Proposal: Dark Machinations
s/ked. Josh
Adminned at 13 Jun 2021 20:17:35 UTC
Add to the Dynastic rule “Vampire Lords” before the paragraph describing Allegiance:
Each Vampire Lord has a Trust, which is a publicly tracked non-negative integer that defaults to the lowest Trust value held by any active Vampire Lord.
Set all active Vampire Lords’ Trust to 0.
Add the following rule, called “Dracula’s Demands”, above “Crypt Denizens” in the Dynastic rules:
A Demand is a publicly tracked objective or instruction whose completion furthers the plans of the dark forces beneath Zahndorf Cathedral. A Demand consists of a name, which is a string of flavour text; a Condition, which is a text string describing an event, circumstance, or course of action; and a Delegation which is a text string that defaults to “Pending”. A Demand with the “Pending” Delegation is a Pending Demand. Vampire Lords may as a Weekly Action add a Pending Demand with a name and Condition of their choosing to the bottom of the Demands list. Richardo von Nestor may as a Daily Action remove one Pending Demand from the Demands list.
As a Weekly Communal Action, if there are a number of Pending Demands equal or greater to half the number of active Vampire Lords (rounded down), any Vampire Lord may perform the following atomic action:
* Select a number of Pending Demands exactly equal to half the number of active Vampire Lords (rounded down).
* Randomly group the active Vampire lords into sets of 2; if there is an odd number of active Vampire Lords, include one set of 3.
* Randomly assign one of the Pending Demands selected in the first step of this action to each set of Vampire Lords determined in the second step of this action.
* For each assigned Demand, move it to the top of the Demands list and change its Delegation to a list of the Vampire Lords in the set it was assigned to, separated by commas.When a Vampire Lord is named in the Delegation of a Demand and that Demand’s Condition is fulfilled (the event or circumstance comes to pass or the course of action is performed), that Vampire Lord may erase that Demand to increase by 3 the Trust of all Vampire Lords named in its Delegation.
If Richardo von Nestor included the phrase “Metaphor Shmetaphor” in an EVC on this proposal, replace “Richardo von Nestor may as a Daily Action remove one Pending Demand from the Demands list.” with “Richardo von Nestor may at any time remove a Pending Demand from the Demands list.” and replace “any Vampire Lord may perform the following atomic action:” with “any Vampire Lord or Richardo von Nestor may perform the following atomic action:” in the rule “Dracula’s Demands”.
i mentioned the other day that i would love to see a game about engineering neutral ground to accomplish goals, so here’s that!! this is similar to the scrapped mechanic of tasks from the AI dynasty, but i think this dynasty is a much better fit for the concept.
and demands are grouped together bc i think 2-3 players trying to make something happen is more feasible than 1 player trying to make something happen in the economy we’re building up :0
But I remain utterly convinced that a variable named “Trust” will never make any narrative sense.
per ais - the hard part here is generating interesting demands in a fair way, and without having that, I’m worried it’s a lot of ruletext for what might amount to RNG noise.
ais523: Custodian
I’m also a little concerned about a possible bug, which is that nothing states that strings in Delegations that resemble Vampire Lord names should be interpreted as Vampire Lord names. So either we just do a string match on the names, leading to a huge scam if someone named “Pending” registers; or we use the usual default of “it isn’t a name unless someone says it’s a name” and the whole thing doesn’t work at all. Or to put it another way, the fourth bullet point seems to depend on Delegations being sets of Vampire Lords, but that isn’t defined as a legal value for a Delegation to have.
(It’s too late to edit now, or I would have suggested “a Delegation, which is either ‘Pending’ (the default), or a set of Vampire Lords and idle Vampire Lords”.)