wants to use the real thing, that’s fine with me too. of course, if e idles, then that might cause a problem later.

Clucky: he/him

01-01-2008 16:42:23 UTC

for

Dynasties which depend on the deaker can be fun, but we have had a bunch like that in a row. Even if spike is willing to do the work—as we saw last time that can end a dynasty prematurely. Lets try and keep this dynasty less dealer dependent =)

Kevan: he/him

01-01-2008 16:46:14 UTC

Yeah, I was initially going to go with a physical deck and email, but it was quite fiddly to get secure email addresses from everyone in the Werewolf dynasty. I’m not sure it’d scale up well to a game where there were lots of new emails to everyoe, every round.

Amnistar: he/him

01-01-2008 17:00:42 UTC

for

we can try it, if it doesn’t work, we can remove it.

spikebrennan:

01-01-2008 17:18:51 UTC

I am not voting against the proposal, just thinking about what to do.  As I see it, under the physical deck system, emails would only be necessary during each deal, which probably isn’t such a big deal.  I’m thinking that if everyone uses their own deck: (i) two or more people could have the same card in their hand, which really wouldn’t be poker; and (ii) how do we avoid cheating?

Chivalrybean:

01-01-2008 17:46:26 UTC

for

Yeah, we can lynch anyone who reloads the page a bunch.

The multiple copies of the same card might be a problem… any way to address that?

Is there a way to create a deck that we’d have to log into and it’d give us all cards from 1 deck?

Kevan: he/him

01-01-2008 18:24:11 UTC

The checksum lets us detect cheating - given a full deck, it’s possible to regenerate the checksum and see whether it matches the one given by the player at the start of the game. If we thought someone was cheating, we’d ask them to send their deck list to Spike, who could then generate a checksum for it (I’d give him access to a script for this) and see if it matched the one they announced at the start of the game.

A card-dealing system could be bolted onto the GNDT somehow (maybe a “DICE” variant where you enter “CARD”, and it’d tell you what you drew, log it in the event log, but obscure that part of the log for everyone else?) but it’d be a hefty little project for whoever took it on.

But yes, maybe a physical deck would be okay, if we can quickly get emails for everyone. Perhaps the Zahndorf Post Office could become a standard BlogNomic document.

Yoda:

01-01-2008 20:49:59 UTC

Did I miss something?  When did Kevan de-idle?

Kevan: he/him

01-01-2008 20:59:04 UTC

Yesterday.

Incidentally, don’t let the pre-existence of the deck-generations script affect anyone’s voting on this, it only took five minutes to write.

Yoda:

01-01-2008 21:06:11 UTC

against I don’t like the fact that everyone has their own deck and each person knows the order of their deck.

There is also no guard against cheating.  Because you save this to a text file, there is no stopping someone from claiming they have a deck full of aces (unless I am misunderstanding it).

Chivalrybean:

01-01-2008 21:14:38 UTC

I don’t think anyone will cheat, and I think the safeguards we have will prevent it.

I’ll look for an alternative that will allow everyone to use one deck that wont be a hassle for everyone to use. I’m ok with getting a hand mailed to me, though.

Darknight: he/him

01-01-2008 21:54:38 UTC

imperial

Darknight: he/him

01-01-2008 22:11:10 UTC

for COV. I got to thinking about this. Alot of poker games use 2 or more decks shuffled together so it wouldn’t be too far off to draw the same card. think of it as all our decks mixed together and thats the order we get.

spikebrennan:

01-01-2008 22:26:19 UTC

for
I think this can work:  then for Hold-Em, each player can roll DICE52 twice in the GNDT (rerolling if the same number comes up twice), and use those numbered cards in his deck as his hole cards.  No emails required.

Yoda:

01-01-2008 22:36:43 UTC

You still have the problem of cheating.  I am not saying that anyone would try to cheat, but someone could claim they have pocket aces when they really do not.

spikebrennan:

01-01-2008 23:08:41 UTC

I think that we need Kevan to explain how the checksums work—can anyone generate a given Player’s deck based on the posted checksum (such that anyone would be able to peek at anyone else’s cards)?  Or does it take more effort to reverse engineer someone’s deck from their checksum?  Kevan?

Night:

01-01-2008 23:09:13 UTC

I forget, but isn’t the GNDT programmed in Perl or PHP or something?  If it’s any of a small variety of web programming languages, I’m certain I could code cards into the GNDT.  Let me know if that would be helpful.  Otherwise, for my vote,  imperial.