Thursday, August 31, 2023

Proposal: The Bare Minimum Revisited

Timed out 1 vote to 1 with 2 unresolved DEFs. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 02 Sep 2023 14:35:08 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, after the text “An Abandoned District may not make any response other than a null response.” add the following text:

If a District responds with anything other than a null response, it must allocate a sufficient quantity of resources in that response to result in a Score of at least 2, or if it is not possible to do so, a Score greater than 0 and as close to 2 as possible. If a District cannot respond with a null response and cannot allocate any combination of resources to result in a Score greater than 0, it must respond with an allocation of 10 People, or if it has less than 10 People, all of its People.

This somewhat mitigates the issue Josh pointed out with a District dragging out the Plenary Sessions with very low bids by establishing a minimum bid.

There’s also a hack where a District does not have the resources to get a Score other than 0, so technically they could allocate 1 People or 1 Energy for a Score of 0 and it wouldn’t be a null response, resulting in a “dying” District that keeps hanging on for a very long time. A penalty of 10 People in this case will ensure that a District that has little chance of winning will be removed fairly soon.

I’ll probably be impacted by this, but I’d rather not drag this out too long.

Dilemma #29 - The Scavengers

The lights reveal small packs of wild carnivores roaming the city at night, unfazed by the street lighting and opportunistically attempting to break into food stores and waste bins. They’re causing some minor structural damage and occasionally diverting the attention of security patrols, but otherwise don’t seem to be a serious problem.

Do the Districts tolerate their presence, or turn off the street lights and hunt them down?

Tolerate: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Lose 1 Defences


Hunt: Gain 1 Food and Randomly select a number from 0 to 2, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides (excluding this one) to yourself

Proposal: The Bare Minimum

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 01 Sep 2023 08:48:32 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, after the text “An Abandoned District may not make any response other than a null response.” add the following text:

If a District responds with anything other than a null response, it must allocate a sufficient quantity of resources in that response to result in a Score of at least 2, or if it is not possible to do so, a Score greater than 0 and as close to 2 as possible. If a District cannot respond with a null response and cannot allocate any combination of resources to result in a Score greater than 0, it must respond with an allocation of 10 People, or if it has less than 10 People, all of its People.

This somewhat mitigates the issue Josh pointed out with a District dragging out the Plenary Sessions with very low bids by establishing a minimum bid.

There’s also a hack where a District does not have the resources to get a Score other than 0, so technically they could allocate 1 People or 1 Energy for a Score of 0 and it wouldn’t be a null response, resulting in a “dying” District that keeps hanging on for a very long time. A penalty of 10 People in this case will ensure that a District that has little chance of winning will be removed fairly soon.

I’ll probably be impacted by this, but I’d rather not drag this out too long.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Proposal: Private Eye

Reached quorum and enacted, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 01 Sep 2023 08:47:36 UTC

Remove the Appendix Keywords entry for Private Message.

Proposal: Name Badges [Appendix]

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 01 Sep 2023 08:46:45 UTC

To the entry for “Discord” in “Keywords”, add:-

Non-idle Districts are strongly encouraged to use a name on Discord that matches or closely resembles their BlogNomic District name.

Putting one angle of the comments on Let’s Talk Privately up for a focused discussion and vote.

It’s the BlogNomic Discord, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask that active players use their BlogNomic names there, or close enough. A new (or forgetful old) player shouldn’t have to do any detective work to establish which username to ping a gameplay question or private alliance suggestion to, or to understand whether an unfamiliar username weighing in on some game discussion is one of the current players or not.

Proposal: Gone Conclavin’

Timed out and enacted 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 01 Sep 2023 08:43:01 UTC

In the rule The Conclave, make the following changes:

Change “direct private message” to

private communication (which may be sent either through the BlogNomic PM system or as a direct message on discord)

Change “quantities of their own resources” to

quantities of their own resources (where Resources are defined as People, Food, Ingenuity, Defence, Energy Trap, Factions, Order, Commons, and Innovations)

Change “A District may make a null response” to

A District may make a null response (which takes the same format as any other Plenary Session response, but which specifies that no resources are bid; any response in which no resources are bid is considered to be a null response)

A few wording tweaks, as well as a way of speeding up the endgame if someone achieves a dominant position.

Dilemma #28 - The Lights

Rumours spread again of dark and unfamiliar shapes moving through the city streets at night, prowling silently from door to door and always gone by the morning. Some say they are wild animals scavenging for food, while others suspect spies from rival districts, or wanderers from other regions of the city passing through.

Do the Districts set up searchlights at their perimeters, or work to maintain the lighting on the streets?

Searchlights: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 4 from your Energy Trap*


Streetlights: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Lose 4 from your Energy Trap*

* or lose all of your Energy Trap instead if your Defences are less than 0

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Proposal: [Appendix][Core] Let’s Talk Privately

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 1 vote to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 30 Aug 2023 12:16:01 UTC

In the Appendix, replace the text for the Private Message keyword with the following:

A message sent via BlogNomic’s Private Messages system at blognomic.com, or via Discord’s Direct Messages system if both the sender’s and receiver’s Discord “Server Nickname” in the BlogNomic Discord server matches their respective usernames on blognomic.com.

In the Fair Play section of the Core Rules, add the following bullet point:

A District should not impersonate another District on the BlogNomic Discord server through the use of the same or similar Server Nicknames.

The goal is to allow “private message” to include Discord DMs while preventing impersonation through the Fair Play rules. If two people want to use Discord DMs, its their Discord “Server Nickname” that is easily changeable without having to change their core Discord “Display Name” for other Discord servers.

I recognize that there could be debate on what “similar” means, but there’s plenty of other Fair Play rules that also have leeway, such as “deliberately and unreasonably prolong the performance of a game action”. I think as long as it’s understood to be “within reason”, it’s good enough.

Also, the call-out specifically to Server Nicknames is due to the fact that it’s not necessarily fair to force someone to change their Display Name, which is displayed across all Discord servers, just to appease the Fair Play rule for BlogNomic. Server Nickname should be enough.

Proposal: Going Once, Going Twice

Fewer than a quorum not voting against. Failed 1 vote to 4 by Kevan.

Adminned at 30 Aug 2023 08:11:22 UTC

Remove the following paragraph from the ruleset:

Each District may respond once to each Plenary Session. A Plenary Session response takes the format of a direct private message to the City allocating quantities of their own resources. These allocated quantities are spent from that District’s own resources, and while it is not required that a District immediately update gamestate tracking to reflect that expenditure, they must do so before they make any subsequent response to a Plenary Session. Defence cannot be expended in this way if it would result in the Defence of the responding District to have a value lower than zero. A District may make a null response.

In the rule “The Conclave”, immediately after “Make a post to the blog announcing the new Plenary Session.”, add the following paragraphs:

People, Food, Ingenuity, Defences, the Energy Trap, Order, Connections and Innovations are resources.

Once a Plenary Session is posted, it is considered to be Ongoing. A Plenary Session ceases to be Ongoing once it has had no Responses for the past 12 hours. If a Plenary Session is Ongoing, any non-abandoned District may Respond to it by performing the following atomic action:
* Spend any positive amount of resources. (except Defences, if doing this would cause it to drop to a value below zero)
* Make a comment on that Plenary Session announcing how many resources you’ve spent during the course of this action, as well as your Score total for that Plenary Session according to the Scoring Matrix of its Agenda Item.

In the rule “The Conclave”, change “When the City summarises the outcome of a Plenary Session, they calculate each District’s Score for that Plenary Session by scoring its allocated resources against the Scoring Matrix of that Plenary Session’s Agenda Item.” to:

When the City summarises the outcome of a Plenary Session, they calculate each District’s Score for that Plenary Session by scoring the resources they have spent on that Plenary Sessions against the Scoring Matrix of that Plenary Session’s Agenda Item.

and “if every non-Abandonned District has Responded to all previous Plenary Sessions, OR if 48 hours have elapsed since the posting of the most recent Plenary Session” to:

if no Ongoing Plenary Sessions exist

a live auction mechanic to replace the current process of receiving anointments. I personally don’t really like this sort of “wine in front of me” gameplay and would prefer something like this, but I’d like to hear your opinions
and yes, this has the potential of dragging the endgame out, but doing so would have literally no benefit so I don’t see why anyone would do it

Proposal: Midnight Sun

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 30 Aug 2023 08:10:24 UTC

In “The Conclave”, remove “if they have not done so that day, “.

Replace “announcing the Plenary Session for that day” with:-

announcing the new Plenary Session

Can’t see a reason to wait for the next calendar day, if a Plenary Session raised in the UTC morning happens to get a full set of responses by the afternoon.

Dilemma #27 - The Vehicles

Most districts still maintain a few biofuelled runabouts for difficult haulage jobs and other emergencies. With leaders jockeying for position in the upcoming Conclave, some advisors suggest converting some of these pickups into patrol vehicles, so that they can scout out the borders and respond quickly to any conflicts that break out. Others say that any additional biofuel would do better serving the failing power systems.

Do the Districts establish patrol routes, or fuel the generators?

Patrol: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Food*


Power: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Lose 1 Food*

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Monday, August 28, 2023

Proposal: Convection

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Aug 2023 17:32:17 UTC

If Proposal: Ties Are For Suits, Not Contests was enacted then this proposal has no effect.

In the rule The Conclave, change “then the single District with the most Anointments has achieved Victory” to read:

then the single District with the most Anointments (or, if there is a tie, the District of those tied who received their first Anointment at the earliest Plenary Session) has achieved Victory

Earliest annointment wins, to promote more aggressive bidding.

Proposal: Who Goes There?

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Aug 2023 17:31:18 UTC

In “Factions”, replace:-

The City may create a new Faction at any time, choosing a name for it and randomly determining its Culture.

Whenever the City posts a Dilemma with a “Gain 5 People” Upside, it must specify a Faction to which the People of that Upside belong.

with:-

Whenever the City posts a Dilemma with a “Gain 5 People” Upside, it must specify a Faction to which the People of that Upside belong, with a 50% chance of it being a new Faction (which the City creates at that moment) and a 50% chance of it being a randomly-selected existing Faction.

I currently have arbitrary narrative leeway to decide if arriving People are a newly-created Faction or an old one. This proposal ascribes specific odds to the possible outcomes.

Proposal: Sticky Heels

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0 with 1 unresolved IMP DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Aug 2023 17:30:24 UTC

In the rule The Conclave, change “A District may make a null response” to:

A District may make a null response up to three times in total while a Conclave is ongoing, unless they are Abandoned, in which case they may only make null responses.

An incentive to not drag the endgame out too much, while retaining it as a tactical choice.

Dilemma #26 - The Panels

Disconnected from the grid and lost without a control system to operate them, the hexagonal panels of the Solar Garden are little more than heavy slabs of silicon now, the skeletons of their electronics fossilised deep beneath the surface. Stripping these down without destroying the contents is hard work, but your scientists believe this will yield useful materials and components. Other advisors suggest simply installing non-functional panels in a decorative or even deceptive role, on the buildings of the district.

Do the Districts reassign labourers to break down the panels, or install them ornamentally?

Break: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Food*


Ornament: Govern and Lose 1 Defences

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Proposal: Ties Are For Suits, Not Contests

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Aug 2023 17:29:37 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, after the text “The single District whose Score is highest on each Plenary Session receives an Anointment;” add this text:

if there is more than one District whose Score is highest for that Plenary Session, then no District receives an Anointment for that Plenary Session.”

In the same rule, after the text “the single District with the most Anointments has achieved Victory” add this text:

; if, under the preceding condition, there is more than one District with the most Anointments, the City must publicly randomly select a District from the Districts with the most Anointments, and the District thus selected achieves victory”

It’s a high-stakes game, ties don’t count in awarding Anointments, but you still lose the resources you committed.

If everyone is tapped out or Abandoned such that no one can reach 3 Anointments, and there’s a tie in highest Anointments, roll off among the tied highest. That seems the most fair to me. I’d rather not get into convoluted equations that we’re going to spend days arguing about just to determine a secondary win condition.

Proposal: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Are Abandoned

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0 with 1 unresolved IMP DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Aug 2023 17:29:00 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, replace the text “If a Conclave is under way and it can be demonstrated that no District is capable of receiving any further Anointments” with this text:

If a Conclave is ongoing and there is no District that can make a non-null response to any of the Agenda Items defined by the ruleset

In the same rule, after the text “A District may make a null response.”, add the following text:

An Abandoned District may not make any response other than a null response.

I know that we already have the text “An Abandoned District cannot achieve victory while it remains Abandoned.”, but that doesn’t stop an Abandoned District from receiving Anointments. If we get to a point where everyone else is tapped out, we reach an impasse where the Abandoned District has the most Anointments, cannot achieve victory, and no other District can achieve victory either.

I think it’s best to say that an Abandoned District has effectively dropped out of the Conclave, since they can’t achieve victory anyway.

Sunday, August 27, 2023

Dilemma #25 - The Brownouts

The city’s fractured electricity grid is beginning to falter, reducing the light and power of essential buildings with no warning. Engineers advise shutting down local substations for repairs and a black start from the old generators, but in the short term this would be even more disruptive to the day-to-day running of the districts.

Do the Districts continue to work through the power failures, or follow the engineers’ recommendations?

Persist: Govern and Lose 1 Ingenuity*


Shutdown: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Lose 4 from your Energy Trap**

* or lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity
** or lose all of your Energy Trap instead if your Defences are less than 0

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Proposal: The Subsequence Dilemma

Timed out 3 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 28 Aug 2023 10:16:02 UTC

In the rule The Conclave, change “while it is not required that a District immediately update gamestate tracking to reflect that expenditure, it must be accounted for before any subsequence response to a Plenary Session is made.” to:

while it is not required that a District immediately update gamestate tracking to reflect that expenditure, they must do so before they make any subsequent response to a Plenary Session.

In the rule The Conclave, change “2 Score per Connection” to “1.5^x Score per Connection (where x is the amount of Connections that District is allocating to this Plenary Session)”, change “1 Score per Connection” to “1.2^x Score per Connection (where x is the amount of Connections that District is allocating to this Plenary Session)” and change “1 Score per Order” to “1.5 Score per Order” wherever they appear.

bugfix + some miscellaneous buffs

Dilemma #24 - The Elders

As preparations continue for the upcoming Conclave, some of the districts’ oldest inhabitants, those who were there at the exodus of the Great Machines, express their doubts over this path of a return to a unified government. The last time that the city reached such heights, outsiders saw its power and brought it down. They will bring it down again. There are other paths the city can take through these difficult years.

Do the District leaders continue to work towards the Conclave regardless, or take time to listen to the elders’ thoughts?

Continue: Govern and Lose 5 People


Listen: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 4 from your Energy Trap*

* or lose all of your Energy Trap instead if your Defences are less than 0

Friday, August 25, 2023

Proposal: What Do Points Mean

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 26 Aug 2023 16:35:26 UTC

Replace the word “points” with “Score” throughout the rule “The Conclave”.

