BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Do we need to define what “gaining a Claim” means or can it be naturally assumed to mean “going from not meeting a Claim’s conditions to meeting them”?

I’ll alter the wording of the proposal to clarify anyway.

Where has this thing of having different defaults and starting values come from? I get it but it feels very exploit-ready

I was basing it off of the way Primogeniture worked.

It feels more exploitable having the default be a dice roll though, since if someone manages to reset their values, at least they can’t keep resetting until they get the dice roll they want.

[Josh] I think the terms were seen as interchangeable until you drew a distinction to fix something in 2020, but I don’t know what we were fixing.

It makes some sense to have a separate crash-recovery default value that allows the game to remain standing, without tempting a player to scam their way there, but we rarely seem to declare different default and starting values in practice. (And we seem to use them a bit interchangeably; unidling players get the default values, but shouldn’t they get the starting ones?)

the dynasty is just starting, so lets get some things into it! WOO

I don’t like the random starting values.

reputations will hopefully vary enough throughout the game so that the random starting values don’t have too significant an effect

I also don’t love the starting values.

There’s also a fun scam in that you can’t currently lose a Claim (‘An Heir who meets the conditions for a Claim is considered to have that claim’ but nothing about what happens if you cease to meet those conditions), so you can currently meet a claim, dip below its threshold, rise up to meet it again, dip below it again, rinse and repeat for infinite Reputation.

None of that is imminent though so happy to pass and fix.

Would that not count as “Losing a claim” in the other condition and penalise you for 4? Admittedly it would be useful to spell it out in more detail than just a few words though.

No, this is my point, you can’t currently lose a claim - there’s no mechanism for a claim ceasing to be owned at the moment.

Ah, got you. Yeah, that’s definitely an ambiguity.

@Josh I feel like “An Heir who meets the conditions for a Claim is considered to have that claim” implies that an Heir who doesn’t is considered to not have it. Like, if “having a thing” is defined, then “losing the thing” can reasonably be interpreted to mean “no longer having the thing”. It doesn’t say “gains”, so I feel like ownership is temporary by the current definition.

I also like the reputation idea, but not the “random starting value for a key resource” part.

@Vovix I reject utterly the idea that the ruleset runs on “implication”. It has to state something for that thing to be true, for really obvious reasons.

I worry that this is going to become a pattern, so: please remember that when I vote FOR on something but point out a bug, that is because I want the ruleset to be better, and fixing the bug is better than pretending that it doesn’t exist. I get the impulse to be defensive, I really do, but the temptation is always there for me to keep quiet and exploit this stuff later, so please see it as an act of service rather than an attack. In this case, I don’t think anyone would believe it accept that the verb “to have” here carries a less permanent connotation than “to own” or “to gain” so let’s just fix it and avoid the problem, yeah?

Oh, to clarify, I’m not offended or anything, and I don’t mind these discussions. I just think that rulesets can rely on some degree of plain English to convey meaning rather than having to have a formal definition for terms that already have reasonable informal ones. I’d rather focus on coming up with good definitions for the new concepts we’re introducing, rather than needing to spend time defining general verbs like “have” and “gain”.

It seems okay to me. If the rule was “An Heir who meets the conditions for a Claim is considered to gain that claim” then losing it would be undefined, but “have” is a state rather than an action. “I now have the Eldest Claim… I still have the Eldest Claim… I now don’t have the Eldest Claim” definitely sounds like I lost the Claim.

@Kevan I am staggered.

I also don’t like the random starting values, and what is an “Act of Subterfuge atomic action”?

CoV now that “That was then, this is now” is up.

I think we should address the random starting values as a separate Proposal.

@Zack, an Act of Subterfuge atomic action is an atomic action that’s described as an Act of Subterfuge. It’s currently just an empty category that actions can be proposed to fall into, such as in “Drama of Documents”.

@Kevan Exactly. What I’ve been saying is that I think a “having” state implicitly defines the transitions of “gain” and “lose” alongside the negative state of “not having”.

seems like there could be an able oppptunity for this to infinite loop where someone does something that causes them to being meeting the criteria, then suddenly not any more, then do it again.

As worded right now, that would indeed be the case.

Wouldn’t that result in no net change at best, and a very negative reputation at worst? The penalty for losing a claim doesn’t check how it occurred, so you can’t gain more than you lose.

we’re literally only just starting out, I’d say this is fine

Oh, missed the “lose a Claim” part somehow and thought it was edited away.