Story Post: Race 2 (48 comments) Okay, the second race is now starting. But what are all these slugs doing here?

Okay, the second race is now starting. But what are all these slugs doing here? At this rate, there’ll soon be more people on the racetrack than in the audience!

Also, we’ve heard rumours that the local squirrel poulation is trying out a new snail-based diet. Please be wary of any, especially during lunch time. Hopefully JonathanDark and Habanero will defend us from predators with their… magnets?

Anyway, I’m going to sleep now. Wake me once someone crosses the starting line.

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Proposal: Slow Death

Add the following to the beginning of Slug of Death’s movement rules:

The Slug of Death’s Position may not be changed if a Snail has not made any Moves in the Ongoing Snail.

In Slug of Death’s extra effects, replace “Other Snails may not move if the Slug of Death’s position is greater than theirs” with

If all Snails have made a Move in the Ongoing Race, then Snails whose Position is less than the Slug of Death’s Position may not make Moves.

This hopefully ensures that everyone gets to actually play in each race

Proposal: Hopslug

Change the text of the Leapsnail move to read as follows:

If one exists, randomly select a non-Slug Snail other than yourself, whose current position is before the Finish Line but no more than 20cm greater than your own, and whose Moves are within 2 of yours. Set your Position to be 1 greater than the selected Snail’s. Optionally, you may add to the random selection Snails who have been directly eligible Leapsnail targets for you at some time in the past 24 hours of this Ongoing Race.

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Proposal: Use Magnets for Faster Acquirement

Append the following to the description of the “Discard” Move:

This Move may only be used if it has been more than 24 hours since the most recent Race started or every non-Slug Snail has made at least one Move in the Ongoing Race.

Append the following to the Movement Rules of the Slug of Death:

The Slug of Death cannot move as a result of any Move other than its Crawling.

A fix to prevent magnet pulling TSoD in early, and also a more general grace period on item usage to prevent similar “I use some combination of Items at the beginning of the race to lock everyone out before they get a chance to get their first Moves in” scams.

Proposal: Time Waits For No Snail

In the rule “Moving”, after the text “some time in the past 24 hours of this Ongoing Race” add the text “and that are not currently after the Finish Line”.

Fixing the issue where one can use Leapsnail to include a Snail that has crossed the Finish Line simply by waiting 24 hours. It’s inconsistent with the first part of Leapsnail, which excludes Snails that crossed the Finish Line.

idling

not interested in playing a dynasty right now where if you’re not carefully parsing the rules for multiple scams you can’t play

Call for Judgment: Dead Too Soon

In the rule “Items”, append the following to the effect of the Magnet item:

If this would cause the Slug of Death’s position to be forward of another Snail’s, instead change that Snail’s position to match its position.

Undo all dynastic actions performed since the start of Race 2. Increase the Fame of the Snails named Habanero and JonathanDark by 5.

Proposal: a Dangerous Spot

Reached quorum, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied to a subrule of Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 06 Dec 2024 02:23:01 UTC

Add the following to the rule Predators:

If it has been at least 24 hours both since the Ongoing Race was created and since the Spotting Danger action was last performed, any Snail or the Jury may Spot Danger.

I just realised that with no Danger Daryl in play, there is currently no way to spot dangers, which is a bit boring

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

Proposal: What’s a Race Without an Audience?

Reached quorum, 4-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied to Rule Amendments as a subrule per that rule.

Adminned at 06 Dec 2024 02:20:51 UTC

If the Proposal “The Price of Fame” passed, then this Proposal has no effect.

Reduce Habanero’s Fame by 24, and remove Slime Lubricant from their Equipment if it is there.

Add the following Equipments to the rule “Equipment”:

== Opposable Radulae ==
Cost: 1 Medal of Bronze quality or better
Effect: When you Discard, you may remove and apply the effect of 2 Items from your Inventory.