Taking it at face value, Bureaucracy At Its Finest saying to “change all appearances of the word ‘point’ to ‘Score’” did not affect the various usages of the word “points”.

Call for Judgment: Rafter Drafter

Reached quorum and enacted, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 25 Aug 2023 16:55:02 UTC

Uphold that Rafter’s Reactions to Dilemmas 21, 22 and 23 were completed correctly.

Rafter commented on 21, commented on 22, updated gamestate on 22, then updated gamestate on 21, and finished the 21 step at hour 49 of the dilemma, making it illegal. This would leave them with an atomic action in progress that they can never complete. Given that it’s a new player and the impact is minimal, seems easier just to tidy up and move past it.

Dilemma #23 - The Rain

Heavy clouds push in from the sea, and torrential rain pours down across the city. Parts of the electrical grid spark and fail where the water seeps through. Sustained levels of rain are rare here, and the districts’ rainwater tanks are quickly filled, the runoff pouring along other channels on its way to the river. While the rain still falls, your scientists suggest that it may be worth patching tanks and diverting drains to capture as much water as possible for filtering and irrigation, fixing the leaks into the electrical system as they go.

Do the Districts work to capture more rain, or continue their previous work as it falls?

Capture: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Ingenuity*


Ignore: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 4 from your Energy Trap**

* or lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity
** or lose all of your Energy Trap instead if your Defences are less than 0

Proposal: A Conclave Arrives Precisely When It Means To

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 26 Aug 2023 16:36:13 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, remove the text ” and existing Dilemmas may not be Reacted to”

In the same rule, after the text “While a Conclave is ongoing” add this text:

, and Dilemma #30 is no longer Ongoing

With the current way that the Ongoing Conclave is worded, Dilemma #30 would get posted, but then no one could React to it, and it’s also possible that some Districts may not have Reacted to Dilemma #29 yet either, and the current wording would lock them out of that one as well.

My Proposal’s wording removal and addition allows all Districts to React through Dilemma 30 before the Conclave really gets going.

Proposal: The Human Equation

Reached quorum 4 votes to 2. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 26 Aug 2023 16:36:10 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, in the table column “Scoring Matrix”, change every instance of “1 Score per People” to “0.2 Score per People”

As it stands, People have an outsized influence on Score considering the amounts of People we each have vs the amounts of everything else we have, to the point where the rest of the equation for Abundance and Culture is near-meaningless. Josh’s original Proposal recognized this for Energy by making it 0.25 per Energy since Outcomes were a gain/loss of 4 Energy at a time. Following this logic, if Outcomes have a gain/loss of 5 People at a time, each People should be worth 1/5 and not 1.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Proposal: Remnants of the Battery Garden

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 26 Aug 2023 07:03:02 UTC

Reword the Effect of the Scavenging Parties Innovation to “Work effect: If you are Reacting to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 5, spend 1 Food to gain one of the following three benefits at random: +1 Ingenuity, +1 Defences, or +4 to your Energy Trap.”

we never updated this dilemma in the wake of energy upsides/downsides being changed from 1 to 4!

Proposal: In Season

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 26 Aug 2023 07:01:56 UTC

In the Effect of the Indoor Gardens Innovation, replace “Gain 1 Food” with “Gain 2 Food”.

this is the other piece of preparation that The Annointed Ones trampled: i only chose to learn Indoor Gardens knowing that starvation would be crucial to avoid in the endgame, and that i would be able to survive to dilemma 40 to gain 1 more Food. the numbers we’re working with here are very small; if Indoor Gardens doesn’t grant 1 more food, it won’t have been worthwhile to take in the first place!
changing it to 2 Food will only effect Dilemma #30, and will give others a chance to get ahold of the upgrade in time if they’d like :0

Proposal: Bureaucracy At Its Finest

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0, enacted by Kevan. Neutrally assuming that the word “points” is not changed by references to editing “the word ‘point’”.

Adminned at 25 Aug 2023 10:02:24 UTC

In the rule “The Conclave”, change all appearances of the word “point” to “Score”.

In the rule Innovation, change the Effect of the Innovation named Careful Rationing to:

When the City calculates your score for a Plenary Session whose Agenda Item’s Scoring Matrix contains the word “Food”, you are considered to have gained 1.5 Score per Food allocated instead of 1.

In the rule Innovation, remove the Innovation named Desperate Measures from the table.

miscellaneous bugfix + a rework of Careful Rationing to work with Plenary Sessions (wording is awkard but I couldn’t figure anything else out)
also removing Desperate Measures because I don’t think it’d work with what we have now

Dilemma #22 - The Hunt

An annual tradition in the city is the hunt, marking the migration of ruminant herds across the northern edge of the snowplains. Some districts undertake this as a pragmatic and dangerous hunting expedition, others regard it as a more ceremonial event where the district leader shows that they trust their fellow hunters and are unafraid to face death.

How do the Districts honour the hunt?

Survival: Gain 1 Food and Lose 5 People


Ceremony: Govern and Lose 1 Defences

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Proposal: The Most Toys

withdrawn
-lemon

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 22:05:22 UTC

In the Progressive Position of “The People’s Front of Judea”, replace “High Ingenuity / Ingenuity cost of understood Innovations” with “High Ingenuity and many Innovations” and “Ingenuity + Ingenuity cost of all understood Innovations” with “Ingenuity + number of understood Innovations”.

Simplifying the only formula that requires ruleset cross-referencing, so that I can eyeball it more easily when making Faction Tests, as can players if they’re wondering where their District falls at any given moment.

Dilemma #21 - The Darkness

Unnerved by some of the rumours filtering in from other districts, your clearance teams are refusing to perform further work underground until adequate lighting and safety measures are brought in.

Do the Districts supply that, or refuse?

Provide: Govern and Lose 1 Ingenuity*


Decline: Govern and Lose 5 People

* or lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

New District Mentorship

Tenured player Josh is formally assigned as Rafter’s Mentor, under BlogNomic’s Mentor rule. This will run until the end of the dynasty or the 20th of September, whichever is later.

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

New Arrival

Howdy everyone

First time doing this kind of game, I’m sure it’ll take some getting used to but I’m excited.

Proposal: The Anointed Ones

timed out and enacted 4-0
-lemon

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 22:01:34 UTC

Rename the rule Into the Storm as The Conclave, and rewrite it as follows:

The City has signalled that it is willing to negotiate a new deal on resources, and a Conclave has been called to appoint a representative, who can showcase the best of what the Districts have to offer.

If the most recently posted Dilemma’s number is 30 or higher, a Conclave is ongoing. While a Conclave is ongoing, new Dilemmas may not be posted and existing Dilemmas may not be Reacted to.

While a Conclave is ongoing, if they have not done so that day, and if every non-Abandonned District has Responded to all previous Plenary Sessions, OR if 48 hours have elapsed since the posting of the most recent Plenary Session, then the City may post a Plenary Session. Posting a Plenary Session is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Make a reply to any previous Plenary Session that has not received such a reply, summarising its outcome and which District (if any) has been Anointed as a result of that Plenary Session;
* Randomly select one of the six Agenda Items that are listed in this rule that have not been the subject of any of the previous four Plenary Sessions;
* Make a post to the blog announcing the Plenary Session for that day.

Each District may respond once to each Plenary Session. A Plenary Session response takes the format of a direct private message to the City allocating quantities of their own resources. These allocated quantities are spent from that District’s own resources, and while it is not required that a District immediately update gamestate tracking to reflect that expenditure, it must be accounted for before any subsequence response to a Plenary Session is made. Defence cannot be expended in this way if it would result in the Defence of the responding District to have a value lower than zero. A District may make a null response.

Each Plenary Session must have a single Agenda Item as its subject. Each Agenda Item has a Name and a Scoring Matrix. These are expressed in the table below.

{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Name !! Scoring Matrix
|-
| Abundance || 1 point per People, 1 point per Food, 1 point per Defence
|-
| Progress || 2 points per Innovation, 1 point per Ingenuity, 0.25 points per Energy
|-
| Stability || 1 point per Order, 1 point per Defence, 2 points per Connection
|-
| Contentment || 1 point per Faction, 1 point per Food, 2 points per Innovation
|-
| Power || 1 point per Defence, 1 point per Ingenuity, 0.25 points per Energy
|-
| Culture || 1 point per People, 1 point per Connection, 1 point per Order
|}

When the City summarises the outcome of a Plenary Session, they calculate each District’s Score for that Plenary Session by scoring its allocated resources against the Scoring Matrix of that Plenary Session’s Agenda Item. The single District whose Score is highest on each Plenary Session receives an Anointment; any District who has three or more Anointments has achieved Victory. If a Conclave is under way and it can be demonstrated that no District is capable of receiving any further Anointments then the single District with the most Anointments has achieved Victory.

An attempt at a less random victory mechanism. Closed-fist auctions with a push your luck mechanic. Couldn’t come up with an all-cases tiebreaker so if we do get to the end and no-one can win then we may just have to CfJ for it.

Proposal: Insert Some Sort of Pun-ctuation [Appendix]

timed out and enacted 4-0
-lemon

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 22:00:07 UTC

In the Appendix, in the rule “Spelling and formatting”, replace “Districts may correct obvious spelling and typographical mistakes” with “Districts may correct obvious spelling, punctuation, and/or typographical mistakes”.

i recall someone talking about this a little while ago & i wrote it down! i’ve got a free proposal slot right now and no dynastic ideas that i’m not too sleepy to write out. is this suitable?

Proposal: Inevitability

timed out and enacted 2-1
-lemon

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 21:56:12 UTC

Append the following text to the rule “Into the Storm”:

While The Storm is ongoing, instead of the Downsides listed in “Upsides and Downsides”, the following Downsides exist:
* Lose People equal to 25 minus 5 for every 1 point you choose to spend from your Energy Trap
* Lose People equal to 10 minus 5 for every 1 Order you choose to spend
* Lose 3 People and 1 Defences, or lose 10 People instead if you have less than 0 Defences
* Lose 3 People and 1 Ingenuity, or lose 5 People and your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity
* Lose 1 Ingenuity and 1 from your Energy Trap, or lose 4 from your Energy Trap instead if you have no Ingenuity
* Lose 1 Defences and 1 Food, or lose 3 Food instead if you have less than 0 Defences
* Randomly select a number from 1 to 3, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides from the rule “Upsides and Downsides” to yourself (excluding the one that begins with “Randomly Select”)

In the same rule, replace the following bullet points:

* When Posing a Dilemma, the City randomly selects six Downsides instead of two, and assigns the first three to the first Outcome and the last three to the second Outcome.
* When Reacting to a Dilemma with more than two Downsides, a District applies each Downside of the selected Outcome to themself.
* Whenever a District’s Order level is reduced, two randomly-selected Downsides are immediately applied to that District.
* If every District is Abandoned except for one, or if the Dilemma’s number is 44 or higher, the District with the most People has achieved victory (in the case of a tie, only the tied player with the most Defences achieves victory).

with:

* When a non-Abandoned District’s Order would be reduced as a result of Passing or of the City performing the penultimate step of Posing a Dilemma, a randomly-selected Downside must be immediately applied to that District instead.
* If every District is Abandoned except for one, or if the Dilemma’s number is 44 or higher, the District with the most People has achieved victory (in the case of a tie, only the tied player with the most Order achieves victory).

here’s a rebalancing of The Storm! when i initially proposed it, Kevan expressed concern about having more randomisation in the endgame. so, what if instead of more downsides, we just had worse ones?
this set of downsides would rank the resources in order of necessity like so: first People (to survive), then Food (for daily hunger checks), then Energy (to stay warm), then Defences (to protect your people and your food), then Order (to stave off panic and win tiebreakers), and finally Ingenuity (to protect your people and your energy). but your personal upgrades and stockpiles would change your personal priorities!

Proposal: Ringing Endorsement

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 13:38:58 UTC

In the rule “Factions”, add a subrule named “Endorsements” and give it the following text:

When a District performs an Endorse action, they make a Story Post called an Endorsement whose title starts with the text “Endorsement: ” followed by text containing exactly one Position of the District’s choosing and any narrative text of the District’s chosing. The contents of the Post must contain the text “Fallow of (x)”, where (x) is the District’s Fallow value when they are performing the Endorse as part of the Gathering atomic action. The contents of the post may also contain any narrative text of the District’s choosing.

In response to an Endorsement, at their earliest convenience the City should perform the Support action, which is an atomic action with the following steps:
* For each Faction housed by the District who posted the Endorsement, if that Faction’s Culture contains a Position matching the Position mentioned in the title of the Endorsement, multiply the Fallow value mentioned in the contents of the Endorsement by the Reward of that Position, rounding all resulting values to the nearest whole number, and add the results to that District’s values.
* If at least one Faction’s Culture contains a Position matching the Position mentioned in the title of the Endorsement, the Response should be positive, otherwise the Response should be negative.
* Reply to the post with a comment indicating the Response to the Endorsement, using narrative text at the City’s choosing and discretion without revealing any Faction names or other Positions held within the Factions’ Cultures.

In the rule “Commons”, remove the the entry in the table with the Name “The Silicon Lake”.

In the same rule, add the following entry to the table:

|-
| Icon of Authority || Perform the Endorse action

Another puzzle-like mechanism for Factions’ Positions.

This allows a District to experimentally determine and gain the Rewards of a Position of their housed Faction(s), but it takes a few steps to get there, namely establishing a new Commons connection and then waiting for and deciding on a Govern outcome, and even then, the District has a 50-50 chance of getting it right the first time if they don’t have any other information to go on.

The “response” to an Endorsement is the weakest part of this, I think. I wanted the City to describe how the Factions respond to the Endorsement based on their Positions, but I didn’t want to make it overly complicated by explicitly stating specific wording for each Position, so I opted for a positive or negative “tone” and creative license instead.

Kevan, if you feel that the Response would be too vague for you to carry it out, let me know and I can try to make it more concrete.

Proposal: Meet and Greet

Timed out and enacted, 3-0 with an unresolved imperial DEF. Josh

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 13:37:22 UTC

In the rule “Factions”, add a subrule named “Socialize” and give it the following text:

When a District performs the Socialize action, they privately send a message to the City containing a Culture where the Positions are chosen by the District and the Loyal or Disloyal Positions are not included. At their earliest convenience, the City should privately respond with the number of those Positions that are in the Culture of one or more Factions that the District is housing, counting 1 per Position regardless of how many Factions’ Cultures it matches.

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, replace the text “it may choose to either Gather, Innovate or gain 1 Order.” with

it may choose to either Gather, Innovate or gain 1 Order, and in addition may choose to Socialize.

 

Josh mentioned that he’d like the Factions’ Positions to be puzzle-like, so here’ s one idea for that.

