BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Actually, the Old King would live only 8.5 days on average

Hm, to be fair I didn’t fully explore the math on this. I’m open to suggestions on changing the numbers to make the average closer to 20-30 days.

Initial Health should be 400 in order to get a average lifetime of about 25 days

Yeah I have this as a 52% chance of killing the king within a week

25 days is also a lot quicker than my proposal in practice, for those voting that one down on the basis of pace.

For me, the problem of Josh’s proposal was the pace plus the uncertainty given that it depends on how many Heirs participate.

My proposal doesn’t depend on how many Heirs participate, just that someone does the work daily. I think it also addresses Kevan’s thematic concern: the King is Ill, his Health should be steadily declining, and the chance of him becoming Perished gets worse as his Health decreases, all of which my Proposal meets.

I also feel like if people don’t like the pace of my Proposal, it’s easy enough to fix with a change in the King’s Health. The uncertainty of Josh’s proposal makes it much harder to adjust that.

Ok, I actually did the math for real this time and choose 600 as the Health and dice roll, which gives the dynasty a 50% chance of ending in 29 days. That’s close enough to the month-long dynasty pace that we usually experience, especially if you count the days that have passed already.

I mean, look, I’ll be voting against this for a variety of reasons, not least because it’s just a bit boring - but the long tail risk that the dynasty still hasn’t ended 550 days from now would also earn a red cross.

You say boring, I say less complicated. I’ve had plenty of Proposals shot down for being too much, so I’m going for simpler this time around.

Also, if the Old King hangs on for too long, we could always tweak the Health decrease or the dice rolls. It’s not like this is permanently etched in stone. If things got really dire, we could slap a “or the date is X” on it.

“It’s not like this is permanently etched in stone”

No proposals are, and yet you are voting against my proposal for similarly cast-in-stone reasons, despite mine having a much lower chance of accidentally keeping the dynasty going for the next two years.

And yeah, I do say boring; given how inert this is, and how long the tail of potential outcomes is, it would seem both less complicated and potentially more interesting to have a hard drop-date than a complicated dice-roll mechanism. My proposal had a dice roll at the heart of it because it was playing with variance as a mechanic - a musical chairs, who-is-holding-when-the-music-stops game design. But this offers way less churn in gamestate, and as such it offers a kind of version of musical chairs but where you can only change chairs once a month - at which point, what’s the point? I think you have to lean into random or lean away from it, but this seems like an awkward halfway house to me.

I’m not sure about “awkward”, but yeah I get the point. Really, I’m just floating this Proposal in the marketplace of ideas to probe for where people are on the spectrum of “end the dynasty randomly” to “end the dynasty deterministically”. Or maybe more accurately, the spectrum might be considered as “end the dynasty through dice rolls” vs “end the dynasty through player actions”.

If this one gets voted down as well, I think the trend will likely be to something more deterministic. Perhaps the rest of the player base would prefer a mechanic that reduced the King’s health directly through player actions alone and then triggered Perished when Health reaches 0. Sort of a “shared diminishing resource” to “spend” the Old King’s Health with every action.

Food for thought.

And yes, I’m aware that your proposal had both random and deterministic player-controlled elements. I just don’t know what everyone actually wants, so this is a test to find out.

even if its rare, I think its lame if we get a fluke and the dynasty ends super early

I think I’m with Clucky on this one. It suddenly ending after only a couple of days would not be great.

I think my ideal would be for there to be some strong expectation of when it would end, but with player interaction to let you manipulate it.

Ok, that’s fair. So, no to dice rolls involved in when the dynasty ends, but yes to player interaction. I’ll work on something for tomorrow unless someone else beats to me to it.

I would be fine with a dice roll to decide when the king perishes but since it’s still so early, there should be something built-in to ensure the dynasty doesn’t end immediately after it passes.

Does seem too unpredictable if the dynasty can suddenly end at any time, with increasing likelihood but no warning.

Withdrawn