“encouraged to do so whenever the number changes” may leak some information; if the Guards see the total suddenly jump up by six, at a time when the Concierge has been online for a while, that tells them how well organised the Burglars are. It’s a good idea in some form, though. (I think the lesson from the Alien DNA dynasty was that the slowest player will notice that they’re the slowest player, but may not realise how slow they’re being - so we might benefit from some Imperial overview of “average submission time last round was 7.5 hours, slowest was 56 hours”.)

I’d disagree on a permanent “always allowed to reveal such information during Interregnum”. At least one past dynasty decided not to do that and instead reveal nothing, and I think that’s generally the more compelling way to go. It’s like requiring players to reveal their cards to show whether or not they were bluffing, after each hand of poker.

If a Burglar bribes a Guard $100 to leave a side door open (where there’s a chance the door will blow shut or be closed by someone else), both parties have to weigh up the fact that the Guard could just take the money and not do it. If the Guard can say “you can trust me because you can check with the Concierge at the end of the game” or the Burglar can say “if you don’t do it, I’ll find out at the end of the dynasty and not trust you in the next one”, that seems enormously less interesting as a game decision.

I’m not keen on the idea that info can be revealed if the rule around it is revoked. In a scenario where one variable is replaced by a similar one with the same role, then you would have the risk of opponents learning what your previous tactics were.

It might not be relevant in this dynasty, but there’s definitely dynasties that would be impacted by it.

The [Dynastic] tag is an escalation. I could vote against just on that basis.

With respect to “can always reveal during Interregnum or if the rule is repealed”, I believe that both are already the case under the current rules (but both are non-obvious and thus it makes sense to point it out in the ruleset, as Emperors often don’t realise that they can do that). After a DoV passes the previous Emperor is no longer the Emperor, and thus they aren’t bound by any rules that only apply to the Emperor, like this one does. Likewise, the current rule only applies to “information defined as publicly tracked”, and if you repeal the rule defining it, it is no longer defined as publicly tracked (or indeed at all). I think there’s an argument that maybe it should be more restricted, but it’s hard to come up with a way to word the restrictions to not break things.

I tried to draft a way to permit dynastic rules to block reveals of information that would otherwise be revealable, for situations where players thought that that was desirable, but after thinking about it for a while, I don’t think it’s possible – the rules in question will almost always be repealed during the next dynasty, and at that point there will no longer be a prohibition on repealing it – and it’s undesirable for rules to have an ongoing effect that lasts after the point at which they are repealed.

With respect to “best to keep things secret forever”, my personal view on this is that discovering what was actually going on is one of the most interesting parts of hidden-information dynasties, and that choosing to never reveal actively makes the game worse. I don’t think that preserving the ability for people to undetectably renege on deals is worth giving that up (and I also think that it’s unlikely for such a scenario to arise – even without the Emperor directly revealing the tracked information, either the other players can figure it out by pooling what they know, or the information had no impact on the dynasty and thus there was no benefit to reneging on the deal). One of the only products that BlogNomic produces is the story of how its dynasties went – if that story never becomes public then the entire dynasty was just wasting the time of all the players. But I understand that this is a personal choice, and that other players might think differently.

@Josh: The [Dynastic] was added to prevent idle players voting on the proposal by mistake, due to seeing the core-edit tag in the title. I thought the title would be misleading if it listed only one of the sections of the ruleset that was being edited.

There’s definitely space where something big can happen and the players can’t, as a group, pool information to work out who did it - the actual perpetrator can also chime in with “and it wasn’t me either!” when comparing notes.

BlogNomic has always been a very reputational and betrayal-averse series of games. If we say that secret renegings and betrayals also have to be revealed at game end (even, I suppose, in dynasties with no Imperial tracking where players have their own secret hashes?), that’s going to close out even more of that gameplay space. If you want to bribe me to take an action and I know you’ll be able to check later whether I did it, then I basically have to actually do it, and the negotiation process will much simpler (and carry a higher fee).

I think I’ve said before that not betraying is just sound general strategy in nomic. Every time you betray someone, even if the information is kept secret by game mechanics, there is a chance that you will be found out – and the ability to make a binding promise is one of the most powerful negotiation tools that exist (e.g. the Prisoner’s Dilemma leads to a bad outcome for both sides if played “normally”, but if you can make a binding promise it is easy to reach the good outcome). Having people trust your promises is worth more over time than breaking a promise is ever likely to gain.