When Governing, a District can play a Mastermind-like guessing game to find out what Positions their housed Factions might have in their Cultures. The result is just ambiguous enough to avoid being overpowered.

Proposal: Well Moot By Meenlight

Timed out and enacted, 3-0 with an unresolved imperial DEF. Josh

Adminned at 24 Aug 2023 13:28:47 UTC

Add a new Common to the list in the rule Commons, with the name Stormbrow Peak and an effect of ‘The District may Moot once, immediately after the completion of this Gathering’.

Add the following as a subrule to the rule Factions, called Mooting:

A District may Moot when directed to by the ruleset. Mooting is an action that is carried out by sending a direct message to the City announcing an intention to Moot.

When the City receives such a message, they should, at their earliest opportunity, carry out a Faction Test for each of that District’s Factions, and then issue the Reward of all Factions that remain Housed in that District to that District.

Multiply the numbers in all of the rewards in the table in the rule The People’s Front of Judea by 10.

Proposal: Horseshoe Theory

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0.

Adminned at 23 Aug 2023 06:37:53 UTC

Change the Preference Formula for Monocultural from “Number of Factions” to:-

(Number of Factions) * -1

Multicultural and Monocultural Positions currently both have the same Formula.

Dilemma #20 - The Tunnels

Storm drains and access tunnels criss-cross the city, most having collapsed and flooded to some degree over the decades. Engineering teams venturing underground to effect repairs to the electrical grid have reported encountering groups of people living down there in the darkness, and are reluctant to proceed.

Do the Districts attempt to clear the tunnels, or work towards a truce with the inhabitants?

Clear: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Randomly select a number from 0 to 2, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides (excluding this one) to yourself


Truce: Gain 5 People (Troglodytes) and Randomly select a number from 0 to 2, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides (excluding this one) to yourself

Monday, August 21, 2023

Proposal: Falling Slowly

Failed 1 vote to 3. Imperial Def becomes AGAINST at 1-2 with all other players having voted. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 22 Aug 2023 06:50:43 UTC

In the rule “Into the Storm”, replace “36 or higher” with “24 or higher” and replace “44 or higher” with “32 or higher”.

Straight reversal of values from Mistaken Forecast on the 11th of August, given that “started to get through Dilemmas a bit faster” didn’t last. At one Dilemma per day it will take another 25 days to reach the end of the dynasty.

Proposal: Power to the People

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0 with an unresolved Imperial DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 22 Aug 2023 06:49:22 UTC

In “Innovation”, after “If a District understands an Innovation but no longer understands a different Innovation which is listed as one of its prerequisites, then the understood Innovation’s effect no longer applies to that District until it regains all of the understood Innovation’s prerequisite Innovations.”, add:-

While a District’s People is zero, the effects of Societal Innovations do not apply to that District. While a District’s Energy Trap is zero, the effects of Technological Innovations do not apply to that District.

Dilemma #19 - The Storehouses

With harsher weather approaching, harvested and salvaged food needs to be stored away securely. The most suitable buildings in the districts are already in use for defensive purposes. Some weaker structures could plausibly be strengthened and repurposed, with some civil engineers speculating that the storm drains could be adapted into cellars, but this would carry significant risk.

Do the Districts repurpose a defensive structure, or risk a more improvised approach?

Repurpose: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Defences


Improvise: Gain 1 Food and Randomly select a number from 0 to 2, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides (excluding this one) to yourself

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Call for Judgment: Solar flare

Reached quorum and enacted, 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:36:42 UTC

Remove the second bullet point from the gather atomic action. Uphold any gather actions that were otherwise validly undertaken on dilemmas 17 and 18.

Proposal: The People’s Front of Judea

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0 with an unresolved Imperial DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 22 Aug 2023 06:48:52 UTC

If Proposal: Papers, Please was not enacted then this proposal has no effect.

In the rule Factions, change “and a Loyalty which is either Loyal or Disloyal” to “and a Culture”. In the same rule, change “randomly determining its Loyalty” to “randomly determining its Culture” and remove any bracketed text that may exist.

Add a subrule to the rule Factions:

Each Faction has a Culture, which is privately tracked by the City. A Culture is a sequence of five terms, called Positions, each of which is one side of a binary statement. If a Faction has no Culture then the City may generate one for it, with each Position being secretly randomly selected. A Faction’s Culture may be:
* Progressive or Conservative
* Multicultural or Monocultural
* Acquisitive or Relational
* Anarchic or Ordered
* Loyal or Disloyal

(The City may set the Culture of the Faction named “Machinists” and the Faction named “Seafolk” to random values and repeal this bracketed text, at any time.)

Each Position (except Loyal or Disloyal) is associated with a quality that a District can have, as follows:

{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Position !! Preference !! Preference Formula !! Reward
|-
| Progressive || High Ingenuity / Ingenuity cost of understood Innovations || Ingenuity + Ingenuity cost of all understood Innovations || 0.2 Ingenuity
|-
| Conservative || High Order || Order || 0.2 Order
|-
| Multicultural || High number of other Factions in the District || Number of Factions || 0.5 People, 0.1 Ingenuity
|-
| Monocultural || Low number of other Factions in the District || Number of Factions || 0.5 People, 0.1 Order
|-
| Acquisitive || High Food and a large number of Connections || Food + Number of Connections + Energy || 0.1 Food and 0.1 Energy
|-
| Relational || High People || People || 1 People
|-
| Anarchic || Low Defences and low Order || (Defence + Order) * -1 || 0.1 Food, 0.1 Ingenuity and 0.1 Energy
|-
| Ordered || High Defences and high Order || Defence + Order || 0.1 Defence and 0.1 Order
|}

A Faction Test is an atomic action that requires a specific District and a specific Faction to be its target. Whenever a Faction Test takes place, the District or City carrying it out undertakes the following steps:
* For the named Faction, calculate the named District’s position relative to all other Districts for each of the Preference Formulas of its Culture, with Loyal always being considered above average and Disloyal always being considered below average.
* If more than two of the results are below the mean average for all Districts then it stops housing that Faction.

Add the following as a fifth step to the Posing a Dilemma atomic action:

* Secretly randomly select a Faction. For each District where that Faction is Housed, carry out a Faction Test for that District and that Faction.

Add the following to the step of the Posing a Dilemma atomic action immediately after the one just added:

If any District ceased to House a Faction as a result of an earlier step in this Action, also announce that change in the same blog post.

The reward stuff isn’t plugged in yet, deliberately

Dilemma #18 - The Livestock

The people of the city have relied on hardy mountain livestock as a bedrock of their diet for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, particularly through the coldest months and poorest harvests. That tradition still continues today to a smaller degree, with each district having small animal pens within its boundaries. With city life becoming more cramped and precarious, some have begun to argue that these pens are a dangerous, and perhaps unethical, anachronism. The land could be put to better purposes.

Do the Districts continue to farm livestock, or set them free?

Farm: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Defences


Release: Govern and Lose 1 Food*

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Proposal: Thinking Before the Box

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 21 Aug 2023 08:24:08 UTC

If https://blognomic.com/archive/division_of_labour was not enacted, this proposal has no effect.

Add the following entries to the table of Innovations:

|-
| Societal || Communal Sway || 2 || None || Immediately before you Govern, if your People exceeds the People of the District with the 3rd-highest People by 25 or more, you may add one consequence of your choice to the Prospect.
|-
| Technological || Gadget Repository || 1 || Shared Wisdom || Work Effect: You may spend 1 Ingenuity to add one Upside of your choice to the Prospect.

a couple of ways to add outcomes to the prospect, reworked from when i originally proposed them for alternate outcomes!

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Proposal: Military Research Inconclusive

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:45:19 UTC

In the rule “Innovation”, change the Effect of the Innovation named Military Research to:

When performing the Connection Effect of the Commons named Deserted Barracks, multiply the result by 2 (before rounding).

Military Research does nothing ever since Josh’s Commons rework, this fixes that

Proposal: Papers, Please

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:42:18 UTC

Add a new rule, “Factions”:-

A number of Factions exist, tracked privately by the City: each has a name (which is flavour text) and a Loyalty which is either Loyal or Disloyal. Each District houses zero or more Factions, and the Factions that they house are publicly tracked. While a District that Houses Factions has no People, it is instead considered to house no Factions.

The City may create a new Faction at any time, choosing a name for it and randomly determining its Loyalty. (The City may set the Loyalty of the Faction named “Machinists” and the Faction named “Seafolk” to random values and repeal this bracketed text, at any time.)

Whenever the City posts a Dilemma with a “Gain 5 People” Upside, it must specify a Faction to which the People of that Upside belong. A District that chooses to Gain People from that Upside begins to house its specified Faction if they do not already.

Whenever a District loses 5 or more People as a result of its own decision, it may also choose to stop housing a single specific Faction.

Create two Loyal Factions called “Machinists” and “Seafolk”.

Update Dilemma #17 to specify that its People are Machinists. For each District who has already chosen the “Gain 5 People” option for Dilemma #17, add “Machinists” to the Factions they house.

Add “Seafolk” to the housed Factions of Josh, JonathanDark and Lendunistus.

Maybe the identity of newcomers is a thing worth tracking and playing off of somehow.

(Some narrative licence on who still has resident Believers from Dilemma #3 in their District: Lemon was the only player to send them away in Dilemma #5.)

Proposal: Division of Labour

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:39:51 UTC

In “Reactions”, replace “Decide: ; then posting a comment on the Dilemma” with:-

Decide: Optionally Labouring; then posting a comment on the Dilemma

To the end of that rule, add:-

To Labour is to select any number of Innovations that you understand and to perform each of their Work effects, in any order.

In “Innovation”, replace “Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 7, gain 1 Ingenuity.” with:-

Work effect: Gain 1 Ingenuity if you are Reacting to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 7.

Replace “Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 10, gain 1 Food.” with:-

Work effect: Gain 1 Food if you are Reacting to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 10.

Replace “Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 5, you may spend 1 Food to gain 1 in a resource randomly selected between Ingenuity, Defences, and Energy.” with:-

Work effect: If you are Reacting to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 5, spend 1 Food to gain 1 in a resource randomly selected between Ingenuity, Defences, and Energy.

Dislocation took us back into “Every time you React to a Dilemma, do X” territory, where it’s unclear when in the atomic actions to apply these clauses: will Indoor Gardens save you from a starvation Dilemma, or not? This restores them to a named step at the start of the Decision.

It also clarifies what happens when two Innovations hinge upon the same variable (eg. Scavenging Parties and Indoor Gardens both firing simultaneously to “gain 1 Food” and “may spend 1 Food”), by saying that the player can choose the order in which these occur.

Dilemma #17 - The Machinists

Those rushing to the Battery Garden encounter another group who already are working hard to control the fires and to repair - or possibly scavenge parts from - the Solar Field. Once the immediate danger is over, the party cautiously introduce themselves, claiming to be a group of Machinists who were left behind when the last Great Machine departed. They warn that the failure of the Battery Garden has overloaded the power grid and that electrical fires will continue sporadically without maintenance work, offering to move into the Districts - at a price - to serve as repair teams.

Do the Districts hire these strangers, or move forward without them?

Hire: Gain 5 People (Machinists) and Lose 1 Food*


Ignore: Govern and Lose 1 Defences

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Friday, August 18, 2023

Proposal: From the Ashes

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:39:15 UTC

Add the following rule, called “Territories”, to the dynastic ruleset:

Each District has a Map consisting of a 5x5 grid of ASCII characters (each of which is referred to as a Block). The top side is marked by the letters A-E in order, such that each column has a letter, and the left side is marked by the digits 1-5 descending, such that each row has a number; these give each Block in a District’s Map its own a reference coordinate. Blocks in a District’s Map can also be said to be inside that District.

Each entry in the table below contains an ASCII character which corresponds to a type of Structure that can be found or Constructed in a District. If a Block inside a District corresponds to an entry on the table below, it represents a Structure of that type, and the corresponding Effect applies to the District it is in; if it does not correspond to any such entry, any District (or the City) may change it to Ruins at any time.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Character !! Structure !! Inhabitants !! Effect
|-
| # || Ruins || 0 || Cannot be Constructed.
|-
| C || Encampment || 25 || Cannot be Constructed. Structures (other than Ruins) orthogonally adjacent to this one have -5 Inhabitants.
|-
| F || Farmland || 15 || When you Gather, your Fallow Value counts as 1 higher for the purpose of calculating the effects of the Grazing Lands.
|}

The combined total Inhabitants of every Structure inside of a single District is that District’s Housing. If a District’s Housing is less than half their People, they are Overcrowded. If a District’s Housing exceeds their people, they cannot Construct.

By default, every Block is Ruins, except for the center block (C3) of each District which is an Encampment.

i still feel like things are a bit flat, so how about this? if we want to have a little eurogame, this feels in keeping with that while also giving us something a bit more dynamic to work with! it would also give us an alternate method of expansion that requires People, rather than Ingenuity. that way we’d have two parallel advancement tracks :0

Proposal: Luckpusher

Enacted 3-1. Josh

Adminned at 20 Aug 2023 21:38:35 UTC

Add a new Downside to the list in the rule Upsides and Downsides:

Randomly select a number from 0 to 2, inclusive; then randomly select and apply that number of Downsides (excluding this one) to yourself.

Proposal: Brought Low

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 11:00:44 UTC

In “Upsides and Downsides”, remove “(or all People if you have fewer than 5)”.

Add a paragraph to the rule:-

With the exception of Defences, if a District would be required to lose more of a value than they possess, as a result of applying a consequence, then they instead lose all of that value.

Making “or all if you have fewer” into a generic rule for decreasing values in consequences; it currently doesn’t apply to the 4 Energy loss or the “lose 10 People instead if you are Starving” fallback effect.

Proposal: The Shape of Things to Come

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 10:59:34 UTC

Add a subrule to “Dilemmas” called “The Prospect”:-

The Prospect is a publicly tracked list of consequences.

Add two new bullet points to the list in “Dilemmas”, placing them after the second point:-

* If there are any Upsides in the Prospect, remove one at random and replace one of this action’s incoming Upsides (selected at random) with it
* If there are any Downsides in the Prospect, remove one at random and replace one of this action’s incoming Downsides (selected at random) with it

After “Select two Upsides and two Downsides at random”, add:-

; these are the “incoming” consequences of the action

Add the word “incoming” before every instance of “Upside” and “Downside” in the bullet point that begins “Make a blog post which pairs the first Upside with the first Downside”.

A take on delayed outcome creation after Thinking Outside the Box. Having new outcomes attached to the next Dilemma should work better for timing, and choosing the outcome feels closer to the idea of the activating District working towards a specific, desired goal, rather than getting an additional but potentially unwanted random option on an existing Dilemma.

This is just a simple framework, so that other mechanics can say “Add a consequence to the Prospect” to queue up an outcome for the next Dilemma - as Emperor, I won’t wade in with opinions on how best to cost and place the mechanics that would activate it.