== Cool Sticker ==
Cost: 15 Fame and 1 Paper
Effect: You may spend 1 Fame to be blindingly cool and reroll a die you rolled in the Dice Roller immediately after rolling it. The Fame price of this Effect doubles for every time you have used it before in a Race.

== Enlarged Foot ==
Cost: 10 Fame and 1 Medal of Silver quality or better
Effect: When you use the Crawl Move, you may adjust the amount it would change your position by up to 2cm in either direction.

I actually like Fame! Here is my counter-offer to The Price of Fame. I’ve argued as to why Fame is interesting in the comments of that proposal, and have posted this for those who agree with me. This obliterates my own Fame supply so as to not be self-interested.

Proposal: The Price of Fame

Timed out, 1-3. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 06 Dec 2024 02:17:49 UTC

In the rule “The Award Ceremony”, remove the text “Each non-Slug Snail has a publicly tracked numeric amount of Fame, which defaults to 0”.

In the same rule, in the Award Ceremony atomic action remove the step beginning with “Increase the Fame” and the step beginning with “Halve the Fame”.

In the same rule, replace “Fame and Medals” with “Medals”.

In the same rule, remove the sentence starting with “If there is a single Snail with the most Fame” and the sentence starting with “The Snails who have a quorum of Snails”.

In the rule “Equipment”, replace the text “spend the amount of Fame” with “Pawn their Medals for a value” and add a subrule named “Pawning” with the following text:

When a Snail Pawns their Medals, they pay a 0 or positive amount of their Gold, Silver, and Bronze to receive a value equal to the following formula based on the amounts of each paid: (5 x Gold paid) + (3 x Silver paid) + Bronze paid

Add a Slime Lubricant to Habanero’s Equipment if it is not already there.

Getting rid of Fame so that there’s less to manage for Races, but still allowing Snails to cash in their Race winnings for Equipment. Habanero gets a Slime Lubricant as payment for not having Fame anymore but having done the hard work to exploit the Fame bug.

Proposal: Unofficially Official

Reached quorum, 6-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 04 Dec 2024 19:57:55 UTC

This proposal edits the Official Rules.
In Rule Amendments, replace “Unless a Proposal” with

If there is an Ongoing Race when a proposal is enacted, then unless it

No need to not resolve proposals immediately if there’s no ongoing race

Proposal: Snails Never Forget

Reached quorum, 4-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copying to a subrule of Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 04 Dec 2024 19:56:35 UTC

In the rule “Position”, replace:

A Snail in the Bucket or on the Bench does not count as a Snail for the purposes of dynastic rules other than this one (except where those rules refer specifically to Snails who are in the Bucket or on the Bench).

with:

A Snail in the Bucket or on the Bench does not count as a Snail for the purposes of dynastic rules other than this one (except where those rules refer specifically to Snails who are in the Bucket or on the Bench, or for the tracking of their gamestate variables).

Since Snails in the Bucket don’t count as Snails for any non-Position dynastic rule (including the ones that say we have a publicly tracked amount of Fame or Medals), there’s a pretty good argument to be made that going into and out of the Bucket or Bench resets those values to their defaults. As the only snail with non-default values for these variables, now is a good time for me to point this out.

Monday, December 02, 2024

Proposal: Making a Bucket List

Timed out, 4-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copying to a subrule of Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 04 Dec 2024 19:52:50 UTC

In the rule “The Award Ceremony”, in the Award Ceremony atomic action, add the following steps to the end:

* Set the Position of all of the non-Slug Snails who are on the Track but failed to finish the Race to “Bucket”.
* Make a separate Story post to the blog with the title “Bucket List X” where X is the current Race Number and the contents of the post contain the names of the Snail(s) whose Positions are “Bucket”.

Snails who don’t finish the Race for whatever reason should actively prep themselves for the next Race, as it’s most likely the ones not actively participating that didn’t finish. Moving from the Bucket to the Bench is a quick and easy task, so this isn’t a huge penalty for those that are actively participating and just got unlucky or strategically outmaneuvered. This Proposal even adds a separate blog post reminder, but if players aren’t paying attention, they shouldn’t hold up future Races if they don’t move themselves from the Bucket to the Bench.

