Tuesday, April 04, 2023

Proposal: Balancing Act

Timed out 4 votes to 2. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 06 Apr 2023 14:04:35 UTC

In the rule “The Building”, replace these bullets in the Build atomic action:

* Roll a DICEN, where N is the number of _ currently in the Building Contents, times 25.
* Decrease Building Stability by the Wobble. (The Wobble for this action is equal to the result of its die roll, minus any Focus spent during it, to a minimum of zero.)

with these bullets:

* Roll a DICEN, where N is the number of _ currently in the Building Contents, times 25. If the result is less than half of N, roll another DICEN and use the larger of the two dice rolls as the result, otherwise use the single roll as the result.
* Decrease Building Stability by the Wobble. (The Wobble for this action is equal to the result of the step above, minus any Focus spent during it, to a minimum of zero.)

In the subrule “Building Contents”, if two columns exist with the heading Properties in the table, remove the rightmost of these columns from the table. If two rows exist that contain “Rebar” in the first column of the table, remove one instance of these rows from the table.

Building is not going to be risky for a long time due to the decrease in Stability being a uniform distribution. Let’s weight it so that we’re more likely to get higher results and get to those exciting Jenga moments a bit sooner.

I also added some cleanup for the Building Contents where the Properties column was duplicated and the Rebar row was duplicated.

posted by JonathanDark at 04 Apr 2023 12:45:00 UTC Comments (13)

Comments

Lulu: she/her

04-04-2023 13:02:32 UTC

Doesn’t this make it more predictable instead of less *because* it’s a bell curve distribution?

JonathanDark: he/him

04-04-2023 13:30:42 UTC

Technically, yes, but there’s still room for surprises.

We could also try Bimodal Distribution if that’s more appealing. At least then it’s somewhat of a coin-flip in distribution.

JonathanDark: he/him

04-04-2023 15:56:14 UTC

@Misty: I changed the formula up to address my actual concern about getting results that are too low. With the change, it’s still largely a linear distribution, so we retain the unpredictability, but it’s less likely to be a lower number in the end.

Lulu: she/her

04-04-2023 16:51:18 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

05-04-2023 08:04:27 UTC

imperial

Josh: Mastermind he/they

05-04-2023 10:46:17 UTC

“exciting Jenga moments”

Alright Jeff Probst, calm down

for

Brendan: he/him

05-04-2023 14:29:46 UTC

for

Kevan: he/him

05-04-2023 16:27:24 UTC

against CoV, going back to my rule of thumb that if it would sound too complicated in an explanation of the rules of a boardgame, it’s probably too complicated to be enjoyable in BlogNomic.

“Roll dX” I can immediately grasp the obvious range of, as well as the likelihood of me knocking the Building over, and how much Focus I might want to spend to avoid that; “roll 2dX and take the highest result unless the first was less than half of X in which case take the first roll” would require me to get my calculator out.

JonathanDark: he/him

05-04-2023 16:56:18 UTC

I struggled to come up with the least-complicated way to move the likely results to higher numbers. Would it be better to always roll dX twice and take the higher of the two results? The alternatives are far worse, I think, involving multiple math steps.

My overall concern is that the game gets dull because the Building Stability takes too long to get to a low-enough value to make Build a risky or interesting choice.

Kevan: he/him

05-04-2023 17:05:59 UTC

Would it work to just start Stability off at a lower number?

Or make the die roll something like “dX+50”?

JonathanDark: he/him

05-04-2023 17:20:02 UTC

Yeah, maybe Stability at a lower number is the cleanest way to go.

If I make a Proposal for a lower Stability, I’ll change both the Move On formula and reduce the current Stability by a constant amount to preserve the progress made so far. I’ve not really cared for Stability going up on each Move On, as it has the same danger of eventually putting the game into a dull state.

jjm3x3: he/him

05-04-2023 20:42:59 UTC

Love the premise of this proposal, but ultimately I think Kevan brought up some good point here so I am against

JonathanDark: he/him

06-04-2023 12:53:09 UTC

For anyone that didn’t like my Proposal to roll the dice twice and take the larger result, I have a much simpler Proposal up now: reducing the default Stability to 500