BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

  This needs an exception for writing out numbers as words - which this rule is already doing with its “ten numerical digits”.

I’m unconvinced that we need this as a permanent rule.

@Kevan - I agree that it doesn’t need to be a permanent rule, which is why I made it a special case -i purpose or because I can guarantee that it’s going to need to be in place any time I’m emperor, so it saves time to have it easily toggleable.

You’re right about numbers-as-words, although I do query whether “numbers used in this dynasty” extends to ruleset text.

“i purpose or” should be “I proposed this”. My autocorrect apologises.

as it stands, might have something to say about it in short order

Special cases flip to “active” by default, and on its surface there’s no reason to switch this one off. It just feels a bit of a fool’s errand, similar to trying to define what kind of English language players should and shouldn’t communicate in, which we don’t bother with. If some joker enjoys making obtruse mathematical bids, can’t they do the same under this rule by framing them as “my bid is the digit 1 followed by X iterations of the digit 0, where X is…”?

In dynasties with public numbers, we can see when someone is being a bore with them; in dynasties where those numbers are tracked privately, we just need a rule like the current Louis XIV Powers to let the tracker reject them if they don’t like them.

Really, this dynasty is a huge outlier for allowing and perhaps encouraging arbitrarily large secret numbers. In any other dynasty we’d just throw out a quick sanity-check rule of “bids cannot exceed 100”.

cov per Kevan

I’m voting for it just to show I ain’t mad about that veto.

additionally, although this is technically a fools errand like Kevan said….Having this rule explicitly written at least codifies an unwritten social resistance to being tricky with your numbers.

It’s good to express intent, even if it doesn’t technically get rid of tricky bastard mathematicians.

I’m not sure tricky numbers is a regular problem, it’s usually just someone saying “oh look, this action is free, I gain 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 units of grain” because it’s funny. Which they can still do if this enacts.

I assume Josh has just been getting some weird bids this dynasty from a player who has decided to win some bids at any cost.

  CoV

The rule is self contradictory because “ten” is a number and it isn’t represented using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system.

after the dynasty, Josh can speak more publicly about the types of bids he saw and we can brainstorm ways around them. But until we actually have that information to better understand why this rule is needed, I don’t wanna make permanent changes to the ruleset.

  CoV per Clucky

[Clucky] Josh comments above that they don’t intend or consider “numbers used in this Dynasty” as referring to ruletext. (Beyond the self-reference in this rule, there were lot of numbers-as-words in the dynastic ruleset at the end of this dynasty - mostly “one"s.)

Even reading it as only affecting gamestate and game actions, though, it still seems a bad idea to say that (months from now when half of us have forgotten about this rule and new players haven’t noticed it) it would be illegal for someone to post a blog-comment-as-action of “I spend three coins”.