Proposal: Acceleration
In “Guards and Burglars”, change:
If a particular Agent currently has more Successes than every other Agent, and also had more Successes than every other Agent immediately prior to the most recent Breaking In action, that Agent has achieved victory.
to
If a particular Agent currently has more Successes than every other Agent, that Agent has achieved victory if at least one of the following statements is true:
* That Agent had more Successes than every other Agent immediately prior to the most recent Breaking In action;
* That Agent is a Guard, and has at least two more Successes than every Burglar;
* That Agent is a Burglar, and has at least two more Successes than every Guard.
Under the current ruleset, a victory is guaranteed at the end of the current round, because nobody is able to catch up. (Incidentally, “Clucky, I challenge you!” would have stopped this scenario occuring – forcing a round 5 that was meaningful – but it got voted down.)
There are two possible solutions to this: a) change the victory condition to be more difficult, making the gameplay more meaningful, or b) skip directly to the win without spending time on meaningless gameplay in between.
I don’t know how much interest players have in continuing to play. Last night’s results looked somewhat like two of the Burglars had given up (12 Infamy with no Guard encounters makes it likely that there was no attempt by them to steal anything and they just idled at, e.g., G), but because so much about what happened is kept secret, I don’t know whether or not I’m interpreting those correctly – and one way to find out is to ask, and one way to ask is to make a proposal. Are players happy with the current gameplay, or would they rather move on?
(I also note that “make the victory condition more difficult” has the issue that once a player is one round from winning, the other players on their team might not have an incentive to help the team win, causing the dynasty structure to break down. I think that if we want to continue play rather than accelerate to the win, we will have to either add a random factor to the victory condition, or make Successes matter beyond the dynasty somehow.)
JonathanDark: he/him
Any reason why this is better than A More Meaningful Round of Play? I noticed the same issue that you did and thought that a game of get/prevent Fame/Infamy might be nice for the last round.