Monday, September 06, 2021

Proposal: Dirty Projectors

Self-killed.Failed by Brendan.

Adminned at 07 Sep 2021 19:40:48 UTC

Repeal the rule Buildings and its subrule, and replace it (in the same position in the Ruleset) with the following as a new rule called Projects:

Each Citizen can be engaged in a Project Instance; the Project Instances each Citizen is engaged in are privately tracked by the Ministry of Informatation.

A Project Instance consists of a type of Project, listed below, and an operation code name, which is always flavour text and which must consist of one to two terms chosen from any of the Corpora lists held on the BlogNomic wiki (https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Category:Corpora). During this dynasty, wiki pages may not be given the Corpora category tag except by proposal. By default, a Citizen is engaged in a Project Instance called Vigilance Flexo Avocet. A Project Instance has the same properties as its Project type, such as whether it is public or private, or what its Progress Target is.

Below is a list of types of Projects that are available. Each Project has a Progress Target (in curly braces), an effect, and may optionally be either Public or Private (denoted by the relevant tag in square brackets), and may optionally be either Shared or Individual(denoted by the relevant tag in square brackets).

* Black Hat Hacking {250}[Private][Shared]
::All other Project Instances gain 50 Progress.
* Brainwashing {50}[Private][Individual]
::Gain 1 random Citizen with no Adherent as an Adherent, if possible.
* Entryism {100}[Public][Individual]
::All Cells that are Leaders cease to be Leaders; then, the Cell that completed this Project Instance becomes Leader.
* Fifth Columnists {1000}[Public][Shared]
::All participating Cells become Leaders.
* Identity Theft {75}
* Registration Roll Dead Drop {10,000}[Private][Shared]
::The rule Projects and all of its subrules are repealed.
* Seditious Pamphleting {200}[Private][Shared]
::All participating Cells gain 1 Adherent
* Social Engineering {50}[Public][Individual]
::The Cell who completed this may name two other Project Instances, one as the Target, the other as the Beneficiary; the Target has its Progress reduced to zero, while the Beneficiary has its progress increased by the amount that the Target lost.
* Vigilance {1000}[Public][Shared]
::All Cells with more than 2 Adherents loose a randomly selected Adherent
* White Hat Hacking {250}[Private][Shared]
::All other Project Instancess lose 50 Progress

There is a publicly tracked list of all Citizens who are engaged in a Project Instance, other than Vigilance Flexo Avocet, whose project type is Public. This list is referred to as the Workplace Registry.

Each Cell is a Leader or not (defaulting to not), and this is privately tracked by the Ministry of Information. Non-Leaders cannot achieve victory.

Add a new subrule to that rule, called Project Progress:

Each Project Instance that has at least one Citizen engaged to it is privately tracked by the Minsitry of Information. Each Project Instance has a Progress, which is a non-negative integer that defaults to zero. Whenever a Project Instance has no Citizens engaged in it it is removed from the game.

A Cell may change the Project Instance of any or all of its Adherents at any time, by communicating that change to the Ministry of Information, creating a new Project Instance for their Adherents if desired. Whenever a Cell has an Adherent engaged to a Project Instance, and the engagement of that Adherent causes the Progress of the Project Instance to increase, then that Cell is participating in that Project Instance. A Cell may not change the Project Instance of any of its Adherents to a Project Instance that is Individual and which already has Adherents of a different Cell engaged.

Update Projects is an atomic action with the following steps:

* For each tracked Project Instance, increase its progress by the triangle number of the number of Citizens that were engaged in it at the end of the last Cycle.
* For each tracked Project Instance, in alphabetical order, if, after the first step, its Progress meets or exceeds the Progress Target for the type of Project it is, apply its effect. If the effect requires the Minsitry of Information to engage a Cell (eg Social Engineering) then this step of the atomic action is considered to be complete when they have communicated with the relevant Cell; however, they may subsequently update the gamestate on the basis of that engagement, provided that it is consistent with the effect as described above.
* Delete any Project Instance whose effect was applied in the second step of this Action, and set the Project of any Citizen engaged in such a project to Vigilance Flexo Avocet.

In the rule Adherents, make the following changes:
* Change “optionally a single Building as their Workplace (defaulting to none)” to “a single Project Instance (see the rule Projects)”.
* Change “their Workplace is set to none” to “their Project Instance is set to Vigilance Flexo Avocet”.
* In “and their corresponding Ideologies and Workplaces”, remove “and Workplaces”.
* In ‘Each Cycle, the Ministry of Information must carry out the following atomic action’ change “must” to “should”
* Change bullet point that starts ‘For each Application received during the previous Cycle’ to read ‘Update Projects’.

Add the following to the list in Censorship Terms, above the current bottommost entry:

*The name of any Citizen
*The name of any tracked Project Instance
*The name of any type of Project

Change the Project Instance of all Citizens to its default value.

Sorry, I’m also taking a stab at this. This is more words but is aiming to be a less opaque system.

Comments

Kevan: he/him

06-09-2021 14:15:45 UTC

What’s the opacity in the current system? Or are you about to get a hard stare from Cuddlebeam for removing a loophole?

This proposed system looks even more opaque from the player side, at first blush, with Projects and Project Instances just asking to be mixed up. (Which they may be already here - does “All other Projects gain/lose 50 Progress” do anything, when it’s Project Instances that have Progress, rather than Projects?)

Josh: Observer he/they

06-09-2021 14:25:59 UTC

Fair comment.

No loophole in the existing rule that I can see, so apologies if I’m shooting anyone’s fox.

I personally find the current system hard to wrap my head around, as the citizen > workplace > building > effect chain feels unintuitive to me in a way that citizen > project > effect doesn’t.

Instances might be a layer too far - I wanted there to be solo projects that players could do individually, during the early phases while collaboration was still hard, and was trying to figure out how to distinguish between separate, well, instances of the same effect. I was also looking at ways to make collaboration more meaningful - everybody doing their own instance of a big project will go slowly, but coordinating action around the same project will make it go faster.

Maybe my goal wasn’t opacity but flexibility? I swear this way makes more sense in my head 😂

Josh: Observer he/they

06-09-2021 14:30:42 UTC

I guess I also think that the current list of buildings is too focused on manipulating the progress of other buildings, and wanted to inject some effects that could touch other areas of the game.

Kevan: he/him

06-09-2021 16:20:15 UTC

Yeah, the existing building effects are definitely a bit repetitive, but they were written at a point where we didn’t have much other gamestate to work with. We should write better ones, and the new payouts here are all good.

The building concept are easier to visualise, to me, as just moving tokens around on a map: if one of your team is placed in Committee Hall then you’re committing to advancing its progress bar a little each Cycle and (maybe) you unlock an ability for being there.

Josh: Observer he/they

06-09-2021 19:22:21 UTC

Sadly this is now out of edit but there may be ways of splitting the diff. I’ll leave it to the Cells to consider whether this is better than the status quo and will do a follow up in due course.

lemon: she/her

07-09-2021 07:26:48 UTC

against

Kevan: he/him

07-09-2021 08:04:45 UTC

against I like the payouts, but I think Buildings are a clearer framework.

Josh: Observer he/they

07-09-2021 09:30:00 UTC

against taking another pass

Raven1207: he/they

07-09-2021 14:46:08 UTC

against