BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Good call, I was finding this a bit backwards as well.

I don’t object, but what happens with the accumulated pending Mistrust changes I have waiting for a Masquerade to be entered into the gamestate?

Seeing as Trust and Mistrust are opposites and the former will replace the latter in the gamestate, it stands to reason that any past attempts to modify Mistrust can unequivocably be interpreted as attempts to modify Trust by the inverse amount. If we want to be crystal clear, it’s nothing a CfJ can’t swiftly fix if/when this proposal is enacted, especially considering that you can just put off the masquerade until the CfJ is resolved.

The floating gamestate effect of “this accrual is not effective until the next time the Doge stages a Masquerade” is a very odd mechanic now that this has put a spotlight on it.

My reading would be that a floating effect of “apply -1 Mistrust to Elector X at the next Masquerade” would fizzle with no effect if this enacted and Mistrust stopped existing - it’s as if we had an extra rule which still said “apply -1 Mistrust” and hadn’t been amended by this proposal.

cause of the floating mistrust issue

I also think that for the most part, people will gaining Mistrust, not Trust, and so working with the thing you gain more of being the positive value makes more sense to me.

To your last point Clucky: “gaining mistrust” is a double negative, it’s just a backwards way of saying “losing trust”. If the implication is that having an aggregate lack of trust is a good thing, I think this change makes the whole game more straightforward. But, maybe we’re in too deep to change it now, though I’ll let Josh make that call.

Oh, I’m not at all going to make a call on this

I’m very easy - when I proposed it I went with Mistrust because, like, you’re rival electors in a cutthroat political system, Trust isn’t even a factor here, narratively speaking, you’re never going to get near Trust, the best you can hope to do is minimise Mistrust. The idea of having a variable called Trust makes little sense to me.

But this is a situation where I’m just one guy, and however makes sense to the most players is what we’ll do.

Maybe we can just rename “Mistrust” “Suspicion”? That way it covers the original point of cutthroat politics, but deals with the confusion of a double negative.

Suspicion is good, although I still think it’s a bit weird to imply that a stat is a measurement of how the group feels about something. (That if I take some enormously treacherous action that everyone immediately and openly hates me for and refuses to ever work with me again, if the ruleset doesn’t have an “when someone does X, their stat is altered” rule covering that specific situation, my “Mistrust” or “Suspicion” level is unaffected.)

@Kevan I did think about that a bit but the difficulty lies in having the ruleset define what constitutes an “enormously treacherous action”, such that it would trigger a penalty automatically (or at a rival players discretion), that doesn’t either have a billion fake positive cases or manipulable outcomes.

I’m actually going to flip to a soft on this, though, as it’s attracted only a few votes and I think we can find another compromise solution that works for everybody.

Yes, I think any stat purporting to be “how much this player is trusted by the group” really has to be directly connected to inputs that other players can toggle at will, so that it can match how people actually feel, in real time. A heavily protected game variable which only gets modified by particular game actions is never going to be a measure of how trusted someone actually is.

As I said somewhere earlier, this is really just about narrative framing. If it’s presented as “how much the player is respected by the Doge / the church / the entire city of Venice” or something then it’s fine for an epic betrayal to horrify the players and immediately change how they feel and act towards that person, while still allowing that betrayer to become Pope with the church’s blessing, or get elected into power by the citizens of Venice, if the ruleset is such that their horrified rivals can’t stop that from happening in time.

Maybe “Scandal”, then, situating it as an externalised, collectivised feeling that may not be a true reflection of each individual’s inner opinions?

Sounds good.