BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I don’t really like this much – working with randomly chosen teams is more interesting than picking the perfect team every time.

I can see something like this existing, but I think it has to be more expensive than just a simple Heist Action. (Perhaps you could use a similar approach to the one used for Watchmaker – make it cost a word from the ruleset in addition to the action.)

I’ve added a “cost” to the action where words need to be selected and swapped in order to perform it. Let me know if the cost is reasonable.

Better, and interesting in that the cost is reversible (i.e. in the state immediately after paying the cost, it is probably still payable again), which in particular lets the other Mastermind just swap the players back if they want to.

It does make my head hurt a bit, though – there are now a lot of words in the rule, and I’m not sure it’s worth the complexity.

Yeah, I’m guilty of overwrought wording quite often. Simplification suggestions are welcome, and honestly if this never gets used, I might just propose to remove the rule later.

In a way, this seems even more powerful than just swapping two players around since now the mastermind gets a new player and puts the team in a position where they can abuse the newly broken rule.

I don’t think I see the linkage between the first three parts of the action and the last. The first bit is also scary… “Heist” is a valid word, for example, and I don’t think having every Heist action suddenly becoming an essentially free action is the kind of scam I’m up for.

It’s more likely that certain Heist actions would be disabled by becoming “X” actions for which there is no definition.

I still think there should be a way for Participants to switch teams (more than just the Double Agent role) if they so desired and put enough effort into it. I’ll re-think this if it fails.

Oops, wrong topic. For this one, I think there should be a mechanism for Masterminds to mess with each other’s teams in some way, especially if the random distribution of team members winds up with one team being more effective than the other.

I might just be looking at this the wrong way. I could instead think about Masterminds creating “impediments” to another team’s functioning.

Casting my eye down the playerlist I see at least three collaborations-of-preference that I think will turn into dynasty-long cooperation if at-will switching were enabled. I’m not against dynasty-long cooperation but I see no reason why it should be easy.

, more because I don’t like the idea of switching teams (I enjoy the temporary bubble of trust created by a team, and think it would be ruined if there was a prospect of your allies switching over) than because of the scammability

At the very least, team-switching should be significantly more difficult than this if it’s to be allowed

Hm. What if it weren’t a choice, but random re-selection of two Participants per Heist attempt? That way, it wouldn’t be efficient to try to spend Heists getting the perfect team. Instead, it would just be used to break up a “too perfect” team. Basically a hedge against one team being Ocean’s 11.

@Habanero: I do enjoy the temporary bubble of trust, but also find it perhaps “too comfy”. Everyone being criminals, I feel like it’s thematic to have some level of distrust and betrayal. It should be hard, sure, but not impossible.

I’ll just withdraw this and go back to the drawing board. I appreciate the input. If there’s no real taste for this sort of thing, I won’t keep trying it.

Unless I misunderstand you there, I would find it incredibly infuriating to spend so long planning to get your word in the ruleset only to have your team randomly reassigned at the last moment.

If we’d like to balance the teams better (I do recognize that at least right now poor Josh is stuck with all the least active players), maybe it would be a good idea to weight the random selection by activity. That seems really hard to implement in practice though, and might just end up being exploited to get the ideal team anyway.

(Per your last comment): I do already think there’s some level of cautious distrust, given that the teams aren’t permanent at all! I’ve at the very least held back a few observations from our group, knowing that the teams won’t last

That’s fair to both points. I suppose random reselection of the teams each time will even things out over the long run.

Right – I feel like there’s a natural tension between “help your team now” and “hope your team triumphs without you, holding back resources for a future attempt when the teams are different whilst scoring the point anyway”, and that might naturally be enough to sow the requisite amount of distrust.