Proposal: Dislocation

Reached quorum 4 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 10:57:07 UTC

If there are any open Dilemmas in which some Districts have Allocated but others have not, then revert all of the Allocations made in Reactions to that Dilemma (while upholding that those Reactions were legally undertaken if they were otherwise legally undertaken). If any District has bought Connections that they would not be able to afford had those Allocations not taken place then also revert the purchase of those Connections.

Remove the word “Allocating” and the phrase ‘who they Allocated to and’ from the rule Reactions.

In the rule Innovation, change the phrase ‘Allocate when Reacting’ to ‘React’ wherever it appears.

Rewrite the rule The Grid to read ‘Each District has a publicly tracked value for Energy Trap, which defaults to zero’.

Now that any illusion of choice has been stripped away from Allocating, it’s a completely inert mechanic that just inflates Connections at a slightly unmanageable rate. There’s nothing interesting about gaining a flat 2 energy a day so let’s bin it off; the Upside should suffice to lump progression into the system.

Dilemma #16 - The Fire

Ancient alarms ring out at the Battery Garden’s control station, and corroded sprinkler valves hiss nothing but air. Within minutes the structure is burning vividly against the night sky, the solar array reflecting its flames. Across the city, the electricity lines flicker and a few substations burn out in flashes of sparks.

Do the Districts send runners to the Garden to divert its remaining power, or reassign engineers to ensure that the local power grid is operating safely?

Divert: Gain 4 to your Energy Trap and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)


Secure: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Ingenuity*

* or lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Proposal: Timely Delivery

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 10:54:03 UTC

If the Proposal “Thinking Outside the Box” was not enacted, this Proposal has no effect.

In the rule “Alternate Outcomes”, replace the text “Choose an Ongoing Dilemma that at least two Districts have not yet Reacted to.” with this text:

Choose an Ongoing Dilemma that was posted less than 24 hours ago and that at least two Districts have not yet Reacted to.

Requiring the Alternate Outcome to be available within the first 24 hours should prevent too much of a delay in Reacting to a Dilemma, while also giving everyone in every time zone a chance to decide what to do.

I found this to be a lot simpler that trying to fiddle with allowing Districts to change their Decision or apply the Alternate Outcome to an upcoming Dilemma. Both of those options seem too messy.

Thursday, August 17, 2023

Proposal: Caffeinated City

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 10:53:14 UTC

In the rule “Dilemmas” add the following text:

If it is possible for the City to Pose a Dilemma without taking any other actions first, or to first resolve Pending proposals through Enacting or Failing them and then immediately Pose a Dilemma without taking any actions other than those mentioned in this sentence, the City should do so at its earliest opportunity.

I liked “The City that Never Sleeps”, so if the only issue was the first point in the priority list, I thought it was worth correcting that one step, and otherwise using the rest of Kevan’s proposal. I know I could have waited until he had a slot back and let him do it, but I thought I’d try my hand at a fix.

Any problems with the wording, now that it explicitly calls out the actions of the first point?

I simplified this a lot based on Kevan’s feedback. He’s right: this doesn’t need to be a strict priority list, but a more casual guideline.

Proposal: First Things First

Timed out 2 votes to 0 with 2 unresolved DEFs. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 19 Aug 2023 11:02:31 UTC

Append the following sentence to the rule “Innovation”:

At any time, a District may move one Innovation within the table of Innovations so that it is directly below another Innovation that is listed in its prerequisites, or directly above another Innovation that lists it as a prerequisite.

In the same rule, after “The Innovations that a District understands are tracked in a public list.”, add the following sentence:

If a District understands an Innovation but no longer understands a different Innovation which is listed as one of its prerequisites, then the understood Innovation’s effect no longer applies to that District until it regains all of the understood Innovation’s prerequisite Innovations.

a minor cleanup rule + a more significant drawback to losing certain Innovations! writing this made me briefly forget that ‘innovation’ was a word at all and not just some random letters having a brunch together.

Proposal: Thinking Outside the Box

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST, a 2-vs-2 tiebreak being broken by the Imperial Deferential. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 18 Aug 2023 10:41:43 UTC

Add the following rule, called “Alternate Outcomes”, to the dynastic ruleset:

Posing Another Outcome is an atomic action that consists of the following steps:
* Choose an Ongoing Dilemma that at least two Districts have not yet Reacted to.
* Select one Upside and one Downside at random. If this pairing matches one of the Outcomes on the chosen Dilemma, randomly select either the Upside or the Downside and randomly change it to a different consequence of the same Upside/Downside type. Repeat this until you have a pairing that does not match one of the chosen Dilemma’s Outcomes.
* Make a comment (referred to as an Outcome Comment) on the chosen Dilemma which includes the Upside and Downside pairing generated in the previous step as an Outcome. This comment should include a name and narrative description for this new Outcome.

After an Outcome Comment is posted, any District may select its Outcome while Deciding on the Dilemma that that Outcome Comment was posted to, as if it was one of the two Outcomes of that Dilemma.

If https://blognomic.com/archive/batteries_not_included1 was not enacted, replace “at least two Districts” with “at least three Districts” in the above rule.

Add the following entries to the table of Innovations:

|-
| Societal || Communal Sway || 2 || None || If your People exceeds the People of the District with the 3rd-highest People by 20 or more, you may spend 1 Order to Pose Another Outcome.
|-
| Technological || Gadget Repository || 1 || Shared Wisdom || You may spend 1 Ingenuity to Pose Another Outcome.

In the rule “Into the Storm”, append the following bullet point after the bullet point that begins “When Posing a Dilemma”:

* When Posing Another Outcome, a District randomly selects three Downsides instead of one, and lists all Downsides when posting the Outcome Comment.

this is long, but it’s really just one mechanic: the unlockable ability to pose another outcome that both you and the other districts can use! the motivation for the Batteries Not Included conditional is that i think reactions will generally be faster if that proposal does get enacted than if it doesn’t. i considered a “that no-one has yet reacted to” clause instead, but that felt unnecessarily restrictive.

Proposal: Another Heart Has Made The Trade

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 18 Aug 2023 08:40:19 UTC

Rewrite the rule Commons to read as follows:

Each District has a Calendar, which is a publicly tracked number. When a District is required to apply its Fallow Value, that is defined as the difference between their own Calendar and the number of the Dilemma to which they are Reacting.

There exist a number of Commons, each of which has a name and a Connection Effect, all of which are detailed in this rule. At any time a District may spend x*4 from their Energy Trap to establish a new Connection to a Commons, where x is their number of pre-existing Connections; the Commons to which each District is connected are publicly tracked. Once established, such a connection may not be broken.

The available Commons are:

{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Name !! Connection Effect
|-
| The Grazing Lands || Gain their Fallow Value / 5 Food
|-
| The Deserted Barracks || Gain their Fallow Value / 10 Defences
|-
| Shrine to Iclaseer || Apply a random Upside other than Governing
|-
| Shrine to Oseele || Apply a random Downside
|-
| The Silicon Lake || Choose to increase or decrease the Solar Field by 1
|-
| Gnostic Mainframe || Gain their Fallow Value / 10 Ingenuity
|}

Gathering is an atomic action with the following steps:

* Apply the Connection Effects of each Connection individually, in the order that they are listed in that District’s Commons field, with repeated Connections duplicating but not compounding their effects. Round all values to the nearest whole number.
* Increase the value of the Solar Field by 1
* Randomly select one Consequence (other than Governing) and apply it
* Set their Calendar to the number of the Dilemma to which they are Reacting.

Mostly just a rewrite to make the interactiosn clearer and more orderly

Dilemma #15 - The Library

Your researchers and social historians, currently working where they can around the other projects and people of the district, are requesting additional workspace - a dedicated library and research building where they can study in peace. There are no suitable structures within the districts’ existing perimeters, so this will mean either claiming a new and undefended building nearby, or commandeering a housing block.

Do the Districts secure a new building or repurpose existing housing?

Expand: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Defences


Repurpose: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

Proposal: The City Never Sleeps

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 18 Aug 2023 08:38:55 UTC

Add a new rule called “The City”:-

The City’s priorities are as follows:-

# Resolve the oldest pending proposal
# Pose a Dilemma
# All other dynastic actions

The City should not take an action on that list if it would be possible for them to take one with a lower number instead. If it is possible for the City to Pose a Dilemma, or to resolve proposals in order that they might then immediately Pose a Dilemma, the City should do so at its earliest opportunity.

Whenever the City is required to select something at random, they may instead do this in a secretly random manner.

Remove “(Whenever the City is required to select something at random, they may instead do this in a secretly random manner.)” from the rule “Dilemmas”.

Explicit statement on when and in what order I’ll take game actions, so that I can just obey an agreed rule without having to worry about the “when taking any actions - including voting - will try to be fair to all players” of my Imperial Style. This proposal says that I’ll always clear the queue before posting a new Dilemma (because those proposals might affect it), and I’ll continue to post Dilemmas early in the day.

Proposal: Batteries Not Included

Reached quorum 3 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 18 Aug 2023 08:38:14 UTC

In “The Grid”, replace “they then transfer one quarter, rounded up, of the value of the Battery Garden from the Battery Garden to that District’s Energy Trap” with:-

they then increase that District’s Energy Trap by 2

Remove “Increase the Battery Garden by the value of the Solar Field.” from the rule “Dilemmas”.

With my Imperial Designer hat on, negotiating over where to assign Energy seems interesting, but tying the amount of that Energy to how quickly a District can react (a quick reaction being good when you want to reward someone, and the slowest possible reaction good when you don’t) seems like it’s overemphasising timing and luck, and may be slowing the Dilemma pipeline down by giving some players a strong reason to delay their responses.

This proposes a simple bypass of the Battery Garden to see if there’s a consensus for that, pushing for no particular replacement usage of it. (I’ll have my own go at working it back in in a different way, if this proposal passes.)

Dilemma #14 - The Towers

A few tall buildings still stand in the city, some little more than central lift shafts with splinters of floors on all sides. The towers would serve well as simple and permanent lookout posts, although repeatedly scaling their broken heights is a dangerous business. A safer use for them would be as antennae for an improvised radio setup, broadcasting emergency messages to distant outsiders, and requiring only a single climbing expedition.

Do the Districts use their local towers as lookouts, or radio masts?

Lookout: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)


Radio: Gain 5 People and Lose 1 Ingenuity*

* or lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Proposal: Energy Crisis

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 15:43:08 UTC

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, change “Gain 1 to your Energy Trap” to “Gain 4 to your Energy Trap”. and “Lose 1 from your Energy Trap” to “Lose 4 from your Energy Trap”.

If an Ongoing Dilemma is using these Consequences, consider it to be using the revised versions for all intents and purposes.

this upside is pretty much entirely useless right now unless you either can’t get someone to allocate to you or you’re one away from a new connection
4 might even be too little, we’ll see though. might be worth making upsides scale with the severity of the downside or something along those lines

Dilemma #13 - The Generators

The old biofuel generators have been largely superseded now, and they’ve been disconnected from the grid to avoid blowing any of the mains wiring. With some care they could be reinstalled elsewhere in the system to support the nascent electricity network, or they could just be used inefficiently off-grid for localised power.

Do the Districts take the time to rewire the generators, or use them standalone?

Connect: Gain 1 to your Energy Trap and Lose 1 Food*


Detach: Govern and Lose 1 Food*

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Monday, August 14, 2023

Proposal: The Final Word [Special Case]

Reached quorum 3 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 15:41:56 UTC

To “Imperial Deferentials”, add a paragraph:-

If there are six or fewer Districts, then the City’s vote of DEFERENTIAL on a proposal is only affected by this rule if all Districts who are not the City have cast a vote on that proposal.

The defer-to-majority rule works okay in larger dynasties where it’s quite likely that a few players won’t vote at all, and where the Emperor’s DEF vote is only likely to speed up a broad and emerging consensus.

With a smaller and fully active group, though, I think it’s breaking down: if the Emperor votes DEF on a proposal that would split a four-player group 2-vs-2, that proposal will enact or fail depending purely on the voting order. In smaller dynasties, the Imperial DEF isn’t needed to speed proposals to quorum - only to call a close race ahead of its timeout (the DEF outcome on 3-vs-3, 3-vs-2 or 2-vs-2 will always correspond to its 48-hour fate).

Proposal: Food Brings People Together

Timed out 2 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 15:40:37 UTC

In the rule “Innovation”, add the following row to the table:

|-
| Societal || Community Food Banks || 1 || Indoor Gardens || When Gathering, any time you perform a random selection that results in a Consequence that would cause you to lose Food, you may re-roll that random selection, but only once for that step of that instance of Gathering.

 

If you invest in the “gardens” Innovation branch, you have a better chance of avoiding Food loss during Gathering, though it’s still possible with some bad luck.

Proposal: Desperate Times…

Timed out 2 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 15:38:27 UTC

In the Posing a Dilemma atomic action, immediately following “If this Dilemma’s number is a multiple of 10”, add “and/or The Storm is ongoing”.

Add the following entries to the table of Innovations:

|-
| Societal || Careful Rationing || 2 || You are not Famished || When you are Famished but not in Chaos and would have your Food reduced by more than 1 as a result of the City Posing a Dilemma, instead your Food is only reduced by 1 and your Order is reduced by 1 as well.
|-
| Societal || Desperate Measures || 1 || You are Famished || When you are Starving and have your People reduced by half as a result of the City Posing a Dilemma, you immediately gain 1 Food for every 10 People lost.

in the Storm, it’ll be impossible to hunt and farm; we’ll have to depend solely on our food stores to survive. here are two methods of dealing with the inevitable!
to establish a procedure of careful rationing, people can’t be already freaking out about food; conversely, people won’t even consider desperate cannibalism unless they’re already feeling starvation draw near.

Proposal: Into the Wastes

Timed out 2 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 15:36:43 UTC

Change the Innovation Type of Shared Wisdom to “Societal” and set its Prerequisites to “None”.

Add the following entry to the table of Innovations:

|-
| Societal || Scavenging Parties || 1 || None || Every time you Allocate when Reacting to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 5, you may spend 1 Food to gain 1 in a resource randomly selected between Ingenuity, Defences, and Energy.

a simple societal upgrade which i’d like to later make the prerequisite for access to a more involved exploration system. it only costs 1 because it’s not reliable, and because Food is pretty valuable so it prolly ain’t worth it unless u have an excess!

Proposal: Personnel Protection

Timed out 2 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 Aug 2023 13:01:35 UTC

In the rule “Innovation”, add the following rows to the table:

|-
| Technological || Military Research || 1 || None || When Gathering and performing the step that begins with “Gain n * 0.1 Defences”, use 0.2 intead of 0.1 in that calculation.
|-
| Technological || Improvised Shields || 2 || Military Research || If your Defences are greater than 0 and you are not Starving, any time you would lose People from applying a Downside, you may choose to lose 1 Defences instead when applying that Downside.