Proposal: You Can’t Hang Fame on a Wall

Reached quorum, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied to a subrule of Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 15:38:52 UTC

In the rule “The Award Ceremony”, after the text “Each non-Slug Snail has a publicly tracked numeric amount of Fame, which defaults to 0.”, add the following text:

Each non-Slug Snail has four types of publicly-tracked Medals named Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Paper, each of which defaults to 0.

and in the same rule, add the following bullet point as the third step in the Award Ceremony atomic action:

* Increase the Medals of the Snail(s) who are past the Finish Line:
** The Snail(s) who finished in the lowest number of Moves get 1 Gold.
** The Snail(s) who finished in the second lowest number of Moves get 1 Silver.
** The Snail(s) who finished in the third lowest number of Moves get 1 Bronze.
** Other finishing Snails get 1 Paper.

and in the same rule, after the text “the changes in Fame” add “and Medals”.

Set Habanero’s Gold to 1.

Since Fame is near-worthless due to being able to get infinite amounts at the moment, there should be some other resource worth gaining from doing well in a Race.

Why four different resources rather than just one thing like “Points” or “Trophies”? I dunno…just trying to mix it up a bit.

Proposal: Patch

Reached quorum, 6-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied as a subrule to Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 15:37:39 UTC

In “Races” replace “If no non-Slug Snail can Move, any Snail or the Jury may perform the Award Ceremony.” with “If there is an Ongoing Race but no non-Slug Snail can Move, any Snail or the Jury may perform the Award Ceremony.”

Is There Such A Thing As Being Too Famous?

TLDR; Someone could just post a CfJ to patch the rule and be done with it, but in the meantime, Habanero could post as many more Award Ceremonies as they want, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. This post is to talk through where to go from here before trying a flurry of CfJ’s to get it right. I think it’s more productive to see if there’s common ground.


Similar to The First Dynasty of Habanero, we have a situation where a player, in this case Habanero, can use a fault in the rules to generate an infinite amount of a resource, in this case Fame. However, there is currently no win condition, thus despite being able to generate this infinite resource, Habanero cannot actually win.

In the First Dynasty of Habanero, the player who did something similar was Brendan, and they used it to justify an end to the dynasty via chop based on relative strength of resources in the dynasty, on the basis that they could hold the dynasty hostage and render it unplayable otherwise. I don’t know what Habanero’s intentions are, but I think we should discuss options. I don’t want to propose a CfJ just yet until there’s a better understanding of where people are. I feel like a CfJ might be premature.

The options, as I see them (please add more if you think of them):
* Let Habanero keep a certain amount of Fame and patch the rules to prevent any further use of this exploit, reverting any other gains of Fame using this exploit from Habanero or anyone else after X amount of Fame, whatever value of X seems fair
* Take away Habanero’s Fame and set it to the amount that maybe people feel was intended by the rules. Note that this is traditionally not done in most dynasties. If you figure out an exploit, you generally keep some sort of reward from it.
* Follow the same path as the First Dynasty of Habanero and go straight to a victory chop
* (something else?)

What say the Snails?

Sunday, December 01, 2024

Story Post: Award Ceremony #1.3

Once more for good measure.
Habanero gains 8 Fame
Everyone else gains 0 Fame

Story Post: Award Ceremony #1.2

And again!

Habanero gains 8 Fame
Everyone else gains 0 Fame

Story Post: Award Ceremony #1.1

You know, that flaming snail was pretty awesome. They majestically leapt through the air, clearing the entire distance of the race in a single bound. I think they deserve a bit more of a round of applause.

Habanero gains 8 Fame (4x2 from being the Fan Favourite)
Everyone else gains 0 Fame

Per the rules: “If no non-Slug Snail can Move, any Snail or the Jury may perform the Award Ceremony.” This does not specify that the Race has to be Ongoing, nor does it specify that it can only happen once per race.