Note that this isn’t just restricted to betrayal – you also get an idea of which players are likely to give the best deals. For example, if a player has a history of suggesting one-sided deals, then it makes sense to be reluctant to deal with them in the future, even if no promises were broken. I typically try to vary who I make deals with over time just because I find things more fun that way (you get to know more people), but if I were trying to play optimally, I would probably choose to pool with people who are known to be reliable and who will even weight deals slightly in favour of the other party, because it means that they get to form more effective pools over time. (There are some Fair Play considerations involved, but the Fair Play rules currently don’t ban allowing things like grudges or trust that were built up over multiple dynasties to influence gameplay. Maybe they should.)

There is also, of course, the nomic play of writing a proposal that would make betrayal difficult or impossible, then seeing who tries to vote it down – players who are not trying to betray would generally benefit from such a proposal passing, and so it immediately lets you know who’s safest to make deals with. (This is similar to the play of writing a proposal that bans pooling, in order to figure out who’s planning to pool.) I wasn’t intentionally trying to do that with this proposal – given that the core parts of this are just making rules that already exist more obvious – but it’s caused me to think “maybe I should consider pooling with other players over Kevan in future dynasties, because he likes the possibility of betrayal (to the extent that he considers it to be worth giving a discount), and therefore he’s less reliable than other potential pooling partners would be”.

I’m using “you” and “me” as placeholders in an example, I’m not intending it to reflect our playstyles.

The discount would just be based on risk: if you don’t know how much you can trust another player to be honest and competent, the bribe cost of “player to perform one private action, may fail, cannot be verified that they attempted it” will be lower (they might lie and not take it, or get it wrong and lie about having gotten it wrong, with no impact on their reputation) compared to one of “player to perform one private action, may fail, attempt is logged and revealed at game end” (much more incentive to perform it correctly, since failing to do so will affect their reputation).

And if the costs of those kinds of agreements go up, they’re overall less likely to happen.

Well, I would charge full price regardless, and consider those agreements being less likely to happen to be overall a good thing. (Although I will pool in dynasties where pooling seems to be suggested by the mechanics or where it gives a substantial win chance increase, I prefer to avoid pooling when there’s a reasonable possibility of a solo win. In particular, I’ve never been part of a mantle roll agreement – to the extent that last dynasty I put most of my effort into scamming to make the mantle rolls irrelevant.) I don’t consider myself to be untrustworthy, therefore I’m not inclined to give players discounts based on me being untrustworthy. If players choose not to trust me, that’s their own decision and I will respect it (and instead make deals with people who do trust me).

In general, I think that “transactional” trades tend to not work very well at BlogNomic (which might be linked to a lack of cross-dynastic currencies, or possibly to its single-winner nature – they happen often enough at nomics which have long-term persistent currencies and wins that don’t cause resets). In theory, there could be situations where you make a one-off deal with someone to trade your resources for theirs, with such a deal beneficial for both parties, and then just go your own separate ways for the rest of the dynasty. In practice, that hardly ever happens (in the rare cases where it does, it’s usually to break an impasse rather than a traditional trade), and pools tend instead to be dynasty-lasting cooperation where the players are acting as a single unit and deal with splitting up the win equity later, if necessary. In such a case, it doesn’t really matter how much you’re trading as part of the deal, because your resources are all pooled anyway.

per my first comment: a progress bar of how many Routes are in is a good idea, but asking me to update it “whenever the number changes” may be too much of an information leak.

Would pass and fix but this is also making a big Core amendment, and per my other comments I strongly disagree that the Emperor should be “always allowed to reveal [private] information during Interregnum”.

The usual default assumption for secret information games is that the information (the poker bluff that wasn’t called, the Magic cards uncast in your hand at the end of a game, the werewolf identity never revealed) stays secret unless the player themselves volunteers to reveal it.

@Kevan: Would you prefer for the current rules to be changed the other way? The current rule does not prevent the former Emperor revealing private information during Interregnum, because it applies only to the Emperor, and a DoV changes who the Emperor is (meaning that the information is no longer Emperor-tracked information). This is subtle enough that I missed it until recently – in the discussion at the end of last dynasty I thought that Josh would have to stay silent about the calculations until after the AA, but it turns out the DoV was enough. As such, it made sense to clarify the rule while I was there.