Following lemon’s recommendation of rewarding positive Defences rather than punishing 0 or negative ones.

Proposal: Measure Twice

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 15 Aug 2023 07:39:34 UTC

In “Innovation”, replace both instances of “Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number” with:-

Every time you Allocate when Reacting to a Dilemma whose number

The “Every time you React to a Dilemma, gain X” Innovations don’t specify at what point in the atomic to apply it - if a District with Indoor Gardens is facing an “or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving” Downside, is the starvation check made before or after the food gain from the Gardens?

This explicitly attaches it to the Allocation step.

Dilemma #12 - The Illumination

Even with some repairs, the antiquated electricity network still falters and can only provide a few hours of reliable power and light each day. The scientists and historians of the districts petition for their buildings to be prioritised, to allow them to work later into the night. Lookouts stationed along the perimeters call for their guardposts to be heated and fitted with searchlights for the dark winter shifts.

Which do the Districts favour?

Laboratories: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Defences


Guardposts: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Ingenuity*

* or lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Proposal: Junction Box

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 14 Aug 2023 15:34:32 UTC

In “Reactions”, replace “Posting a comment on the Dilemma announcing which of the two Outcomes they are selecting, and then applying the selected Outcome’s Upside and then its Downside to themselves; and then Allocating.” with:-

Allocating; then posting a comment on the Dilemma announcing who they Allocated to and which of the two Outcomes they are selecting; then applying the selected Outcome’s Upside and then its Downside to themselves.

Maybe the simplest solution: players are allowed to forget to perform the Allocation step. The selection restriction still stands.

Since this means we won’t be able to tell the difference between a player who’s finished a Decision and one who may yet Allocate, I’ll swap the two steps around.

Edited to just require players to mention their Allocation in the comment.

Call for Judgment: Brownouts

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 18:34:57 UTC

Uphold each attempted Reaction made prior to this CfJ where a District neglected to Allocate, if that Reaction would have been legal if they had performed a valid Allocation.

Per Lendunistus on Discord, earlier this morning: “...I forgot to allocate when reacting to 9 and 10 / and JD’s already drained the battery garden / might need a CfJ”

Straight uphold and play through, here, will venture an amendment as a separate proposal.

Proposal: Can’t Unidle Your Way Into This One

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 14 Aug 2023 15:33:38 UTC

In the rule “Into the Storm”, add the following bullet point to the end:

* Idle Districts may not be unidled and no new player joining requests may be administered, unless Blognomic is in Interregnum.

per Kevan’s comment on Can’t Reinitialise Your Way Out Of This One

Proposal: No Sense In Letting Good Energy Go to Waste

Enacted popular, 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 14 Aug 2023 15:32:35 UTC

If Proposal: No Sense in Letting Good Food Go to Waste was not enacted then this proposal has no further effect.

Change the Downside which starts ‘Lose 1 Food if your Defences are 0’ to read as follows:

Lose 1 from your Energy Trap, or lose all of your Energy Trap instead if your Defences are less than 0

Making it about Energy rather than food, as having two food downsides makes no sense, and making it apply even when Defences do exist.

Dilemma #11 - The Roadways

With the city’s street lighting needing only minor repairs to become functional again, your advisors suggest clearing out the overgrown main roads through the districts, and installing barriers and guard posts.

Do the Districts clear the roads, or leave them dark?

Light: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Food (or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving)


Dark: Govern and Lose 1 Ingenuity*

* or lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Call for Judgment: Duracell bunnies

Reached quorum and passed, 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 15:22:31 UTC

Increase the energy of the Districts called Josh and lendunistus by 4.

Due to an oversight, we rowdy gave lemon and JD 4 energy for free despite them not needing it to balance the status quo (originally the formula needed an expenditure of 4 for the first connection). This just rebalances the situation.

Proposal: No Sense in Letting Good Food Go to Waste

Reached quorum and enacted, 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 14 Aug 2023 15:31:00 UTC

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, replace “Lose 1 Food, or lose 3 Food instead if your Defences are less than 1” with:

Lose 1 Food if your Defences are 0, or lose 3 Food instead if your Defences are less than 0

Uphold Josh’s loss of only 1 Food when he Reacted to Dilemma #10 with “Unearth”.

Right now Dilemmas are twice as likely to have “losing 1 Food” for a Downside compared to any other Downside, which seems a little unbalanced towards food loss. This tempers it down somewhat.

Also, Josh may not have been paying attention when choosing “Unearth”, as he clearly only subtracted 1 from his Food, not aware that he should have subtracted 3 instead, so I’m offering a little bribe for him to vote for this Proposal.

Proposal: No Time to Relax

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 14 Aug 2023 08:14:47 UTC

In the rule “Districts”, add the following text:

A District with no Defences is Relaxed. A District with negative Defences is Vulnerable.

In the rule “Commons”, after the text “At any time a District may spend x*4”, add the following text:

(x*5 if the District is Relaxed)

and in the same rule, after the text “minus their Calendar;” add the following text:

Set n to half of this result, rounded down to the nearest integer, if the District is Vulnerable.

The idea is that it costs a little bit more for a District with no Defences to establish a connection due to the increased protection needed for the citizens going out to make that connection.

Districts with negative Defences are not only unprotected, but invite trouble by naively trusting anyone they meet, providing a target for hostile forces to harrass the citizens of that District when the opportunity is ripe. When a District sends out its citizens to Gather, the citizens are only half as effective as they would normally be.

Proposal: Can’t Reinitialise Your Way Out Of This One

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 18:19:21 UTC

In the rule “Into the Storm”, change the last bullet point to:

* If the Special Case rules called Dormancy and Reinitialisation exist and are Active, the City or any District may set them to Inactive.

Saturday, August 12, 2023

Dilemma #10 - The Grid

On the mountainside above the city, long-dormant solar panels are being reactivated. They angle and glint in the winter sun, and across the districts below, the shattered electrical network begins to spark erratically back into life. Most of the city remains unpowered, the bulk of its underground cabling having fallen into disrepair, some of it having been dug through for agriculture.

Do the Districts dig up their fields to repair these connections?

Excavate: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Food (or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving)


Unearth: Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Food (or lose 3 Food instead if your Defences are less than 1)

Friday, August 11, 2023

Proposal: Tree Stump

Timed out / quorumed 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 17:23:18 UTC

In “Innovation”, replace “There exist a number of Innovations, all of which are recorded in the table below. Each Innovation has an Innovation type, a name, an Ingenuity cost, zero or more prerequisites, and an effect which is applied to every District who has learned it. If a District has learned an Innovation multiple times, its effect applies an equal number of times (if possible). The Innovations that a District has learned are tracked in a public list; if an Innovation has been learned more than once by a District, its name is marked with a multiplicative suffix (e.g. “x2” or “x3”) in that list to indicate the number of times learned.” with:

There exist a number of Innovations, all of which are recorded in the table below. Each Innovation has an Innovation type, a name, an Ingenuity cost, zero or more prerequisites, and an effect which is applied to every District who understands it. (If a Prerequisite is the name of another Innovation, it requires that the District must understand that Innovation.) The Innovations that a District understands are tracked in a public list.

In the next paragraph, replace “and then learn it” with “and then understand it”.

Remove “May not have already been learned by this District” from the Prerequisites of Shared Wisdom.

In “Upsides and Downsides”, replace “lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation” with “lose your lowest-cost understood Innovation”.

Set each District to understand all Innovations that they had learned at any earlier point in the dynasty.

Wondering if we’d benefit from simplifying Innovation. We’d have more of an actual tech tree going on if we replaced a single stackable tech with an equivalent branch of “Indoor Gardens → Hothouses → Hydroponics” that each did the same thing. Innovations might also be easier to write and balance if we removed the implicit default that most Innovations should, with rare exceptions, all be infinitely stackable.

(This proposal also changes the past tense “has learned” to a present tense “understands”, to make it clear that the rules only care what Innovations you have right now, not which ones you had and lost in the past. It also specifies that if we want to write a simple “must have other Innovation X” prerequisite, we can just put its name in the box.)

Proposal: Law and Order

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 12:02:04 UTC

In “Upsides and Downsides”, replace “When a District Governs, it may choose to either Gather or Innovate.” with:-

When a District Governs, it may choose to either Gather, Innovate or gain 1 Order.

Maybe Order should be modifiable (to allow Chaotic Districts to potentially rise again, and cautious ones to anticipate future disorder) rather than something that can only hit zero and stay there.

Dilemma #9 - The Strike

The district leaders turn their attention to new research and infrastructure projects, but the citizens shouldering the burden on the front line are starting to feel overworked and underappreciated.

Do the Districts pledge extra food rations to support these workers, or replace them with others?

Reward: Govern and Lose 1 Food (or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving)


Dismiss: Govern and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)

Proposal: Mistaken Forecast

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 11:58:22 UTC

In the rule “Into the Storm”, replace “24 or higher” with “36 or higher” and replace “32 or higher” with “44 or higher”.

i think we’ve started to get through Dilemmas a bit faster, and at this rate, we’ll end up with half of the game to propose ways to prepare for The Storm and even less to actually attempt those preparations!! i think it’ll be more fun if we have a bit more time to prepare (and also to propose additional consequences of The Storm, i’d hope!)

Proposal: Food Is Supposed to Get Eaten, Don’t You Think?

enacted 3-0
-lemon

Adminned at 13 Aug 2023 11:40:05 UTC

Append the following step to the Posing a Dilemma atomic action:

* If this Dilemma’s number is a multiple of 10, reduce the Food of each non-Abandoned District by 1; or, if that District is Famished, reduce its Food to 0; or, if that District is Starving, reduce its People by half (rounded up).

In the Gathering atomic action, replace “Gain n * 0.1 Food” (if it exists) with “Gain n * 0.2 Food”.

Add the following Innovation to the list of Innovations:

| Technological || Indoor Gardens || 1 || None || Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 10, gain 1 Food.

a slight rework of Food Is Supposed to Get Eaten that has less of an effect on most Districts, but more of an effect on Districts that are Famished or Starving, while only happening every 10 days instead of 7.
(also, Indoor Gardens is slightly cheaper because its effect is honestly very minor!)

Proposal: Shouts to all my lost boys

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 12 Aug 2023 17:53:28 UTC

If Proposal: We Rowdy was not enacted then this proposal has no further effect.

In the rule Commons, change “Each District may be connected to a number of Commons up to its population divided by 100, rounded up” to:

At any time a District may spend x*4 from their Energy Trap to establish a new Connection to a Commons, where x is their number of pre-existing Connections

Add an Upside to the rule Upsides and Downsides as follows:

* Gain 1 to your Energy Trap

Increase the Energy Trap of all Districts that don’t have a Connection by 4.

Per some comments on Discord, there are three problems with Commons at the moment: the people thresholds, the value of the commons being 0.1 of a benefit, and the imbalance in the Upside/Downside payoff. This attempts to address all three.

Proposal: We Rowdy

Reached quorum 3 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 12 Aug 2023 17:48:43 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called The Grid:

There exist two publicly tracked values, one called The Solar Field, and one called The Battery Garden; The Solar Field defaults to 4 and The Battery Garden defaults to zero. Each District has a publicly tracked value for Energy Trap, which defaults to zero.

Whenever a District is called upon to Allocate, they must select a single other District who was not their selection the last time they were called upon to Allocate, if there is one; they then transfer one quarter, rounded up, of the value of the Battery Garden from the Battery Garden to that District’s Energy Trap.

Add the following to the end of the Decide option in the rule Reactions:

; and then Allocating.

Add the following as a third bullet point to the rule Dilemmas:

Increase the Battery Garden by the value of the Solar Field.

Add the following as a new entry on the list of Commons in the rule of the same name:

The Silicon Lake

Add the following as a fifth bullet point in the Gathering atomic action:

Increase the value of the Solar Field by 1, then choose to either increase or decrease the Solar Field by one for each connection that District has to the Silicon Lake.

Dilemma #8 - The Mariners

A group of bedraggled strangers arrive in the city claiming to be the surviving crew of the wrecked cargo ship. They tell dark and contradictory tales of the outside world and the dead city’s place in it. Afraid for the future, the crew ask to be given sanctuary within the occupied districts, or at least to trade some essentials on their way to the abandoned areas of the city.

Do the Districts welcome the groups, or trade for food and send them on their way?

Welcome: Gain 5 People and Lose 1 Ingenuity*


Trade: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Ingenuity*

* or lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Proposal: True Dilemmas

Timed out / quorumed 3 votes to 0 with 1 unresolved DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 12 Aug 2023 17:37:25 UTC

In the rule “Dilemmas”, in the second bullet point of the steps for Posing a Dilemma, add the following text after the text “If the two Upsides are the same and the two Downsides are the same”:

, or if the 3rd word of the first or second Upside is the same as the 3rd word of the first or second Downside respectively,

and at the end of the same bullet point, add this text:

. Repeat this step until none of the conditions of this step apply.

The ability to Decide on an Outcome that effectively does nothing is getting dull. I think every Outcome should have some actual impact.

Also, I was struggling to word this in a way that indicated that if the Outcome is a wash, randomly re-select the Upside and Downside for that Outcome. I chose the “3rd word” wording because with all of the other clauses on several of the Downsides, it was hard to easily express explicitly what a “wash” would be. Any suggestions are welcome.

Dilemma #7 - The Shipwreck

Lookouts report a derelict cargo ship aground in one of the craters at the old harbour. It’s a dangerous part of the city to set foot in, but the vessel is bound to have some rare supplies still preserved in its hold.

Do the Districts send out teams to salvage what they can, or leave the waves to claim it?

Salvage: Gain 1 Food and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)


Ignore: Nothing happens (Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Food*)

* or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving

Proposal: Raiding Parties are the Best Parties

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 11 Aug 2023 15:03:59 UTC

Add a new rule named “Raids” and give it the following text:

Raid is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Choose another District and call them the Target.
* For every 1 Defences that the Target has, subtract 5 from your People.
* If you have at least 5 People, transfer your choice of 1 Food or 1 Ingenuity, choosing both if the Target’s Defences are negative and the Target has at least 1 Food and 1 Ingenuity, from the Target to you. The Target must have at least 1 of the chosen value(s) to be transferred.

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides” replace the text “When a District Governs, it may choose to either Gather or Innovate.” with this text:

When a District Governs, it may choose to do one of the following: Gather, Innovate, or Raid.

 

Time to put those Defences to work!

Proposal: Point of Order

Enacted popular, 4-0. Josh

Adminned at 11 Aug 2023 09:16:24 UTC

In “Dilemmas”, replace “reduce the Order of all Districts who haven’t reacted to that Dilemma by 5” with:-

reduce the Order of all Districts who haven’t reacted to that Dilemma by 1

I overlooked this when proposing to divide all Order by 5.

Dilemma #6 - The Nightwalkers

There have been scattered reports of muffled noises in the streets at night. Erratic footsteps, and some kind of knocking and scratching at the doors of the district’s houses and storage buildings. Those who claim to have been awoken by it say they looked out but saw nothing.