Story Post: Award Ceremony #1

*Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
Huh? Agh, this announcer’s booth is the opposite of comfortable. Impossible to get a good rest. Are they still just sitting there? The crowd has already left by now. It’s been several days. The Slug of Death is so close, you’d think these guys would have a little more self-preservation. At least the flaming one took some initiative. It looks like Death is gearing up to Crawl once again.

And there it goes! Oh… oh my… that is rather gruesome. Yes, it looks like the rest of them won’t be moving anytime soon. Is that reversible? I sure hope so, would be a shame to have to find others to replace them. Eh, snails are pretty resilient critters.

Habanero gains 4 Fame
Everyone else gains 0 Fame

I have won the race via apathy!

Proposal: Why is it Called Leapfrog When

Reached quorum, 4-0 with 1 DEF and Jury voting FOR. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copying to a subrule of Rule Amendments per that rule.

Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 15:35:44 UTC

Throughout the ruleset, change the name of the “Leapfrog” Move to “Leapsnail”. Update its text to read as follows:

If one exists, randomly select a non-Slug Snail before the Finish Line whose Moves are within 2 of yours. Set your Position to be 1 greater than the selected Snail’s. Optionally, you may add to the random selection Snails who have been directly eligible Leapsnail targets for you at some time in the past 24 hours of this Ongoing Race.

Nerfing Leapfrog, as promised. Also experimenting with a new idea to reduce the “players need to react immediately to play optimally”. The general concept is that you can choose to act at any time, but other players will still be able to treat your gamestate as it was before for determining the conditions of their actions if it’s been less than a day. Applied here, the strategy of “I stare at the tracking page until someone is just barely in Leapsnail range, then Leapsnail for maximum distance” falls apart because a less attentive player will still get a full day to react to their opponents zooming by them and be able to do the same thing. Since it can be tedious and annoying to have to go digging through the gamestate history to find eligible targets, I’ve made it optional. The system isn’t anywhere near perfect, but it should help a fair bit.

Proposal: They Were Late

Reached quorum, 4-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied as a subrule to Rule Amendments per the text of that rule.

Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 02:11:31 UTC

For each of the following Slugs, if less than half of EVCs on this Proposal contained the phrase “I hate X” (where X is the name of the Slug in question), then add it to the list of Slugs:

* Name: Broom Barry
* Movement Rules: After Broom Barry sweeps, he moves backwards by 5cm.
* Extra Effects: Broom Barry starts each race at a Position of DICE50 + 50. If after a Move a Snail’s Position is changed to be within 8cm of Broom Barry, he sweeps, pushing all Snails in his range away from him until they are 8cm away. Snails sharing his Position are pushed backwards.

* Name: Friendly Fiona
* Movement Rules: If a single non-Slug Snail’s Position exactly matches Friendly Fiona’s and has done so for the past 24 hours, then whenever that Snail’s Position changes her Position changes by the same amount and her number of Moves is the same as that Snail’s Moves.
* Extra Effects: Friendly Fiona starts each race at a Position of DICE100. If a Snail’s action causes Friendly Fiona to cross the Finish Line for the first time in a Race, that Snail captivates the crowds with a heartwarming display of friendship, gaining 2 Fame.

* Name: The Iron Slug
* Movement Rules: When a Snail’s Position exactly matches that of the Iron Slug and has done so for at least 24 hours, then that Snail may reverse its polarity by making a comment in the Ongoing Race saying they are doing so and setting its Position to DICE100.
* Extra Effects: The Iron Slug starts each race at a position of DICE100. If after a Move a Snail’s Position is changed to be within 20cm of the Iron Slug, then that Snail is pulled closer to the Iron Slug by 5cm (or, if less than 5cm away, directly on top of the Iron Slug).

