Friday, January 03, 2020

Descension Deddress

I request to be unidled.

I think I ought to mention how I feel about the dynasty. I got here because I usually put a lot of effort into winning—I quite enjoyed the challenges it presents. But I didn’t plan much when I started the dynasty, and when things got complex I didn’t see an easy way of solving the resultant lack of interest that the schema effected. I was hoping a bit that some interesting and balanced path might materialize, but that hope faded.

Anyway, I guess the talent of winning doesn’t always translate to that of inventing fun central dynamics. I didn’t really want to run a second dynasty at the time, anyhow. It kind of stressed me out. It didn’t help that the “real life” system was esoteric in nature. (My family actually noted that it didn’t sound as fun as Castaways, back when I was considering it for TyGuy6 1.)

So, we should do something fun next, and show our newest players a good time.

Btw, Happy New Year!!!

posted by TyGuy6 at 03 Jan 2020 04:34:00 UTC Comments (5)

Comments

card:

03-01-2020 05:18:24 UTC

you are unidled
blognomic is not dormant
quorum is still 3

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

03-01-2020 08:21:12 UTC

We were dormant? Oh, dear.

Kevan: he/him

03-01-2020 09:36:50 UTC

My post mortem on this one would bring up two red flags we’ve seen before:

* The Emperor drawing from source material that they know better than everyone else, and rejecting proposals which don’t quite fit the theme - we’ve seen this before with dynasties based on videogames that not everyone has played. Although it’s good to learn about a new thing from someone who knows their stuff, this can have a chilling effect on proposals, as players are deterred from investing too much time writing something which might be thrown out for being “wrong”.

* The Emperor proposing a somewhat complex set of mechanics, with the implication that they’ll be applying or helping to enforce it, but then not doing so. (Despite toggling Dynastic Distance off upon ascension, TyGuy took no game actions beyond picking a Type, and the only players who tried using the MHB rule got it wrong by forgetting about TyGuy’s weekly Maturing the People action - which TyGuy neither performed nor noticed us overlooking.)

Having to also survive Christmas, with players fading out and back a few days either side of Seasonal Downtime, can’t have helped.

I did like the basic idea of personality types here, with different types getting different bonuses from actions. In retrospect it might have been better to have gotten away from Enneagrams specifically, and made it our own, inventing new Types and groupings.

Madrid:

03-01-2020 09:42:56 UTC

I think my crappy Katamari dynasty suffered from that first point

pokes:

05-01-2020 15:23:33 UTC

The winter holiday season just a hard time for dynasties in general. Personally, I’m only now done with holiday-related lifestuff.

To add something new to the post-mortem: I don’t know what it is about it that seems to bog everything down, but a dynasty starting with defining a laundry list of stub stats with no mechanics for how to use them is working its way on my list of red flags. (Similar to how a 2D map with movement tends to use all of the proposal oxygen to deal with getting movement to work right.)

Anyway, I unidle. Quorum remains 4.