Do the Districts reassign people from other work roles to keep watch, or ignore the issue?

Patrol: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Ingenuity*


Ignore: Nothing happens (Gain 1 Ingenuity and Lose 1 Ingenuity*)

* Lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

Proposal: Out of Control

Enacted popular, 3-1. Josh

Adminned at 11 Aug 2023 09:15:05 UTC

To the dynastic rule “Districts”, add a paragraph:-

A District with no Order is in Chaos. Whenever a District that is in Chaos Decides on a Dilemma, it must make the selection between Outcomes at random.

A downside to zero Order.

Idle Rights Exercised

I idle myself. Quorum drops to 3.

Call for Judgment: So I Gather

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 10 Aug 2023 06:43:46 UTC

Uphold this enactment of Innovation in Action as being the correct enactment of that proposal, specifically that other references to Gathering in the ruleset are not changed to Governing.

If the proposal “iGather, iGovern, iDon’t Know Any More” has not passed and the phrase “other than Governing” exists anywhere in the ruleset, change it back to “other than Gathering” in each case.

Resolving the iGather, iGovern issue to the status quo, upholding Lemon’s original enactment of Innovation in Action as being complete and valid.

Proposal: iGather, iGovern, iDon’t Know Any More

Enacted popular, 3-0. Josh

Adminned at 11 Aug 2023 09:14:00 UTC

In the rule Commons, change “(other than Gathering)” to “(other than Governing)” wherever it appears.

Proposal: The City Cannot See Us

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 11 Aug 2023 09:12:01 UTC

Add a new rule to the ruleset, called The Crumpled Stateroom:

The Convener should create a private Discord channel in the BlogNomic Discussion category of the BlogNomic discord server, called “#crumbled_stateroom” to which all non-City Districts have access; if that channel does not exist then they may not take any dynastic actions except for the one that follows this statement in the same sentence; but if it does then they may delete this sentence from the ruleset, and replace it with the sentence “The Crumbled Stateroom is a Discord channel that can be found here:” with a direct link to that channel appended. The District named Josh is the Convener.

A District is considered to have access to the Crumpled Stateroom if they are a member of the BlogNomic Discord server and the permissions for that channel allow them access to it, or if they have been personally issued a live invitation link to the BlogNomic Discord server by the Convener. If any District does not have access to the Crumbled Stateroom then they may request it by making a post to that effect the BlogNomic blog. When the Convener has undertaken any actions necessary to give the requester access to the Crumpled Stateroom they should respond to that request post with a FOR mark. If 24 hours have elapsed without the Convener having given access to the requestor then the rest of this rule is flavour text until they have done so.

The Crumpled Stateroom is gamestate in its entirety and no District may post to it except as authorised by the ruleset.

The subrules to this rule detail data that is privately tracked by the Districts in the Crumpled Stateroom, and how that data can be changed.

Add a new subrule to the rule The Crumpled Stateroom, called The Benign Intrusion:

If the City has voted DEFERENTIAL on a Proposal, that vote is valid and can potentially be either FOR, AGAINST, or retain its DEFERENTIAL status (in which case it is resolved as per the Special Case rule Imperial Deferentials; in all other cases this rule has priority over that one). The current resolution status of the City’s Deferentials is referred to as the Deferential Resolution Status, and is privately tracked in the Crumpled Stateroom through the most recent Change of Deferential Status statement.

Each District has a Deferential Posture which is privately tracked in the Crumpled Stateroom in their most recent Change of Deferential Posture Statement. At any time, a District may make a Change of Deferential Posture Statement to the Crumpled Stateroom, which takes the format of “Change of Deferential Posture: x” where x is either FOR, AGAINST or DEFERENTIAL; once they have, their Deferential Posture changes to x. If there is a simple majority for any of the three options amongst expressed Deferential Postures then that position becomes the Deferential Resolution Status; if a District makes a Change of Deferential Posture Statement that changes the Deferential Resolution Status then they should immediately make a Change of Deferential Status statement, which takes the format of “Deferential Resolution Status Change: x” where x is the new Deferential Resolution Status.

The City cannot know how its perambulations will affect the world below.

NB that this would make it impossible for Kevan to resolve proposals where he has voted DEF without asking for a vote count in the Discord, which might be a fatal flaw but, idk, we do have quite a few admins at the moment and I wouldn’t have a problem appointing lendun and JD either if they want it.

Proposal: The Old Calendar

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 10 Aug 2023 07:20:54 UTC

In “Into the Storm”, replace “If the date is on or after August 28th 2023, The Storm is ongoing.” with:-

If the Dilemma’s number is 24 or higher, The Storm is ongoing.

Replace “or if the date is on or after September 4th 2023”:-

or if the Dilemma’s number is 32 or higher

Turning the endgame date points into Dilemma numbers, so that it won’t give a reason for players to slow things down, or upset any plans if I happen to miss a day.

Dilemma #5 - The Floodwaters

The city’s river runs high today, spilling over the old concrete banks in some places. Sheets of water pool across the streets as the river seeks other paths to the ocean. The newcomers from the flooded district seem encouraged by this turn of events, and urge district leaders to let the water take its course, saying that they could not continue to live in a community that did not respect the wishes of the river.

Do the Districts ignore this petition and attend to their local flood defences, or seek counsel from the newcomers?

Repair: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)


Consult: Govern and Lose 1 Defences

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Proposal: Variable Strength Population Crises

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 1 vote to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 14:41:27 UTC

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, replace “Gain 5 People” with “Gain 2DICE4 People”, “Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)” with “Lose 2DICE4 People (or all your People if you have fewer than that many) and “lose 10 People” with “lose 4DICE4 People (or all People if you have fewer than that many)”.

In any Ongoing Dilemmas, replace all instances of “lose 10 People” with “lose 10 People (or all People if you have fewer than that many)” and “all People if you have fewer than 5” with “all your People if you have fewer than that many”.

Add the following to the end of the rule “Upsides and Downsides”:

Where an Upside or Downside contains a dice roller formula, it is valid with any possible value of the roll substituted for that formula”.

In the steps of Posing a Dilemma in the rule Dilemmas, before the step containing “Make a blog post”, add the following step:

* Roll any dice formulas in the selected Upside and Downside, and replace the formulas with the corresponding results in the selections (but not in the instances in the rule “Upsides and Downsides” itself)

Proposal: Commons Knowledge

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 1 vote to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 16:36:59 UTC

Change the Innovation Type of Shared Wisdom to “Societal”.

If the Prerequisite “May not have already been learned by this District” exists in the table of Innovations, replace it with “You have not previously learned Shared Wisdom”

Add the following entries to the table of Innovations:

|-
| Societal || Fear of Oseele || 1 || None || At any time, you may spend 1 Food to gain 1 Order per connection you have to a Shrine of Oseele.
|-
| Societal || Wreckage Clearing Teams || 3 || You have not previously learned Wreckage Clearing Teams || Proposals made by you that have the singular effect of adding a new Commons to the ruleset count as having 1 fewer AGAINST vote.
|-
| Technological || Pre-Collapse Technology || 2 || None || When you learn this, gain 1 Ingenuity.
|-
| Technological || Weaponry Repairs || 2 || You have previously learned Pre-Collapse Technology; You have 2 or more Defences || When Gathering, the Defences you gain from the Deserted Barracks are increased by an additional n * 0.1.

defining the main Innovation Types to be either Societal or Technological, and adding a few starter Innovations to set the standard! these ones specifically involve the Commons a lot, since i’d say that’s the only distinct orbital mechanic we have aside from Innovation!

Proposal: Food Is Supposed to Get Eaten, I Think

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 2-3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 14:38:56 UTC

Append the following step to the Posing a Dilemma atomic action:

* If this Dilemma’s number is a multiple of 7, reduce the Food of each District by that District’s People divided by 50 (rounded up); if this would reduce a District’s Food below 0, instead reduce their Food until it reaches 0 and then reduce their People by 10 for each excess point of Food reduction.

In the Gathering atomic action, replace “Gain n * 0.1 Food” with “Gain n * 0.2 Food”

Add the following Innovation to the list of Innovations:

| Technological || Indoor Gardens || 2 || None || Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 10, gain 1 Food.

it feels a bit odd to me if our food doesn’t naturally go down over time, regardless of the choices we make!

Proposal: Who Left the Gates Open?

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 08:06:31 UTC

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, replace the text “Lose 1 Defences” with:

Lose 1 Defences, or 5 People if your Defences are less than 1

Defences is the last resource where the Downside can be avoided by simply not having any Defences. It thematically makes sense to me that if a District experiences a Downside in which their Defences are eroded, and they have none, the threat takes away People instead.

Proposal: Wilkommen, Ingenue

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 08:05:30 UTC

In the rule Innovation, change the Effect of the Shared Wisdom Innovation to read

Every time you React to a Dilemma whose number is a multiple of 7, gain 1 Ingenuity

Change the Prerequisite of the same Innovation to “May not have already been learned by this District”.

Dilemma #4 - The Crows

Birds wheel through the darkening skies above the crop fields, cawing to one another and occasionally swooping at something behind the ruins before rising up again. The people of the districts look up from their work sowing the fields. Where the crows would normally perch and wait for their chance to pick through the planted seeds, something else has caught their interest for now.

Do the Districts abandon the fields and investigate, or stay focused on planting crops for the next harvest?

Investigate: Govern and Lose 1 Food (or lose 3 Food instead if your Defences are less than 1)


Sow: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Ingenuity, or lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

Monday, August 07, 2023

Proposal: Too Much Idle Rights

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 08:02:34 UTC

If Proposal: The City Must Survive was not enacted, skip the rest of this proposal.

In the rule “Into the Storm”, add the following to the end:

* If a Special Case rule called Dormancy exists and it is Active, the City or any District may set it to Inactive.

adding an option to disable dormancy during the storm as per comments on The City Must Survive

Proposal: Idle Rights

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 09 Aug 2023 08:01:09 UTC

If there is a rule named “Into The Storm”, replace the bullet point that begins with “Any district that is Abandoned” with the following text:

* Any district that is Abandoned may no longer gain People and may not React to Dilemmas, except to execute the “Pass” atomic action if it exists in the rule named “Reactions”.

 

Proposal: Innovation in Action

enacted 4-0
-lemon

Adminned at 08 Aug 2023 16:25:09 UTC

Rename the “Gather” Upside to “Govern”, in the ruleset and all Ongoing Dilemma Outcomes that it appears in.

To the end of “Upsides and Downsides”, add:-

When a District Governs, it may choose to either Gather or Innovate.

Defining that pesky verb. A straight-up Innovate Upside would probably get in the way too much, so merging it with Gathering for a multipurpose “get on with stuff” Upside.

Proposal: No Easy Choices

once again, enacted 4-1!
-lemon

Adminned at 08 Aug 2023 16:19:28 UTC

In “Upsides and Downsides”, as well as any Dilemma posts it appears in, replace “Lose 1 Ingenuity” with the following:

Lose 1 Ingenuity, or lose your lowest-cost learned Innovation (selecting one at random if there’s a tie) instead if you have no Ingenuity

this doesn’t hurt us now, but eventually it’ll hurt pretty bad. it should also double as a slight boost to newly-unidled players later in the dynasty; they’ll get to make easy choices for a little bit while the rest of us have to make hard ones.

Proposal: The City Must Survive

enacted 4-1
-lemon

Adminned at 08 Aug 2023 15:43:46 UTC

Add the following new rule to the dynastic ruleset, called “Into The Storm”:

If the date is on or after August 28th 2023, The Storm is ongoing. While The Storm is ongoing, the following rules changes are under effect:
* Any district that is Abandoned may no longer gain People, React to Dilemmas, or become Idle.
* When Posing a Dilemma, the City randomly selects six Downsides instead of two, and assigns the first three to the first Outcome and the last three to the second Outcome.
* When Reacting to a Dilemma with more than two Downsides, a District applies each Downside of the selected Outcome to themself.
* Whenever a District’s Order level is reduced, two randomly-selected Downsides are immediately applied to that District.
* If every District is Abandoned except for one, or if the date is on or after September 4th 2023, the District with the most People has achieved victory (in the case of a tie, only the tied player with the most Defences achieves victory).

inspired by the video game Frostpunk, here’s an idea for a victory condition: we’ll be spending the next three weeks preparing for The Storm, and when it comes, we will face hardships so severe that they will knock us out of the game, one by one!! it will be a test of endurance and our preparation; the last district left alive will remain to pick up the pieces and breathe life into the city after The Storm passes — or, if more than one district manages to survive a full week, the survivor with the most people wins (to avoid a stalemate or unnecessarily drawn-out conclusion)! i suspect we’ll want more special things going on during The Storm, to make it more deadly. that’s outside of the scope of this proposal, though :0
please consider this a general opinion check on this mechanic. if you like the overall idea, but don’t like some of my wording or timing, we’ll have three entire weeks (or more) to fix it!!

Call for Judgment: What is an action

Cannot be enacted with 3 votes against and 1 for. Josh

Adminned at 08 Aug 2023 11:16:55 UTC

Revert this change to the gamestate.

Here’s a long-running BlogNomic ambiguity. The ‘Innovate’ action is named, fully defined, and has explicit effects and limitations. It is an Action: the ruleset says who can do it, when they can do it and what happens when they do it.

The precise ruletext is “When a District Innovates, they choose one Innovation for which they meet all prerequisites, pay its Ingenuity cost, and then learn it.” There are no limitations expressed on under what circumstances a District can Innovate, only what happens when one does. The ruleset doesn’t explicitly say “A District may Innovate” but does it need to? Nor does it say “A District may not Innovate”; should it? Does the presence of a fully defined action in the ruleset imply that that action may be carried out? If not, why not?

Proposal: One Thing After Another

enacted 4-1
-lemon

Adminned at 08 Aug 2023 15:39:47 UTC

In “Dilemmas”, replace “If they have not already done so that day, the City may perform the atomic action of Posing a Dilemma:” with:-

If they have not already done so that day, or if every Ongoing Dilemma has had a Reaction from every District, the City may perform the atomic action of Posing a Dilemma:

In “Reactions”, replace “A District may React to the oldest Ongoing Dilemma that they haven’t already Reacted to, by performing the following atomic action:” and the bullet list after it with:-

A District may React to the oldest Ongoing Dilemma that they haven’t already Reacted to, by performing either of the following atomic actions:
* ‘’‘Decide:’‘’ Posting a comment on the Dilemma announcing which of the two Outcomes they are selecting, and then applying the selected Outcome’s Upside and then its Downside to themselves.
* ‘’‘Pass:’‘’ Posting a comment on the Dilemma announcing that they are passing, then reducing their Order by 1 (to a minimum of zero).

Divide every District’s Order by 5, rounding down.

Replace “defaults to 20 and is capped at 100” with “defaults to 4”.