I disagree about your “usual default assumption”. Although I agree that it’s true for poker (although not televised poker, which generally lets the audience know what hands the players folded with), I think that poker is an outlier here:

In Werewolf it is almost universal to reveal who the wolves are at the end of the game, and typical players would be very disappointed if the reveal didn’t happen – where are you playing Werewolf that doesn’t do that? (On one major Werewolf site, I used to review game setups for balance, and after a while it was decided that even revealing the review notes after the game was beneficial. It’s also common practice to reveal all private communication between players after the game is over; occasionally someone objects to this, which they have the right to do, but it generally causes everyone else to be annoyed at them.)

In Magic, revealing hands at the end of a game can reveal what’s in your deck, which is a reason why players often don’t do it (although some do it anyway!); but it’s very common for the decks to be revealed after the tournament (which is generally more interesting information than the transient information about what’s in a hand at a particular point).

In BlogNomic, there is definite information leakage from revealing pools and unused scams at the end of a dynasty, but it’s usual practice to do so anyway because it makes the game more fun. It seems weird to exempt Emperors from that.

I disagree with revealing the secret information after the dynasty ends. We’ve had information in the past where people expected information to remain secret and I’d rather err on the side of keeping it secret and add rules to explicitly allow revealing information we want to actually be revealed

> (meaning that the information is no longer Emperor-tracked information)

Ugh, I just realised that this is actually really broken in the current rules – a DoV changes the Emperor without repealing the dynastic rules, meaning that the new Emperor becomes the tracker for all the private information from the previous dynasty. I think that technically means that the old Emperor has to communicate it all to the new Emperor, in much the same way that we copy information from the old dynastic tracking page to the new one if the rules defining a publicly tracked variable are retained from one dynasty to the next rather than repealed.

Hmm… after thinking about this some more, I think that it might be desirable to reveal Routes at the end of each round (not just the end of the dynasty), although of course that isn’t a great fit for this proposal.

The main reasoning is that it would give players who weren’t involved in a pool a chance to figure out that the pool existed. As it is, pooling between a Guard and a Burglar (to throw points to each other, rather than to eavesdrop on their team) seems like it’s probably going to make more sense than playing the dynastic mechanics as intended. It’d be an unsatisfying end to the dynasty to have it decided by who sits there grinding the most, rather than trying to help out their team.

I guess an alternative way to fix the problem might be to make it more important which team “wins”, i.e. one Burglar stealing something gives a large benefit to all Burglars and not just the thief, and likewise giving a large benefit to the Guards if all the Burglars are caught.

I’m this, I think, unless someone presents a very convincing argument otherwise. Having hidden information revealed after the game ends also strikes me as fairly standard for games with hidden information.

I also think it’s important to note that this is only explicitly allowing the outgoing Emperor to reveal private information at the end of a dynasty; it doesn’t create an obligation or even a recommendation to do so.

I’ve played a lot of boardgames and I’d say there was a general etiquette that it’s a player’s own decision whether they reveal their cards at the end, in a game where they could just quietly shuffle them into the discards instead. It’s maybe as much about embarassment over bad moves, as anything; if the table are saying how the winner was very lucky that nobody played a certain card to stop them, a player who was still holding it won’t always want to admit that.

It’s certainly the player’s own choice whether they reveal information about their decisions much earlier in the game, which can no longer be constructed by looking at the table and hands. If I ask you whether you really had third midgame counterspell or were just bluffing very convincingly and drew it later, it’s up to you whether you give me some friendly insight into your bluffing strategy and blue deckbuilding approach, or just say “aah” and don’t tell me.

Giving the Emperor unilateral permission to reveal all this, if asked, is saying that players don’t have that choice.

@Kevan “It’s certainly the player’s own choice whether they reveal information about their decisions much earlier in the game”: this isn’t true for matches that are broadcast live, which show all the decisions by both players, and which is commonplace for the final rounds of major tournaments (and for a subset of players in the earlier rounds).

In general, having all the decisions revealed is clearly beneficial for spectators, and that is generally beneficial for the players too (because for any given player, there are probably many more games available to spectate than games they play in).

