BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

-> I like the ten moves at once mechanic, which makes every duel risky, but as this is the stats of the combatants have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the battle.

I was thinking they could be used to break ties (highest strength winning simultaneous punches, skill for kicks and reflexes for grabbing), so that you’d know which moves you had the edge with, but I didn’t want to put too much forward at once.

Things I like:
Resolving everything with one message
Clan Lords putting out open Duel slots

Things I don’t like:
The absolute symmetry so far
The lack of a way to stuff a Dodge
The fact that you don’t know what state you or your opponent are in when you decide to surrender.

Comments?

Needs work:
- Why _ten_ moves: isn’t a lower number sufficient, and doesn’t it make a lot of work for the Clan Lord?
- Dodges have no effect.
- There isn’t really a system in place to email the Clan Lord: should a rule specify a munged email address to be used for this purpose?

Also, a combat doesn’t end even if one of the participants becomes Dead in the middle.

Ten was an arbitrary number; it’s long enough to really hurt people, and I don’t think it’s much more work than a lower one, once the Clan Lord has done all the paperwork of blog posts and email collection.

Dodges are (currently) bulletproof for guaranteeing you won’t get hurt in a given round. (In fact, they’re outright better than Surrendering, in every situation, so that would need tweaking.)

And combat doesn’t break if anyone dies, you just end up punching a corpse for a few rounds.

I’m assuming that the future weapons from Grabthar’s Hammer will do the most to add asymmetry and tactic-stuffing.

Actually, I suppose the Dead thing is a bit ambiguous; “Dead Clansmen may not take any action defined by a Dynastic Rule”, but arguably the Clan Lord is just taking an action on their behalf. So that would need a fix.

Oh, and private messages would work better than e-mail, I believe.

Do private messages get sent out as email? Is there a setting that some people might have switched off? I wasn’t entirely sure.

Question 1: No.

Question 2: You can block PMs from specific players, but who would?

1) Make it pms instead of email.
2) Have a penalty if the combatants do not send the list of moves.  (This was the problem with the last duel proposal.)
3) Have the duel end immediately if one Clansman dies.
4) Do not allow the Clan Lord who anounced the duel to fight in the duel.
5) Have stats factor in somehow along with rewards for winning in the form of raising stats.
6) Have some way to become alive again once you are dead (such as resetting all your stats).
7) Make dodging do something but have some chance of failure.

You might even consider making it rounds where each round, the combatants pm their moves for that round to the Clan Lord, then the Clan Lord makes comments to the post once he receives both combatants moves.  This would put more turn-by-turn strategy instead of just guessing at when you might be close to dying.

I suggest that:
“In each Combat Round, the Combatant will perform their specified Combat Move, to the following effect”
be revised to read:
“In each Combat Round, the Combatant will perform their specified Combat Move, to the following effect (subject to any other Rules or Gamestate Documents that require a different result)”

    Self-kill.

Some of these things are necessary fixes and some of them are ideas for greater details. I’ll repropose a fixed version of it later or tomorrow, if nobody else gets there first.

Isn’t “subject to other rules” implicit, though?

Kevan—

Another suggestion: in the hook to Grobthar’s Hammer, you may want for the phrase “Use an Item (specifying one of the Items the Clansman was holding when they accepted the Duel).” to be limited to Items that the gamestate provides may be used in duels (some items might be weapons so it would make sense for a Clansman to have to expressly state that he is using it, other items might be things such as armor that are assumed to be “in use” for as long as they are carried, or things such as a training manual that might be sensibly “used” as a non-duel action.

Kevan:

I like the idea of making all the moves in advance. Maybe when the Clan Lord posts the Duel he specifies how many rounds will the duel last instead of a fixed number? I was also toying in my mind with the idea of somehow “stateless” combat, so that fights do not take long to resolve, and this kinda fits in, but we will have to work in the stat factors and possibly honor too.