Friday, December 08, 2023

Proposal: Always Aging

Times out 1-3 and fails -SingularByte

Adminned at 10 Dec 2023 09:00:49 UTC

In “Health of the King” replace

and a publicly tracked number named Old King’s Stress that can range from 5 to 10 inclusive and defaults to 5. If the Old King is Ill, as a Daily Communal Action, any Heir or the Old King should subtract the Old King’s Stress from the Old King’s Health and then set the Old King’s Stress to 5

with

, a publicly tracked number named Old King’s Stress that can range from 5 to 10 inclusive and defaults to 5, and a publicly tracked integer number called Build Up which defaults to 0. At the start of every day, the Build Up increases by 1. If the Old King is Ill and the Build Up is positive, any Heir or the Old King may as an Atomic Action reduce the Build Up by 1, subtract the Old King’s Stress from the Old King’s Health and then set the Old King’s Stress to 5

Increase the Old King’s health by 50.

Making the timer on the king’s health explicit rather than the “you should do this but you don’t have to”

Comments

Kevan: City he/him

08-12-2023 10:17:45 UTC

Not sure I see how this is changing anything - under the amended rule we could still all choose not to take the decrease-Health action?

JonathanDark: he/him

08-12-2023 13:55:59 UTC

It actually does the opposite. I had “should” as part of the health decrease. This weakens it to “may”.

Were you missing a consequence that Build Up was going to trigger that would encourage players to take the action?

against

4st:

08-12-2023 15:31:45 UTC

against noooo don’t kill the old king

have no idea what’s going on kinda :3

Kevan: City he/him

08-12-2023 15:34:30 UTC

against as I’m not sure what’s been missed out here, but something clearly has.

Clucky: he/him

08-12-2023 15:48:39 UTC

Right one, every day, one of us *should* decrease the king’s health but there is no requirement to do so. Which is a weird sort of requirement to have, especially because its a communal chore so everyone can just sit back and expect someone else to do it but then no one does it


This would make it so that you never really don’t decrease the king’s health. Yeah you can go a day without decreasing it, but then the Build Up will be 2 and so it’ll just get decreased by 10 the next day. And even if no one bothers to decrease the health, eventually it’ll reach high enough that whoever is in the lead can just burn his health all the way down to 0.

Kevan: City he/him

08-12-2023 16:03:38 UTC

Wouldn’t “reduce the Build Up by 1, subtract the Old King’s Stress from the Old King’s Health” have to be something like “subtract the Old King’s Stress multiplied by the Build Up, then set Build Up to zero” to do that?

Either way, numbers which are considered to have silently and magically updated themselves (even if everyone forgets to update the tracking) are risky. I don’t want to be caught out by a lead player revealing that Build Up was actually a bit higher than we thought it was, to end the game.

Clucky: he/him

08-12-2023 16:09:29 UTC

no because if the stress is 10, then ideally someone would decrease the King’s health by 10 one day, reset the stress to 5. And then next day someone would decrease the king’s health by 5. So you get 15 decrease overall.

If someone forgets a day, you don’t wanna decrease it by 20 you still wanna decrease it by 5

I agree that auto updating health is a bad idea as its dependent on stress and so those values secretly changing is very weird but having a value that ticks up one every day seems pretty harmless to me

Clucky: he/him

08-12-2023 16:09:48 UTC

*still wanna decrease it by 15, not 5

Kevan: City he/him

08-12-2023 16:24:00 UTC

Oh, right, it’s not a daily action any more. If nobody takes the action today, someone can take it twice tomorrow; if nobody takes it for five days someone can take it five times; and so on. Got it.

Still voting against for introducing a value that secretly changes every day even if we forget to update it. A player being able to say “surprise, turns out we all forgot to update the Build Up for the 13th and 18th, so I get to take this action twice more today” is potentially game-ending stuff.

Clucky: he/him

08-12-2023 16:43:59 UTC

that is a good point.

what if we did something like, there is the daily action to increase buildup by the number of days since someone last increased buildup? I was always thinking that is how it would work, but hadn’t considered the whole “what if build up just gets out of sync and no one notices.

I guess technically you’d still run the risk of “build up should’ve been increased to 3 on the 13th but instead it was only increased to 2 so really its one higher”

JonathanDark: he/him

08-12-2023 16:45:11 UTC

Honestly, I’m fine with leaving things as they are. If we happen to forget to do it a day or two, there’s no real harm done. If no one is invested enough to push the dynasty towards an end consistently and things stagnate to never reach the end, that’s a sign of a bigger problem than just doing a daily communal action.

I suspect those who feel like they have a chance to achieve victory and who plan to be active will be the most invested in moving things along, so I’m not too worried about it right now.

Clucky: he/him

08-12-2023 18:51:33 UTC

Something else to keep in mind—that one risk we have with the current system is that if a nameless heir decreases the kings health they technically aren’t allowed to do that but it quite possibly wouldn’t be caught. So even with the current rules we could wind up in a situtation where we realize the king isn’t quite as dead as we think he is. But this doesn’t really fix that problem

JonathanDark: he/him

08-12-2023 19:33:42 UTC

True, but that’s the case with any dynastic action performed by a Nameless Heir. We’ll have to watch out for any of those and revert when necessary.