I’m thinking of BlogNomic in terms of a casual board game or social deduction game rather than a televised competition.

I think BlogNomic’s strong culture of betrayal aversion is a bad fit for bringing a camera in and filming everybody’s secret actions. Secret-action negotiation becomes less interesting when it also includes an implicit “and you know it’s completely safe to agree to this because it’s all being filmed, and I obviously wouldn’t want to take the hit to my reputation when we watched it all back at the end”. It becomes easier for pools to form and to take actions safely in lockstep. It’s a play style that some prefer, I know Madrid pushed for it repeatedly whenever it became an issue that someone might try to deniably trick them, but it seems like we’re just throwing out potential depth and intrigue.

I’m going with a to both remove the “reveal private information at the end of a dynasty” and to make the progress bar update at regular intervals, something like “if it has been at least 24 hours since the last update”

The number of people who watch nomic gameplay is normally substantially higher than the number of people actually playing – it’s in a sense televised whether you want it to be or not. (The “idle player invasion” at the end of last dynasty is one of the more recent demonstrations of that, although there have been a few in the past.)

I consider betrayal aversion to be common not due to cultural reasons, but because it’s the strategically optimal move. (This has actually made me come to something of a realisation – I’ve seen mechanics for enforcing binding agreements in nomics before now, sometimes even allowing the agreement to be private, and the realisation is that one of the benefits of these mechanics may be that they help prevent players ending up permanently locked out of trust-based gameplay if they do happen to betray some players early on. They also help reduce timing issues, by letting the players in the agreement take actions on each others’ behalves, so only one of them needs to be online rather than all of them.)

The sort of intrigue you’re talking about definitely has happened at BlogNomic in the past. But it normally isn’t done by explicitly breaking agreements; more commonly, someone is in multiple informal pooling agreements (none of which has explicit actions traded) and trying to decide where their loyalty lies. Players are normally forgiving of that sort of thing; and they’re also normally able to detect that someone has decided to throw in with a different pool even during the dynasty, without needing any secret knowledge (because players usually stop communicating with pools they’ve decided to leave, and in particular are usually careful not to make agreements to take particular actions). Or in other words, the intrigue happens before the concrete action-trading agreement is formed rather than later. (The end of my coregency with Josh is instructive: Raven, Brendan and I had a plan to win the dynasty, but Raven was in another pool at the time – and Raven resorted to trying to win the dynasty first, before the plan could happen, despite the obvious alternative of “say you’ll cooperate with the plan, but then actually don’t”. I don’t consider that a betrayal (and suspect that Raven would have gone through with it if the other plan to win didn’t pan out), but it was definitely intrigue. The betrayal alternative would have been very boring by comparison, and I don’t think it would have lead to particularly deep gameplay.)

Anyway, thoughts for a potential revise-withdraw (do people have any comments?):

- It’s more important to give Emperors to reveal things that they want to reveal, than it is to force them to keep things hidden; the Emperor can still choose to keep things hidden on their own, but the rules might prevent them from revealing things on their own.
- Using an Imperial Style to say “wants to reveal things at the end of the dynasty” / “wants to hide private information” would make a lot of sense – more so than trying to enforce one option or the other in the rules.
- We should fix the bug in which the previous Emperor might potentially need to reveal all the privately tracked information to the new Emperor when a DoV passes.
- Quantizing status updates would be fine. (Note, though, that with this proposal the Emperor already has discretion in when to perform Virtual Actions, so can simply delay the route-setting actions if necessary to hide the exact timing of updates.)

I honestly don’t really have an opinion about sharing or not

I like the ideas JD gave for a revise.

Having just finished a dynasty where secret information was decisive to the outcome I feel keenly the preference to have disclosure be a matter of enacting a votable matter, rather than attempting to read vibes.

(I also agree with Kevan that, unless the poker hand plays out, you don’t dhow your cards unless you really want to showboat.)

I think everyone is misunderstanding this – a) the current rules permit disclosure during Interregnum, and b) this change doesn’t force disclosure at any point – but are somehow voting on the basis that the current rules force disclosure and the existing rules prevent it.

That said, if people are persistently misunderstanding a rule, that’s a reason in its own right to not enact it (and possibly even to change the core rule to say what people want it to say, even though it doesn’t say that at present).

Withdrawn for revision.