BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Nothing invites cabalism like an advantage that excludes all but two people upon each use. How about the hat can’t pass to previous owners? 

Hmm, that would certainly be an option . . . I envisioned the hat (and other items) gradually working their way around through all the players, do you not think this would happen in practice?

I think if it’s used to best benefit it’s user, it won’t, unless (perhaps) the ruleset develops to give wizards a way to entice others to mutate their own creatures specifically. Do we all trust in each other’s fair play enough to overcome tragedy of the commons, and yet also prefer not to take an easy step to avoid it?

I sort of feel bad if I’m quashing such an early idea, but social game theory would to me indicate it’s a risky experiment, a bit like a ten-way trust fall? Albeit in this case, with slow (and theoretically reversible) net effects.

The fact that it takes 72 hours to use gives us plenty of time to fix that problem before it starts, if this proposal enacts.

Even longer, in fact, because the Hat Wearer isn’t being tracked anywhere, so (per Orphan Variables) nobody will be able to use it.

Addressing these suggestions, how about a further proposal including:

- Items of Power are tracked in GNDT or the wiki
- A specific Item of Power cannot be held by a Wizard more than once

Alternatively, whenever someone proposes an item of power, everybody gets one of the same item, and Wizards have to choose between the short-term benefit of using their item now, or the long-term benefit of saving it for later (maybe for Victory points?).

What do we think?

I’d be tempted to combine this kind of thing with Creatures, so that we can track everything in the same place. If you have a “Wandering Frog” in your Stables, you can send it off on a mission to do whatever it does.

So maybe have special creature qualities, you mean? More powerful qualities which are harder to acquire but make a more valuable creature?

Yeah. It’d probably tie in quite well with your short-term/long-term point, if (as seems likely) creatures end up being worth victory points.

Yeah. It’d probably tie in quite well with your short-term/long-term point, if (as seems likely) creatures end up being worth victory points.

Nice! Do you think you could put together a proposal for that?

@Kevan: I originally wrote Orphan Variables with the intent that something like this would be okay - even if the “tracking” is via piecing together what happened from the original roll and all (visible) updates to the state, it’s poor tracking but still tracking.

Or it’s at least somewhere between “tracked” and “can be determined from other gamestate variables”

[Farsight] I’m out of slots right now.

[pokes] Ah, okay, I’ve been reading that much more strictly: that an orphaned variable can only ever “see” the current gamestate, and not its history.

Though I don’t see why you need the king to be the one to randomly assign an item: if its random, it doesn’t matter who rolls it.

The food clause works because it gives me a sort of gas pedal to speed up or slow down the dynasty with.

I agree that using animals rather than items for this effect is cleaner.

[derrick] I hadn’t thought of that point about the king.

I like the suggestions about using the creatures, but I’m struggling to think of how exactly to re-work the proposal. Does anyone want to help out?

To iterate what you’ve got here, I think “A Creature with the Wandering quality allows its owner to mutate a single Creature in another Wizard’s Stable without paying its Upkeep. If a Wizard chooses to use a Wandering Creature in this way, the Wandering Creature is moved to the Stable of the Wizard whose Creature they mutated.”  (and creating a Quality called “Wandering”) should do it. There might be a better adjective for it. (Parasitic?)

Without some tracking of previous owners, it’s still a rich-get-richer/scratch-your-back mechanic.

You COULD debuff it into simply a swappable creature? Then it’s a rob-from-the-rich mechanic, and actually seems more interesting, IMHO. Might not even need a long timer, anymore. Makes each recipient lose another creature first to get the creature, with a non-gameable net effect.

Note: if you are planning to abandon a proposal, it is courteous to self-kill it by voting against your own proposal. This allows the proposal and all proposals afterwards be resolved more quickly.

Thanks for the suggestions folks, let’s see where it leads. Self-killed.