Monday, June 21, 2021

Proposal: Blood Simple

Timed out and failed, 2-5. Josh

Adminned at 23 Jun 2021 08:39:55 UTC

Replace the paragraph beginning “If a Vampire Lord is Enthralled, then as” with:-

If a Vampire Lord is not Enthralled, they may set their Allegiance to the name of any other Vampire Lord. A Vampire Lord may remove their own name from a Vampire Lord’s Allegiance at any time.

Replace all the paragraphs in “Unlife” containing the word “Enthralled” with a single paragraph:-

Imparting is a Power Action with a cost of 1. The Vampire Lord carrying it out may select a Vampire Lord who is Enthralled to them and increase that Lord’s Puissance by 1.

Reword “Dark Favours” to:-

If the game is in Interregnum, any Vampire Lord may - for every Vampire Lord who is Enthralled to another - create an Unripe Favour held by that first Lord and lent by the second, and remove the Enthrallment.

If “Another Way Out” passed, undo the changes it made to the ruleset.

If “forget the scalpels, bring the sledgehammer!” passed, replace “may not perform any Power Actions not described in this sub-rule, except for Devastation” with “may not perform any Power Actions except for Devastation”.

Suggesting a major simplification of Enthralment to just “if someone agrees to become Enthralled to you, you get all of their Puissance and can choose to give them some of it back, or give them some of your own, until you agree to release them”, with leftover Enthralments being converted to Favours at the end of the dynasty. As it stands it feels like we’ve got two different stats - Enthralment and Favours - doing the same kind of thematic vampire-allegiance work, but with different scopes, and with the actual meat of vampiric intrigue (offering to assist or spare someone in exchange for their obedience) being opaque or absent.

This also addresses the trapped-at-1-Puissance problem, and removes the fastest-biter-first issue where Enthralment is currently all about being quickest to respond to a Crypt Entry post, rather than a dusted vampire cautiously choosing who they trust to restore them.

posted by Kevan at 21 Jun 2021 08:00:00 UTC Comments (13)

Comments

Josh: Imperator he/they

21-06-2021 08:36:03 UTC

Imperial no-vote.

Clucky: he/him

21-06-2021 16:14:21 UTC

Won’t this let you get enthralled, get dedusted, then change the enthrallment so you don’t actually owe any favors?

Kevan: he/him

21-06-2021 16:21:30 UTC

Hopefully not. Only the Vampire you’re Enthralled to can decide when that Enthralment ends, or at least that’s the intention.

Brendan: he/himIdle

21-06-2021 21:25:25 UTC

for

lemon: she/herIdle

21-06-2021 21:39:56 UTC

against the dark favours rule allows the trading or gaining of multiple different (non-numerical!) resources, none of which are puissance, and this removes that functionality

Josh: Imperator he/they

21-06-2021 21:43:46 UTC

Oh, right, this completely erases Dark Favours?

Imperial no-vote rescinded against

Kevan: he/him

21-06-2021 22:11:20 UTC

It does. I’d rather add back “players can trade Sycophancy and things as well” from here is we want it, than struggle on with the multi-level Favours and Enthrallments that work a bit differently and surprisingly over many different paragraphs, myself.

ais523:

21-06-2021 22:55:58 UTC

against This produces a mechanism to force players to involuntarily give Favours for the next dynasty.

It also strongly encourages mass idling of Enthralled players at the end of the dynasty, in order to prevent the Favours being generated.

Clucky: he/him

21-06-2021 23:06:57 UTC

yeah it does seem like if you get dusted, the only way out is to give up a favor. which isn’t fun.  against

Kevan: he/him

22-06-2021 07:27:43 UTC

There’s no forced Favour here. I’d expect Enthralments under this rule to be more along the lines of “I’ll help or spare you now if you become Enthralled to me first, and the deal is that I’ll release you after two Crypt runs”, with some negotiation, with conversion to Favours only happening as a last resort if the pact breaks down, or if the dynasty suddenly ends early.

Right now if players want to cut a simple “I Enthral you” deal, they have to navigate the current rule of “right, so if you Spend (or Incur?) a Favour against me, I’ll give you an Enthralment and then I can release that Favour immediately, and when I want to release you from the Enthralment you should Incur (or Spend?) a Favour to exchange the Enthralment back to me and I’ll release that Favour”, which I’m not sure the second half of even works.

[ais523] Tactical idling is a good point, and fixable.

Janet: she/herIdle

22-06-2021 12:59:24 UTC

imperial

ais523:

22-06-2021 23:30:45 UTC

The forced Favour is on lemonfanta, who’s Enthralled at the moment.

Kevan: he/him

23-06-2021 07:59:58 UTC

Oh, that one. I’d 100% support swapping that Enthrallment to someone else of Lemon’s choice, given that it was just grabbed by Jumble as a no-brainer “I am the first person to be online after Josh performed the Crypt run that dusted Lemonfanta”.