BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I fear there will always be some lazy person who doesn’t Bet so the optimal strategy if you want to avoid a Misfortune is just to Bet with Risk 1 (knowing someone won’t respond and Bet 0). Sort of similar to why no one ever bids high on flaws in Rumble

Good point. Maybe the minimum Bet, if you make one, should be higher. Is 10% too high of a minimum?

You only actually lose the resources if you lose the bet (unless I’m missing something). That should probably be changed, otherwise any minimum won’t actually do anything. 10% seems reasonable though

Well I didn’t want all Seekers to have to spend Resources every time one of these Misfortunes came up. The idea is that you’re playing a game of potentially avoiding a bad event, but if you don’t Bet enough, you’ll wind up losing Resources and having a Life Event happen to you.

I suppose the optimal play would be to always Bet 100% and count on at least one Seeker to Bet less than that or fail to Bet at all. I might have to revisit this Bet structure and edit the Proposal a bit while I have time.

Maybe the highest Bet loses the Resources that they Bet but the lowest Bet(s) have the Life Event happen to them.

That would be better, but there still needs to be some incentive to bet anything other than 0 or the minimum. Maybe making everyone less than or equal to the median Bet suffer the Misfortune would work, but that would add more complexity to an already quite complex proposal

Ok, I think I have it figured out:

* If you Bet the highest Risk, you avoid anything bad happening, but you have to be the only one with the highest Risk

* Everyone else has to pay the % of Resource that they Risk in their Bet

* All of the lowest-Risk Seekers get the Life Event applied to them

* Minimum Risk is 10%

So doing nothing or Betting the minimum just gets a double-whammy of paying the Resource and the Life event.

Betting just above the minimum might work if no one else does it, but if even one other person does, you pay the Resource.

Betting higher might get you to avoid paying anything, but the question is: how high should you go? That’s the tension that I was trying to get to.

This seems much more interesting. I still have some concerns about the race to be the first to post the Misfortune if you and an opponent both have some Life Event/Resource you want to have in it, though

Yeah. I’m not really sure how to avoid that, other than the restriction I’m proposing that the Seeker who posts a Misfortune can’t have posted the most recent one before it. That at least avoids the same Seeker spamming Misfortunes.

If there’s two Seekers and neither have posted the most recent Misfortune, then yeah it’s a race between the two, but at least after the first one “wins”, it leaves an opening for the other to post the next one.

Maybe it should be a round-robin instead? But then if a Seeker never posts a Misfortune, it holds up the ability of anyone else to do it, so I don’t really care for that option.

A simple fix: people can post a Misfortune once per dynasty, and there can be multiple Misfortunes pending at once. Adds some additional strategic value of how long you want to hold on to it for as well

I suppose that’s a bit thematically off with a Misfortune, though

Which part do you think is off thematically? The once-a-dynasty part or the multiple-at-once part?

If it’s the former, it could be a Weekly Action instead, so the strategic value is still there, just a more narrow window, determining exactly when in a given Week to post yours.

The idea that you control exactly when a Misfortune happens, instead of it just being something that happens every once in a while (3 days) and you have to deal with it. Isn’t very Misfortunate!

I still think once-a-dynasty + multiple pending is better than the current wording though (and it has the bonus of being significantly fewer words). I likely will be against this if the race isn’t fixed

Ah yes. I did like that cycle of every 3 days. Maybe that’s the solution, then: the cycle should happen every 3 days, but to remove the advantage of the person posting it, the Life Event and the Resource is chosen at random. Of course, then that removes it as a strategic tool and it just becomes something random that happens.

I’ve been trying to avoid introducing randomness in this dynasty, since the last one was all about success or failure largely determined at random. I may just let this go as it is now, and if we’d rather remove the timing issue at the cost of strategy and make Misfortunes random, we can do that later.

However, your opinion convinced me to at least fix the race condition. The randomness can be dealt with later.

I guess… I still feel… like we’re skipping over a layer here!  We’re a few days in and there aren’t any basic actions yet, why are we piling in on this more elboate stuff? I can’t quite wrap my head around what this is going to do yet as I just feel like the centra; mechanic of the dynasty isn’t there yet.

I did think about a “turning the crank” rule that got us starting to accumulate Resources, but I wanted to understand how Resources were going to flow in and out first.

Is it as simple as a Communal Daily Action to add/subtract Resources based on a combo of Job and Hobby? I don’t know.

On randomness: me too, the last 3 dynasties have had heavy random elements (crawl/leapsnail targeting, heist actions/team selection, the entirety of the last dynasty) which dominated the dynastic gameplay. I think it’d be best to take a break from that sort of thing.

There’s a difference IMO between a random result of an action you take you can’t react to and some randomness that you get to react to though, and the latter is significantly more “fine”

@Josh: Bribing might not be appropriate for this, but hey, bribes are fun (or at least funny sometimes)! If I can get your vote in favor of both “Life Happens” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, as soon as I get a slot free, I’ll propose something to start generating Resources on a regular basis.

Or, if you prefer, you make such a Proposal, and provided there’s nothing egregious in it, I’ll pledge my support for it.

Why didn’t I do it now? Eh, I just figured someone else would.

Counter-point: yes, I know you could also implement the “punitive” approach in which every Proposal gets voted down until we start Proposing the basics. It’s an option, I suppose. Carrot or stick?

I have proposed a simple get-resources action. Hopefully it suffices

Not punative, just using my slots for other things and responding to proposals as feels right.

Can’t get a handle on this in the absence of more tangible mechanics.

That’s fair. If it fails, I may just hold on to it and re-Propose it later, tweaking in light of further developments.

We probably shouldn’t have passed Opportunities for the same reason, but :shrug:

This mechanic seems complicated enough that few Seekers are likely to want to figure out how it works – perhaps once people are more confident with the dynasty’s basic gameplay (and when that gameplay has been established!) it might be worth trying again.