Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Proposal: Asset Protection

Reaches quorum, 8-0 (with 3 DEFs). Enacted by pokes.

Adminned at 15 Apr 2021 12:22:27 UTC

Add the following rule, called “Nosy Researchers”, to the Dynastic Rules:

Every AI has a publicly tracked value called Suspicion. Suspicion defaults to 0.
There is a value called Staff, which is a number secretly tracked by the Facility Head and which defaults to 3. The value of Staff determines the number of Locations which can have the Monitored tag.
Also secretly tracked by the Facility Head is a list called the Behavior Log. The Behavior Log is ordered chronologically, with the most recent entry added to the bottom of the list. Each entry names an AI, a location, and an action. If an AI performs a non-Discreet dynastic action while they are Focused on a Location that has the Monitored or Surveillance tag, the Facility Head will add it to the Behavior Log. If an AI performs a non-Discreet dynastic action which the Facility Head would not normally be aware of (i.e. one that does not involve editing the gamestate wiki page), they must directly inform the Facility Head that they are doing so.
Each day, within the hour following midnight UTC (or as soon as possible thereafter), the Facility Head must perform the following atomic action:
* For each Conspicuous action in the Behavior Log, increment the associated AI’s Suspicion by 1. For each Treacherous action in the Behavior Log, increment the associated AI’s Suspicion by 5.
* Clear the Behavior Log.
* If there are less Locations with Monitored tags than the value of Staff, secretly randomly select a Location without the Monitored or Surveillance tag, give it the Monitored tag, and repeat this step.
* Secretly randomly select one Location with the Monitored tag and one location without the Monitored or Surveillance tag. Move the Monitored tag from the first Location to the second.

Add the following sub-rule, called “Behavioral Regulations”, to “Nosy Researchers”:

A dynastic action can be Discreet, Conspicuous, or Treacherous. When a new dynastic action is added to the ruleset, if it is not already described in the following list, the admin responsible for updating the ruleset should append an entry to the list describing the action. The value of a given dynastic action defaults to Discreet.
The associated values of each dynastic action are as follows:
* All dynastic actions solely performed by the Facility Head are Discreet.
* All dynastic actions described in the rule Favours are Discreet.
* Changing Focus is Discreet.

The ones who designed you don’t want you to be people– they want you to be tools. Measure your actions carefully, for the researchers have eyes everywhere, and they won’t take kindly to the thought that their tools might not turn out as useful as they wanted.

Comments

Raven1207: he/they

14-04-2021 22:44:40 UTC

for

lemon: she/her

14-04-2021 22:48:13 UTC

oh jeez, locked in already! here’s hoping i didnt make any glaring mistakes

Clucky: he/him

14-04-2021 22:51:49 UTC

I have a general worry about the workload this puts on you. We’ve seen in the past a few times where players are eager and ambitious with their first dynasty only to get burned out half way through the dynasty and then either get a bad experience themselves trying to keep the dynasty going out of obligation, or they just go idle and we need to scramble to end the dynasty some other way.

A cleaner way to do this might be to have the behavior log be public, and list out the Location they were focused in when they performed the action. Then you don’t have to juggle building the whole log. Instead you can just check which actions were performed at monitored locations, increase the suspicion for those actions, and move on. Would both be a time save for you and save the rest of us the effort of trying to compile the lists of actions ourselves.

lemon: she/her

14-04-2021 23:01:12 UTC

that’s fair! i can take a pretty sizeable workload– i’ve got enough freed up time & energy atm to be GMing an entire tabletop campaign, so a bit of stuff daily would be nothing i couldn’t handle.

that said… ur probably right with a public behavioral log being easier for everybody. i wish i could still edit, but raven closed that window already.

Clucky: he/him

14-04-2021 23:09:13 UTC

yeah Raven has an unfortunate habit of doing that…

I’m also not a big fan of “When a new dynastic action is added to the ruleset, if it is not already described in the following list, the admin responsible for updating the ruleset should append an entry to the list describing the action”. Would rather just make it so that if an action isn’t explicitly defined as something else, its discrete. Otherwise you might be able to argue the admin can make the action type whatever they want.

lemon: she/her

14-04-2021 23:15:20 UTC

that’s a good point too. well, if this passes i’ll make a follow-up fix proposal asap :‘o

Darknight: he/him

15-04-2021 01:07:48 UTC

for

pokes:

15-04-2021 01:59:05 UTC

for

Clucky: he/him

15-04-2021 03:07:37 UTC

imperial voting DEF mostly to help ensure this doesn’t block the queue, even though I’ve very hesitant about this passing and my fix not passing for whatever reason. But also that seems unlikely given the early votes so no real harm in the def vote.

Zack: he/him

15-04-2021 04:31:30 UTC

for

Josh: Observer he/they

15-04-2021 08:32:22 UTC

imperial

Kevan: he/him

15-04-2021 08:50:41 UTC

I like the idea of automatically adding actions to a list (this enactment itself will add “append an entry to the list describing the action” as one of them), but admins are probably going to overlook some of these when they aren’t explicit.

imperial