Allowing the City to create a new Dilemma if everyone has responded to the current ones, to keep things moving and to break up the timezones. To support that, this also gives players an option to actively declare that they’re passing on a Dilemma and move straight on to the next, rather than having to wait 48 hours for it to be timed out.

Also taking the Order scale down to individual digits here, so that it can be more clearly read as “player can choose to pass X times”. (We still need something to happen at zero, though.)

Dilemma #3 - The Believers

A large, scattered group arrive from one of the forgotten outer districts of the city, dragging their possessions behind them on primitive carts, and recounting how their homes have been reclaimed by the ocean. You all pick up on the same strange and irrational note in the the way that they talk about the sea, as if it is some great living creature that can be angered and appeased.

Do the Districts invite these outsiders to settle in their buildings, or suggest that they move on?

Welcome: Gain 5 People and Lose 1 Ingenuity


Spurn: Nothing happens (Gain 1 Defences and Lose 1 Defences)

Sunday, August 06, 2023

Call for Judgment: Do-over

Reached quorum 4 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:49:58 UTC

If CfJ: Displaying Much Ingenuity was enacted, revert its effects.

Revert any changes made to the personal gamestate of the Districts named “Josh” or “Lendunistus” as a result of their Reaction to Dilemma #2. Uphold that those Reactions took place. For each of those Districts respectively, if their EVC to the CfJ names a single Outcome from Dilemma #2, apply the Upside and Downside of that Outcome to that District.

Lendun and I miss out due to the resource switch faff in Dilemma #2. This is just a straight do-over.

Proposal: Errant Punctuation

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 08:41:26 UTC

In “Upsides and Downsides”, remove the hyphen that immediately follows a colon and replace “or 10 People if you don’t have any Food” with “or lose 10 People instead if you are Starving”.

Append semicolons to the first two steps of the Gathering atomic action.

If the text “Calculate B = 5 - Defences. If B is > 0, lose B People.” exists in the ruleset, replace it with “If a District’s Defences are less than 5, that District loses People equal to the difference between 5 and their Defences.”.

If the sentence “If a District’s Defences are less than 5, that District loses People equal to the difference” exists in the ruleset without a period, replace it with “If a District’s Defences are less than 5, that District loses People equal to the difference between 5 and their Defences.”

Call for Judgment: Displaying Much Ingenuity

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 0-3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 20:51:29 UTC

Consider Dilemma #2 to be worded as “Gain 1 Ingenuity” instead of “Gain 1 Tech” in both outcomes.

Uphold the Reactions made to that Dilemma prior to the posting of this CfJ as if they were performed while that wording was in effect.

as per talks in discord, dilemma #2 is technically invalid since tech doesn’t exist anymore

Proposal: From the Ground Up [Special Case]

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:52:05 UTC

Set the Special Case rule “Reinitialisation” to Active.

Maybe this should be an option, given the slightly bumpy start to the first couple of Dilemmas.

Proposal: We All Go Down Together

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 1 vote to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:51:23 UTC

If Proposal: Cloudy with a chance of Horde was enacted then this proposal has no further effect.

Add a new dynastic rule, called Regional Effects:

Regional Effects come into effect based on the aggregate conditions of all Districts, and apply to all Districts while they are in effect.Regional Effects that are in effect are not publicly tracked, as they are derived from publicly available information, although they may be informally tracked on the gamestate tracking page by Districts if they wish. When the conditions that caused a Regional Effect to come into effect no longer exist, that regional Effect ceases to be in place.

The Regional Effects that can exist, and the circumstances that cause them, as as follows:
Depopulation: The sum total People in all Districts is less than 200.
Famine: The average Food in all Districts is less than 4.
Marauders: The average Defences in all Districts is 0 or lower.
Nihilism: The average Order in all Districts is less than 40.

While any Regional Effect is in effect, any loss of the resource associated with that Regional Effect (Depopulation with People, Famine with Food, Marauders with Defences and Nihilism with Order) is doubled.

Dilemma #2 - The Cold

Freezing gales sweep into the city from the east, marking a shift in the seasons and colder months to come. The residential infrastructure of each district will need some essential construction and maintenance to get through it, using parts and materials from wherever they can be found.

Do the Districts focus on stripping agricultural equipment for pipework and boilers, or recycling construction materials from their defensive structures?

Heating: Gain 1 Tech and Lose 1 Food


Insulation: Gain 1 Tech and Lose 1 Defences

Proposal: Howdy, Partner!

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 2 votes to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:50:35 UTC

Add a new rule named “Partners” and give it the following text:

Each District has a Partner, which must either be empty or contain the name of another District and defaults to empty. A District may set its Partner if it has not done so since the most recent Dilemma was posted, but only after Reacting to the most recent Ongoing Dilemma.

If two Districts have each others names in their Partner, they are considered to have a Partnership between each other. If there is a Partnership between two Districts, when a District in that Partnership applies an Upside or a Downside to themselves, they must also apply it to the District named as their Partner.

If a rule named “Special Cirumstances” exists, replace the text “Calculate B = 5 - Defences. If B is > 0, lose B People.” with

If a District’s Defences are less than 5, that District loses People equal to the difference

Districts can use this semi-alliance Partnership mechanic with each other in order to attempt to maximize gains and minimize losses, with the right choices in Upsides and Downsides. There are times when it may backfire, of course. There’s also the case where one District may React, apply the Upside and Downside, and then break the Partnership, leaving their Partner in the cold. I’m leaving that in on purpose as another risk of Partnerships.

The other part of this Proposal regarding Special Circumstances is just a wording tweak based on lemon’s recommendation.

Sunday, August 06, 2023

Proposal: Grain Thieves

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:46:52 UTC

Add a Downside:

* Lose 1 Food, or lose 3 Food instead if your Defences are less than 1

an alternative to Kevan’s Grain Rats proposal that isn’t totally negated by Defences!

Proposal: Cloudy with a chance of Horde

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 2 votes to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 07 Aug 2023 07:43:30 UTC

In the rule “Dilemmas”, in the steps for the Posing a Dilemma atomic action, replace the bullet point that begins with “Make a blog post” with these bullet points:

* Roll 2DICE6. If the result matches a value in the Roll column of the Special Circumstances table, select the corresponding Circumstance as the Special Circumstance for this atomic action.
* Make a blog post which pairs the first Upside with the first Downside, and the second Upside with the second Downside. Include the Special Circumstance in the post if there is one from the preceding step. This post is known as a Dilemma, with each pairing an Outcome.

Add a new rule named “Special Circumstances” and give it the following text:

When a Special Circumstance appears in the Dilemma, it applies immediately to all Districts and uses the District’s values at the time of the posting of the Dilemma.


{| class="wikitable sortable"
|+Special Circumstances
|-
! Roll !! Circumstance
|-
| 5 || Marauders at the Gates: Calculate B = 5 - Defences. If B is > 0, lose B People.
|}

I would have called this “Events”, but the obvious collision with the Special Case rule of the same name prevented it.

Proposal: Famine’s Edge

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0 with 1 unresolved DEF. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 15:19:51 UTC

In the rule “Upsides and Downsides”, and in all Ongoing Dilemmas, change

Lose 1 Food

to

Lose 1 Food, or 10 People if you don’t have any Food

Proposal: Open Door Policy

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 15:18:33 UTC

In the rule Districts, change “A level of Defences, being a number that defaults to 0.” to read

A level of Defences, being a number that defaults to 0 but which can be negative.

If Proposal: Grain Rats was enacted, change “if you have no Defences” to “if you have zero or lower Defences”.

Defence preparedness can dip below the baseline.

Proposal: Survival of the Wittest

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 14:48:17 UTC

If Proposal: Reinventing the Wheel didn’t pass, this proposal has no effect.

Throughout the dynastic ruleset, replace “Tech” with “Ingenuity”.

Add a new dynastic rule, called “Innovation”:

There exist a number of Innovations, all of which are recorded in the table below. Each Innovation has an Innovation type, a name, an Ingenuity cost, zero or more prerequisites, and an effect which is applied to every District who has learned it. If a District has learned an Innovation multiple times, its effect applies an equal number of times (if possible). The Innovations that a District has learned are tracked in a public list; if an Innovation has been learned more than once by a District, its name is marked with a multiplicative suffix (e.g. “x2” or “x3”) in that list to indicate the number of times learned.

When a District Innovates, they choose one Innovation for which they meet all prerequisites, pay its Ingenuity cost, and then learn it.

{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Innovation type !! Name !! Ingenuity cost !! Prerequisites !! Effect
|-
| Fundamental || Shared Wisdom || 0 || None || Whenever you gain Ingenuity, increase the amount of Ingenuity gained by 1.
|}

by golly do i love tech trees!!
there’s currently no declaration that a District /can/ ever Innovate; that’s intentional for now. i think we’ll want it to be an Upside in the list, once we have enough innovations!! innovating definitely shouldn’t be something that can be done freely, which is why i have a 0-cost ramp-up upgrade as the first basic one; it’s meant to be a simple diminishing-returns bonus so that innovating without any ingenuity is still somewhat worthwhile :0

Proposal: Grain Rats

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 2 votes to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 14:42:34 UTC

Add a Downside:-

* Lose 1 Food if you have no Defences

Adding a small initial reason to consider building Defences.

Proposal: Gathering Together

enacted 4-1
-lemon

Adminned at 06 Aug 2023 14:40:23 UTC

Add an Upside to the list:-

* Gather

Remove “As a daily action, a District may Gather.” from the rule “Commons”.

In that same rule, replace “* Calculate n, where n is the number of days since they last Gathered, or the number of days since the most recent Ascension Address was posted if they have yet to Gather in this dynasty” with:

* Calculate n, where n is the number of the Dilemma that they are Reacting to, minus their Calendar
* Set their Calendar to the number of the Dilemma that they are Reacting to

After “select one Consequence” and “one additional Consequence”, add:-

(other than Gathering)

Add a paragraph to the end of the rule:-

Each District has a Calendar, which is a publicly tracked number.

To “Dilemmas”, add:-

A Dilemma’s number is equal to the number of Dilemmas to have been posted before it in the dynasty, plus one.

Rolling Gathering into the Dilemmas as an event that comes along periodically, adding a little uncertainty as to when you’ll get the chance to take it again. Also putting a visible clock in the gamestate so that we know much stored up potential everyone has.

Dilemma #1 - The Blockades

The city is, at least for now, at peace. The last wave of conflict between the Districts ended in a kind of pyrrhic stalemate, with the heavier fortifications across the city blown open at all angles, some parts still hanging dangerously above the roads by a single chain or girder.

Do the Districts collapse these useless barriers safely for easier access to the crop fields, or risk sending people in to reassemble them?

Clear: Gain 1 Food and Lose 1 Defences.


Rebuild: Gain 1 Defences and Lose 5 People.

Proposal: Surprise Guests

Fewer than a quorum not voting AGAINST. Failed 1 vote to 3 by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 18:22:03 UTC

If the rule “Dilemmas” exists, add a new rule named “Visitors” and give it the following text:

Each District has a publicly tracked Visitor, which is one of the values listed in the table below or is blank, defaulting to blank. When a District’s has a non-empty Visitor, the corresponding Special Dilemma is considered Ongoing, but only for this District, for exactly as long as the current Dilemma is Ongoing. A District with a non-empty Visitor must follow the same rules as described in the subrule Reactions for the Visitor’s Special Dilemma, in addition to the current Dilemma that is Ongoing.

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|+Visitors
|-
! Visitor !! Special Dilemma
|-
| Cult Leader || Gain 10 People, Lose 1 Food, Lose 1 Defences OR Lose 10 People, Gain 2 Defences
|}

In the game Reigns, you occasionally get a character that shows up and offers special choices, so this is somewhat of a similar thing. I’m leaving the mechanic of how a District gets a Visitor open. The numbers can be tweaked of course, but I think they should be more impactful than the regular Dilemmas.

Friday, August 04, 2023

Proposal: Reinventing the Wheel

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 18:20:54 UTC

If there is a dynastic rule named “Districts”, add the following bullet point to the end of the list of publicly tracked values:

* An amount of Tech, being a number that defaults to 0

If there is a dynastic rule named “Upsides and Downsides”, add the following bullet point to the end of the list of Upsides:

* Gain 1 Tech

and add the following bullet point to the end of the list of Downsides:

* Lose 1 Tech

No matter how ruined a human population is, they will always continue to invent ways to make their lives easier. Tech is the representation of the District attempting to support that effort.

For the purposes of fitting with Kevan’s theme, I’m paving the way for a District to spend Tech in certain Categories (think Civ tech trees, but appropriately-themed for a struggling city) to add modfiers to the resources gained or lost from Upsides and Downsides, as well giving a District special abilities if they spend enough Tech in that area. I didn’t want to add those to the same Proposal because I wanted Tech itself be a stand-alone idea, and leave it open for others to come up with uses for it if people don’t like my ideas regarding Tech trees.

Proposal: Left The People On Read

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 18:17:49 UTC

If Proposal: Fifteen Minute City or Proposal: Two Roads Diverged failed, skip the rest of this proposal.

In the dynastic rule “Districts”, change this:

* A number of People, being a number that defaults to 50.
* An amount of Food, being a number that defaults to 5.
* A level of Defences, being a number that defaults to 0.

to this:

* A number of People, being a number that defaults to 50.
* An amount of Food, being a number that defaults to 5.
* A level of Defences, being a number that defaults to 0.
* A level of Order, being a number that defaults to 20 and is capped at 100.

In the rule “Dilemmas”, add the following bullet point to the end of the Posing a Dilemma action:

* Perform this step once for each Dilemma that has ceased to be ongoing between this Posing a Dilemma and the last Posing a Dilemma: if a Dilemma has ceased to be Ongoing between the last Posing a Dilemma and this Posing a Dilemma, reduce the Order of all Districts who haven’t reacted to that Dilemma by 5 (if this would reduce a District’s Order to a value below zero, then reduce it to zero).

a basic retreading of order from the last dynasty + a punishment for simply ignoring a dilemma
order doesn’t have any use right now but hopefully that’ll change soon

Proposal: Statistical Guideposts

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 14:29:47 UTC

If a dynastic rule named “Districts” exists, add the following text to the end of it:

A District with no People is Abandoned. An Abandoned District cannot achieve victory while it remains Abandoned.
A District with People in excess of 25 times its Food is Famished.
A District with no Food that is not Abandoned is Starving. A Starving District cannot willingly increase its own People unless it simultaneously increases its Food.

Call for Judgment: Ratify the False Start

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 16:31:25 UTC

Uphold the Ascension Address at https://blognomic.com/archive/the_dead_city and proceed as though the update to the ruleset at https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Ruleset&oldid=23998 had been made by Kevan, rather than lendunistus, to complete the atomic action that the Ascension Address began and trigger the start of the dynasty. Legalize the subsequent proposals and votes that were only invalid because they were made during Interregnum and/or made by Kevan in the middle of an unrelated atomic action.

