Saturday, April 12, 2025

Proposal: Around and Around We Go

Add a new rule named “Competence” with the following text:

Each Agent has a publicly tracked number named Competence that defaults to 0.

In the rule “Phases” append the following text:

There is a publicly tracked number named Round that defaults to 1.

In the rule “The Break-In” add the following as the last steps of Breaking In:

* If the sum of the Fame of all Guards is greater than the sum of the Infamy of all Burglars, increase the Competence of each Guard by 1. Otherwise, increase the Competence of each Burglar by 1.
* Increase the Round by 1

 

Is it too early to do this? It could be Fool’s Gold, but I feel like it helps encourage team play.

Round doesn’t do anything functional yet, but might be handy later for changing numbers based on what Round it is. It’s also a nice reference point for private discussions.

Comments

Kevan: Concierge he/him

12-04-2025 18:47:24 UTC

I’d prefer to see a more thematic and less “victory, which may be achieved” kind of noun for this.

JonathanDark: he/him

12-04-2025 18:55:25 UTC

Ok, I changed it to Competence, which could be a victory resource or just persistent currency to spend on something else.

Kevan: Concierge he/him

12-04-2025 18:57:45 UTC

(For the historical record, the first version of the proposal was using “Wins”.)

Clucky: he/him

12-04-2025 23:49:13 UTC

for

ais523:

13-04-2025 04:14:19 UTC

against I prefer the comparable statistic in “Stasis Breaker” – this one has weird incentives because it allows burglars to win the round by camping in a corner for 12 minutes and not ever trying to steal anything.

JonathanDark: he/him

13-04-2025 04:40:09 UTC

I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing being broken. The Burglars can’t win by camping unless camping grants the most Infamy. Thus, it’s not that this Proposal is broken, it’s that the Infamy formula is broken. That’s true thematically as well: why would a Burglar become infamous for doing nothing?

ais523:

13-04-2025 07:32:16 UTC

@JonathanDark: I think it’s maybe interesting if Burglars have a choice between trying to help out their team in order to get Successes, or aim to boost their personal score in order to get Infamy, giving them an advantage in the next round.

I don’t think it makes sense to try to put Fame and Infamy on the same scale as each other, because the relative value of the two statistics varies too much based on things like player counts and the amount of cross-team pooling (Fame scales quadratically with the number of players in the game, whereas Infamy scales linearly).

Kevan: Concierge he/him

13-04-2025 08:18:43 UTC

imperial

SingularByte: he/him

13-04-2025 09:13:50 UTC

imperial

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