BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’m not sure this does what it’s intended to do. I think the gamestate is updated automatically, whether we notice it or not. You’re talking about updating the gamestate *tracking*.

I don’t necessarily agree that the Gamestate is updated automatically, but certainly all actions change the Gamestate by definition, and the difficulty is around how that is tracked.

I’m also not keen about “unless it is not possible for them to do so, in which someone who can will. (For example, if they take an action, and then idle out before changing the Gamestate.)” That effectively endorses taking an action and idling out without updating tracking - if this is a “must” case (and I think it should be) then I don’t think it should be weakened by an “unless”.

I put this one on the laundry list because I think we occasionally have rules where the gamestate is described as being updated automatically, when we really mean “the person who initiated this event has to update this as well”. (From the last dynasty we had “When the Emperor calls a new meeting of the Kaiju Court and offers new Aspects, [...] if a single Kaiju has a higher Prestige than every other Kaiju at this point, that Kaiju gains 1 Lab Token.” - implying that the Emperor has to update the Lab Tokens, but not explicitly saying so.)

The “idle out before changing the Gamestate” example here is a significant and separate one, though, and one that was obscurely tackled last dynasty (“If they fail to pay Prestige in this way within five minutes”). It’s worth a think about what a “must” action means - I know we’ve touched on individual mechanics of “if a player must do X, it means they cannot take other game actions until they do X”, and maybe it’s worth genericising that.

because I don’t think this really fixes either problem, but I appreciate the stab at it.

Ah, well, I tried. Self-killing.