Proposal: Benevolent Dictators
Rejected with 1-5 -SingularByte
Adminned at 26 Jan 2025 07:03:52 UTC
In the rule “Teams and Targets {I}” add the following as a separate paragraph after the first paragraph in that rule:
When choosing to perform dynastic actions, each Mastermind should act in the best interests of the Participants on the same team whenever reasonably possible. This includes choosing to perform actions that would benefit those Participants over actions derived from any planning or collaboration with Participants on the opposite team. This obligation is reset each time a Mastermind’s Target is changed. This does not obligate the Mastermind to spend an unreasonable amount of time monitoring activity and participating on the blog, blog private messaging system, wiki pages, or Discord.
Hopefully addressing Habanero’s concerns that a Mastermind could intentionally prevent one or more Participants on the same team from gaining Triumphs. “reasonable” and “unreasonable” are intentionally squishy here, but this is meant to be a guideline.
I do see why Emperor-nonEmperor pooling could be a potential concern for players who aren’t planning to be involved in it, and am not against rule changes to fix that. But I think this has too many side effects, and may be difficult to reconcile if players on the same team are at odds with each other (e.g. some of them are trying to score and some of them are trying to manipulate the rules in ways that improve their future position, or two non-Emperor players on different teams are trying to pool and so one of them benefits from the other team winning).
ais523: Mastermind
I think I’d vote against with the current wording – I think the best balance is along the lines of “won’t actively try to harm their own team” rather than “will actively help”.
Note that a “no cooperation with the other team” rule, which this amounts to, will prevent traitor-like mechanics working, although I guess they can amend it when proposed.