Set all Special Case Rules to their default statuses.

Proposal: Commons People, Like You

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 07:21:42 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called Commons:

There exist a number of Commons, all of which are detailed in this rule. Each District may be connected to a number of Commons up to its population divided by 100, rounded up; the Commons to which each District is connected are publicly tracked. A District may establish a connection to a Common at any time, provided that they meet the population criteria, but once established, such a connection may not be broken.

The available Commons are:
The Grazing Lands
The Deserted Barracks
Shrine to Iclaseer
Shrine to Oseele

As a daily action, a District may Gather. Gathering is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Calculate n, where n is the number of days since they last Gathered, or the number of days since the most recent Ascension Address was posted if they have yet to Gather in this dynasty;
* Gain n * 0.1 Food for each connection that District has to the Grazing Land, rounded to the nearest whole number;
* Gain n * 0.1 Defences for each connection that District has to the Deserted Barracks, rounded to the nearest whole number;
* Randomly select one Concequence and apply it. For each connection that district has to a Shrine of Iclasser, randomly select and apply one additional Concequence. For each connection that District has to a Shrine of Oseele, randomly select and apply one Downside Concequence.

Proposal: Two Roads Diverged

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 06:59:15 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Upsides and Downsides”:-

Events in the world have consequences which are either Upsides or Downsides.

The Upsides are:

* Gain 5 People
* Gain 1 Food
* Gain 1 Defences

The Downsides are:-

* Lose 5 People (or all People if you have fewer than 5)
* Lose 1 Food
* Lose 1 Defences

Enact a new rule, “Dilemmas”:-

If they have not already done so that day, the City may perform the atomic action of Posing a Dilemma:

* Select two Upsides and two Downsides at random
* If the two Upsides are the same and the two Downsides are the same, randomly select one of those four consequences and randomly change it to a different consequence of the same Upside/Downside type
* Make a blog post which pairs the first Upside with the first Downside, and the second Upside with the second Downside. This post is known as a Dilemma, with each pairing an Outcome.

(Whenever the City is required to select something at random, they may instead do this in a secretly random manner.)

Add a subrule to “Dilemmas” called “Reactions”:-

A Dilemma is Ongoing if it is less than 48 hours old. A District may React to the oldest Ongoing Dilemma that they haven’t already Reacted to, by performing the following atomic action:

* Post a comment on the Dilemma announcing which of the two Outcomes they are selecting
* Apply the chosen Outcome’s Upside and then its Downside to themselves

If a District is unable to perform a Upside or Downside (eg. because it would set a variable to an invalid value), they must skip it instead of performing it.

Setting up the basic mechanic for this dynasty: the Emperor generates a random dilemma for the group, and everyone decides how their District responds to it.

Proposal: Fifteen Minute City

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 05 Aug 2023 06:57:00 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Districts”:-

Each District has the following publicly tracked values:

* A number of People, being a number that defaults to 50.
* An amount of Food, being a number that defaults to 5.
* A level of Defences, being a number that defaults to 0.

In the Special Case rule “Dynastic Tracking”, change “The Scale Model” to “Dead City”.

Ascension Address: The Dead City

It is hard to truly kill a city.

War had driven many from the old seaport, and by the time the floods came, most of what remained of humanity had relocated into the Great Machines, vast and protected structures that roamed slow and optimised routes across the inhospitable landscape.

For years the old city remained a trading post, a fragile but crucial meeting point between the Machines and the cargo ships. When conditions worsened and trade stopped, the Machinists offered the people of the city one final, fractious evacuation. The Machines maintained a wary distance after that, with only occasional sightings of them grazing blindly through the city’s outskirts, sifting through the rubble for raw materials before moving on.

Contact with the Great Machines was eventually lost, and it has now been a generation since anyone in the city has seen one, even on the icy horizons. Across the city’s splintered districts, small communities still survive under the guidance of local leaders, maintaining a precarious but unbroken existence against their constant adversities.

The city lives.

Replace the term “Great Machine” with “City”; replace “Machinist” with “District”.

Thursday, August 03, 2023

An Uncertain Future

Post-dynastic commentary thread

Alliances Was On After All

I pass the mantle to Kevan.

Thursday, August 03, 2023

Call for Judgment: Interregnum Chat Simplifier

Popular by Quorum 4-0. -Bucky

Adminned at 03 Aug 2023 04:19:37 UTC

In the rule “Machinist Agendas”, change

Machinists may never disclose, implicitly or explicitly, publicly or privately, their Agendas, except where explicitly required for the Declaration of Victory

to:

Machinists may never disclose, implicitly or explicitly, publicly or privately, their Agendas, except where explicitly required for the Declaration of Victory, or during Interregnum

The rule forbidding agenda disclosure will still be on the books until repealed at ascension, even though the interregnum has traditionally been the time to discuss such things.

Declaration of Victory: So Does The Machine Collapse Now Or What

Passes unanimously, 5-0 including the GM, after more than 12 hours. - Bucky

Adminned at 03 Aug 2023 15:20:12 UTC

Per That Was Fast!, I have achieved victory.

thanks for the dynasty, lemon!
I have a bunch of stuff to say but I’ll save it for the postdynastic commentary

Story Post: That Was Fast!

With the following Agendas, lendunistus has achieved victory:

You have a combined total of Housing and Valves that’s greater than all other Machinists’ Housing and Valves totals combined, and a majority of Machinists have non-zero Housing and non-zero Valves.

You have been in Lockdown while holding at least 14 baubles (which are obtainable in the Flea Market) for at least 50% of the last 168 hours (1 week).

Your current quantity of owned Coal and baubles are the same, and that quantity is also the same as number of Locations in the Great Machine’s Destination.

much sooner than i expected, and i’m a little disappointed that it’s two primarily numerical agendas that did it. i guess those are the easiest sort? nevertheless, congrats lendun!!
i know this was a weird one, but thanks for humouring the experiment, y’all :0

Proposal: Functional Programming

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:37:04 UTC

Create the following Facilities in the System of Dwelling:

|-
| System of Dwelling || Machinist Terminal || 0 || DORMANT ||

Create the following Facilities in the System of Control:

|-
| System of Control || Programming Station || 0 || DORMANT || Replace the text of the Function of the Machinist Terminal with the text from the Function of any other Facility except the Junction Supergrid, the Programming Station, and the Machinist Terminal, paying 1 non-Paint Component per 3 words of the new text, then change 1 word of the new text that is not a number to any word except the name of a Machinist, a number, or any form of the word “victory”.

The idea is to allow Machinists to program their own Facility that’s similar to an existing one, but fits their specific needs. It requires a number of steps to become useable over several instances of Passing Time, so it should be obvious and fairly easy to block by simply removing Power from the Machinist Terminal, plus the Machinist who alters the Function of the Machinist Terminal risks someone else getting there first, so they can’t make it too overpowered.

Proposal: Background Resources

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:37:00 UTC

Add the following sentence to the end of the first paragraph of the rule “Resource Triangle”:

New Machinists start with a number of Resources equal to the number of instances of Passing Time that have occurred this dynasty, divided evenly between Coal, Housing, and Valves with the remainder going to their Megasystem’s Resource.

Award 2 Coal, 2 Housing and 2 Valves to any Machinists who had never possessed any Coal, Housing or Valves between the start of the dynasty and when this proposal was posted.

Proposal: Automated Defenses

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:36:42 UTC

In the rule “Damage and Repair”, after

* Perform the Criminal Activity atomic action

add the following step:

* If the Megasystem is Defective but not Destroyed, roll DICE3. On a 1, put yourself on the Lockdown list for 2 days and remove your name from each Machinist’s Witness List wherever it appears.

With only four Machinists, we lack the manpower to monitor the entire Great Machine, allowing the unscrupulous to scavenge without consequence. But mysterious damage should also alert other residents.

Story Post: Time’s Passage, Day 6

The Great Machine is limping its way across the ice plains. Though it’s moving much too slowly to reach its destination today — the System of Motion remains heavily damaged, and the strain of moving is damaging connected mechanisms in Control — it’s thankfully able to avoid getting caught and damaged in the glacial movements of the ice plates.

Within the Machine, the situation is showing some hope of recovering. Both the Systems of Motion and Dwelling are in much better shape than they were yesterday as the Machinists have gotten back to work in full force. There is still much work to be done, however.

A second Machinist has been caught scavenging the Great Machine, however, meaning that the people cannot rest their worries just yet. The Machinist who was arrested yesterday has since been released, as he has insisted he was only going to use the parts to repair a more urgent breakdown elsewhere in the Machine. A likely story!

In mercantile news, the high prices of Coal and Valves have begun to drop, though the former remains tied with Housing as the most expensive. A handful of component types — cogs, pipes, and wiring — are all tied as the cheapest.

Proposal: Who Said Machines Can’t Limp

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:35:25 UTC

In the rule “Time’s Passage”, change “If the Destination list is not empty and the System of Motion is not Defective” to “If the Destination list is not empty and the System of Motion is not Destroyed”.

In the rule “Time’s Passage”, directly after “Randomly select a Megasystem and add a random component to its Damaged Parts; do this twice if the Destination list is empty.”, add a new bullet point:

* If the System of Motion is Defective but not Destroyed and the Destination list is not empty, randomly select a Megasystem and add a random Component to its Damaged Parts.

making it so that the Machine can still move if the System of Motion is defective, just with a small downside

Proposal: Beadworks Golf

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:18:04 UTC

In “Brevity”, change “Any Proposal which would add more than 400 characters net to the dynastic ruleset” to:-

Any Proposal which would add more than 400 characters net to the world (the world being defined as the dynastic ruleset and the Functions of Facilities)

Removing the temptation to put all new ruletext into Facility Functions.

Proposal: A-Minding its Own Business

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:17:13 UTC

Append the following step to the Passing Time Atomic Action:

* If the Destination list is empty and the System of Control is not Defective, add a random Location to the Destination list.
* If the System of Control is not Destroyed, Operate one random STANDBY Facility as if you were a Machinist, making all associated decisions at random and ignoring requirements and effects of its Function that refer to an Operating Machinist’s personal gamestate variables.

taking another crack at this one, too, since the main point against it seemed to be the lack of clarity on the second bullet! now it explicitly specifies STANDBY facilities only :0
(adds 398 characters)

Proposal: Purified Watercooler

Vetoed upon Ascension. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 04 Aug 2023 09:15:21 UTC

Remove the sentence “Machinists may never disclose, implicitly or explicitly, publicly or privately, their Agendas, except where explicitly required for the Declaration of Victory.” from “Machinist Agendas”.

Per the comments on Bread and Bounties and the Discord, if most players are reading this as meaning that partial statements of “my Agenda requires lots of Repair Log entries” aren’t implicitly revealing a specific Agenda (because none of us know the full pool of Agendas, and even if I know I wrote a “have 7 Repair Log entries” Agenda, I don’t know whether anyone else wrote a similar one), this clause may not even mean anything.

Proposal: Steering and Salaries

Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 02 Aug 2023 14:48:17 UTC

If a Facility exists called Steerage Override, change its function to “Pay a number of Valves equal to the number of Locations in the Destination list to add your choice of Location to the top of the Destination list.”

In the rule “Damage and Repair”, change “A Machinist may Repair the megasystem they inhabit: they pay 1 of a Component to delete one of that type from its Damaged Parts, add the details to a new Repair Log entry and increase their Baubles by 3.” to “A Machinist may Repair the megasystem they inhabit: they pay 1 of a Component to delete one of that type from its Damaged Parts and add the details to a new Repair Log entry.”

Create two new Facilities with the following details:

System of Dwelling || Machinist Compensation Office || 0 || DORMANT || In each Repair Log, remove all entries listing dates more than 2 days in the past and give each Machinist 5 Baubles for each removed entry bearing their name.
System of Control || Loyalty Evaluator || 0 || DORMANT || Choose one Megasystem and remove all entries from its Repair Log. The Machinist (or Machinists, if tied) whose name appears the most in the removed entries receives Valves equal to the number of removed entries their name appears in minus one. All other Machinists receive one randomly selected Component for each removed entry bearing their name.

Remove the step “Randomly pick a Component and add one of that Component to each Machinist’s Components.” from the atomic action in “Time’s Passage”.

Remove all current entries from all three Repair Logs.

for the record, my statement about being “inclined to reward” Bucky for repairing the Great Machine was mostly a bit of whimsy — i’d really just forgotten to take that into account! here’s another try at the Facilities proposal that doesn’t double-play Machinists. currently-existing Repair Log entries will end up having been payed a bit less, but the pay increase exists primarily to offset the loss of ease and quickness, which past repairers have certainly benefitted from.

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Proposal: Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 02 Aug 2023 07:39:56 UTC

In the Function of the Steerage Override, replace “Add your choice of Location from the list” with:

Spend 1 Valve to add your choice of Location from the list

Per the proposed cost and effect change in Bread and Bounties, the Steerage Override costing 0 Valves for 1 Destination does seem cheap against the baseline Control system’s cost of 1 or 2 Valves for 2 or 1 Destinations.

Proposal: Zoned Out

enacted 5-0
-lemon

Adminned at 02 Aug 2023 06:24:23 UTC

In “Time’s Passage”, replace “Each day, the Great Machine can and should perform the following Daily Atomic Action, called Passing Time:” with:-

If they have not already done so in the last 30 hours, the Great Machine can and should perform the following Atomic Action, called Passing Time:

The Great Machine generally Passing Time around 1am-3am UTC at the start of an Earth day means that players in a UTC-like timezone (like myself) will never get to react first within a cycle, being asleep. This spreads it around the clockface a little.

Proposal: Arbitrary State Despotism

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 01 Aug 2023 22:00:37 UTC

In the rule “Time’s Passage”, change “Remove every entry in the Lockdown list with a Days value of 0, then subtract 1 from the Days value of each remaining entry.” to “Subtract 1 from the Days value of each entry in the Lockdown list, then remove every entry in the Lockdown list with a Days value of 0.”.

under the current ruleset, you effectively have to stay in jail for three days instead of two
this fixes that

Proposal: Tied Cable

Reached quorum 4 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 01 Aug 2023 21:59:06 UTC

In the rule “Victory”, change “If a Machinist’s Mastery is at least 2, and is higher than that of every other Machinist, and if the date is on or after August 3, 2023, then the Great Machine may make a blog post announcing the identity of this Machinist and listing every Agenda owned by that Machinist. Upon doing so, that Machinist achieves victory.” to:

If a Machinist’s Mastery is at least 2, and is higher than that of every other Machinist, and if the date is on or after August 3, 2023, then they have achieved victory. When a Machinist has achieved victory, the Great Machine should, at their first opportunity, make a blog post announcing the identity of this Machinist and listing every Agenda owned by that Machinist.

seems a bit odd that victory is contingent upon whether the Great Machine is awake or not