* Name: Identity Crisis Ian
* Movement Rules: If it has been longer than 24 hours since he has last moved or he has not Moved this Race, then any Snail may cause Identity Crisis Ian to perform the Slipstream Move.
* Extra Effects: Identity Crisis Ian starts each race at a Position of 50. If a single non-Slug Snail is within 5cm of Identity Crisis Ian, that Snail may help him find himself by choosing a Slug from the Bucket, swapping its Position with Identity Crisis Ian’s, and mentioning this in a comment in the Ongoing Race.

* Name: Danger Daryl
* Movement Rules: Danger Daryl cannot move by normal means.
* Extra Effects: Danger Daryl starts each race at a position of 35 + DICE30, because she enjoys the thrill of being directly in the path of oncoming traffic. Whenever a non-Slug Snail passes her for the first time in a Race, they may immediately after choose to roll DICE20. On an 11-19, they Spot Danger. On a 20, they Spot Danger three times.

Add the following step after “Create a new Race” in the atomic action in “Races”:

* Select the Slug of Death and 3 other Slugs at random, including those in the Bucket, and set their position to the Bench. Set the Position of all other Slugs to the Bucket.

Change the distance Slingshot Sam throws Snails from 5 to 20.

Filling out the Slug roster, including a reprise on the Iron Slug to make it more predictable and not hold up the game if someone gets near it. Generally I prefer them to be more powerful (they should each conceivably be able have a significant effect on your strategy IMO), so I’ve also made Slingshot Sam throw further. Feel free to say you hate Slugs you don’t want to see and they won’t be added.

Proposal: Items

Reached quorum, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied as a subrule to Rule Amendments per the text of that rule.

Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 02:03:32 UTC

Add the following new rule, titled “Items”:

Each Snail has a publicly tracked list of Items, defaulting to an empty list. Each Item has a name, and optionally an effect that is applied when the Item is Discarded. Items may also have Passive effects, which apply to all Snails who have that Item in their Items.

The following Items have effects:
* Magnet: choose to either move all Snails 5 cm towards you or move all Snails 5 cm away from you.
* Magic Mirror: if your Position is negative, set it to the corresponding positive value.
* Crystal of Moderateness: remove all Items from a single Snail (if such a Snail exists) who has at least as many Items than every other Snail, and then remove all Crystals of Moderateness from every Snail’s Items. (Passive effect: the only Move you may make is Discard)
* Shield: (Passive) Other Snails may not change your Position by more than 11-N cm at a time (where N is the number of Shields in your Items). If they would, your Position changes by only 11-N cm instead (to the same direction as the original change)
* Huge Club: if a Snail (other than you) has the same positive Position as you, move that Snail 30 cm backward.

At any time, a Snail may Order an Item by privately sending to the Jury the name of that Item. The name must appear in the above list or be an English language concrete noun.

In the rule “Races”, replace “may perform the following atomic action” with

may perform Preparations, which is an atomic action with the following steps

Add a new step to the beginning of Preparations:

* Set all Snails’ Items to empty. Then, for each Item that was Ordered since the last Race was created, add that Item to its orderer’s Items. (If a Snail made more than 10 Orders, only consider the 10 most recent ones for that Snail)

Add the following new action to the list of possible Moves in the rule Moving:

Discard: remove one Item from your Items and apply its non-Passive effects (If any Snail(s) have the Crystal of Moderateness in their Items, no other Snail may perform this action.)


If a quorum of Snails included the text “confusing terminology” in a comment on this proposal, rename the rule “Equipment” to “Upgrades”, and replace its contents with:

Each Snail has a publicly tracked Upgrades, which is a list of names of Upgrades, and defaults to blank.

An Upgrade has a name, a cost and an effect which is applied to a Snail that has that Upgrade’s name in their Upgrades. A Snail may, at any time, spend the amount of Fame equal to the cost of an Upgrade to add that Upgrade’s name to their Upgrades (if it isn’t already there).

An Upgrade is defined as a subrule of this rule, with the name of the subrule being the name of the equipment.

The intention here is that you have to predict what your opponents are planning to do; how many items is it safe to order, should you order the crystal or will someone else do it anyway, etc.

