“the author of the Intent for this Prospect and any Challenger for this Prospect may secretly communicate to the Old King an amount between 1 and their current Reputation at the time of the communication”

this lets you spend negative reputation FYI

Vovix said in their Ascension Address that their Imperial Style would be hands-off (“would prefer all game actions to be left to the players”), which sounds like it rules out complex and secretly-tracked Imperial actions like this.

also:
1. Dowries should be associated with Intents to Marry, not Prospects
2. there’s still nothing preventing you from opening Intents to Marry if you don’t go through with the marriage
3. “The Heir named in the Marriage Arrangement for this Prospect” is a bit vague, should be made clearer that it’s the person with the highest Dowry

I’ll fix these issues in a bit. I forgot about Vovix’s Imperial Style statement, so we’ll have to do open wagering of Reputation instead, which will require a fair bit of tinkering with the proposal.

I would prefer to avoid doing a lot of tracking, yes. Though I suppose a single blind-bid to collect and then announce isn’t much work.

No worries. I think I addressed all of the issues mentioned above, and now the Heirs are responsible for managing the Intent to Marry.

Just to check, this doesn’t actually stop you from marrying via the normal atomic action? Is there a reason a player would use this system above the more reliable one?

@SB: it’s the reverse. Currently, nothing allows you to perform the Marriage atomic action. The action is defined per “Marriage is an atomic action”, but does not specify when it can be done. This Proposal puts the mechanics in place to allow it.

It feels quite long-winded, and I’m half thinking I might propose turning the prospects into something more like prospect archetypes where multiple people can marry a given archetype.

per SingularByte and in favour of their Jumping Straight Into Marriage proposal.

I like a lot of this, but it is a lot of words for what it does. There’s also an irritating wrinkle with Challenges, in that the optimal move is to wait for the exact last second of the Intent to Marry’s 48 hours timespan and snipe it, leading to irriating timing-based gameplay. Also I think that being a Cad may be an orphan variable.

All fair comments. I was actually trying to avoid timing issues, but it seems inevitable given the current method of selecting Prospects. I think SingularByte has a promising idea that would address my concern of some Heirs taking the best Prospects before others had a chance.