The dynasty’s done, but I still have no idea what happened. It looks like it’s supposed to be about secret deals, but the first sentence of Ethics of the Nobility forbids making deals. And there’s a bunch of secret information and hints at that, where I lack the basic knowledge to make any deductions at all.

It seems like the only meaningful thing I did this dynasty was accidentally take myself out of play.

Making deals was kinda the whole point of the dynasty. The first line of Ethics of the Nobility just made it clear that you need to be careful about the deals you make cause you can’t really trust anyone.

My strategy for deductions was just “let someone else figure it out for me” <.<

I think that this was a good dynasty.

It had a couple of mechanics that didn’t take (winnower elections, confessions) but the big mid-dynasty repeal was good and the basic gameplay conceit (which I stole from pokes) was also good.

On Campaigns:

The reason why Campaigns needed to be fixed was the Gerontocracy / Jail bug. As written, each Campaign had one effect that occurred when the Campaign was activated, and that effect was not an atomic action, meaning that clauses of it could be attempted, could fail, and then could be skipped. At that time, Gerontocracy was written

If your Campaign has been “Gerontocracy” at the start of 5 or more Seasons, you may respond to the most recent Masquerade post with a comment saying “Advancing my Gerontocracy Campaign” . The Doge must increase your Political Power by 2 before the next Masquerade.

What Clucky noticed was that he could activate Geronotcracy, skip the first step entirely (Gerontocracy had not been his campaign for 5 or more seasons so he didn’t have to make a comment) and then activate the second step anyway, as it wasn’t atomic. Free invisible 2 Power every turn forever, and if it hadn’t been patched I’m sure that pokes and Jumble would have switched to Gerontocracy immediately as well. The Giolitti 3 gaining 6 Power invisibly every turn seemed worth the effort of a wide-scale neutering of the rule.

(The jail aspect of the scam was that theoretically a Gerontocracy-ing Elector could be disrupted by sending them to Jail, but the Campaigns rule at that time establishes that a Campaign only had an effect when it was activated - so the Jail effect of “You may only change your Campaign to ‘None’” could simply be ignored by not activating the Jail campaign and changing it under the provision of the regular rules.)

By the by, I’d be happy to share the spreadsheet of actions so we can all work out how wide of the mark the final stats actually were; if anybody objects to their secret actions being disclosed then please let me know?

That was an enjoyable dynasty, good work from the Doge in keeping all the moving parts in motion, and not being too attached to rules when players tried to repeal them.

I’d spotted the Gerontocracy bug, but only after the Doge’s Campaigns rewrite was up and (from their assurances that it wasn’t just an idle rewrite that happened to wipe out Dark Cults) I knew there must be something in there that I’d missed. I think we probably need to find a general approach for dealing with secret-information scams in future dynasties - it shouldn’t be on the Emperor to decide whether and how to fix a loophole that one player is employing invisibly. Maybe a sanity checklist would have been enough (announcing what Power was gained from which rules, but not by whom), maybe it just needed an explicit, voted-through rule of “if the Emperor spots a secret scam, they should tell everyone”, leaving it up to us to fix.

I had a vague back-pocket scam concept based on “Secret Faction” and “Faction” being dangerously close pieces of terminology (and even having the same range of values): either slipping the latter in when writing a long rule about the former, or simply asserting that Secret Factions were a type of Faction (which may have been enough to tear down a victory if I could show that the calculations came out differently that way). It never came to anything, though.

No objection to my secret actions being disclosed.

No objection to my actions being disclosed either. I think most of my part in the dynasty has already been shaken out on slack—I got rounded up by Cuddlebeam and Raven early on, then Cuddlebeam recruited Kevan, then Cuddlebeam idled out and that fell apart, then Kevan and Zack and I tried to put something together with Darknight as a possible accessory, and then just when we got the leverage to use Scandal to ostracize enough players that we might have had a majority of heft, the game was over.

I think this was a good dynasty, though I never had strong hopes of winning—missing three days pretty early on, when I went to visit family, left me feeling like I was trying to catch up for the rest of the game. Thanks for running a tight ship and taking on a lot of work, Josh.

No objection here either.

I honestly was lost with everything

It would be nice to find out after the fact what my actions actually were.