This doesn’t necessarily conflict with lendun’s idea of Equipment, because Equipments seem to be intended as permanent one-time purchase upgrades, whereas Items would be Race-specific and discardable. (to be clear, I had sketched this already earlier, so this is not a direct “answer” to lendun’s proposal)

The renaming part is because having both “Equipment” and “Items” seems like it might be confusing

Saturday, November 30, 2024

Proposal: Pimp My Snail

Timed out, 4-1. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied as a subrule to Rule Amendments per the text of that rule.

Adminned at 02 Dec 2024 18:33:22 UTC

Create a new dynastic rule named “Equipment” with the following body:

Each Snail has a publicly tracked Inventory, which is a list of Equipments that defaults to blank.

A piece of Equipment has a name, a cost and an effect which is applied to a Snail that has that Equipment in their Inventory. A Snail may, at any time, spend the amount of Fame equal to the cost of an Equipment to add that piece of Equipment to their Inventory (if that Equipment isn’t already there).

Pieces of Equipment are defined as subrules of this rule, with the name of the subrule being the name of the equipment.

Create a subrule of that rule named “Slime Lubricant” with the following body:

Cost: 10
Effect: When using the Crawl move, you may increase your position by DICE12 instead of DICE10.

Proposal: Updated Rulebook

Timed out, 3-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Dec 2024 14:54:55 UTC

Add the following new rule, titled “Rule Amendments”:

The text of all subrules of this rule is considered flavour text in all other respects except that when performing the Update Rules action, the first subrule is considered to have meaning as if it was the text of a proposal.

Unless a Proposal explicitly tells to modify the Official Rules, any instructions in it to edit the dynastic ruleset are not performed upon enactment, but instead the text containing those instructions is copied as a new subrule of this rule.

If there is no Ongoing Race and this rule has at least one subrule, any Admin may Update Rules, which is the following atomic action:
* Perform the instructions in the first subrule in this rule, following the rules for enactment described in “Resolution of Proposals”
* Remove the first subrule from this rule

A new Race may not be created if this rule has one or more subrules.

This idea is borrowed from Giolitti (Kevan XXVIII):
keeping the rules within a race constant and applying changes only between races

Friday, November 29, 2024

Proposal: It’s In The Cards

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Dec 2024 19:00:44 UTC

If Race 1 is Ongoing, the rest of this Proposal has no effect.

Add a new rule named “Cards” with the following text:

Each Snail has a publicly-tracked Cards, which is a list of names of Moves that may be empty, is empty by default, and has a maximum of 3 names of Moves. A Slug’s Cards are always empty.

Draw is an atomic action where the Snail who performs it randomly selects the name of a Move from the list of valid Moves and adds that name to their Cards.

A non-Slug Snail may Draw only when there is an Ongoing Race and at least one of the following is true:
* That Snail has not yet made any Moves in the Onging Race.
* All Snails whose positions are not greater than the Finish Line have made at least 1 Move in this Ongoing Race since the last time they performed a Draw.

In the rule “Moving”, replace the text “unambigously specifying one of the actions listed below” with the following

unambigously specifying one of the Moves listed in their Cards, removing the name of that Move from their Cards, then performing the action associated with that Move.

and in the same rule, replace the bulleted list with the following:

* Crawl: Increase your Position by DICE10.
* Walk: Increase your Position by 6.
* Toss: If you have at least 2 Moves in your Cards, randomly select among the non-Slug Snails, other than yourself, whose Positions are within 5cm of your Position and are not greater than the Finish Line. The selected Snail loses 5 Position. Then, set your Cards to an empty list.
* Run: If you have at least 2 Moves in your Cards, increase your Position by 10, then set your Cards to an empty list.
* Rest: Set your Cards to an empty list.

Kevan had a good point about this being a swingy game. Right now, it’s mostly luck and very little strategy. What if we pushed things more towards the strategy side, with just a little card-drawing luck?

The Moves that have a larger increase or cause a penalty also force you to discard at least 1 other Move, so they cost you a little bit to use.