BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Morally I should be arrow but my heart wants to greentick

This is basically an attempt to attack people’s Sepulchres by proposal. There are two squares with the effect in question, at the moment: Chicken Coop and Forgotten Corridor. Chicken Coop is blocking the route to my Sepulchre and Kevan’s. Forgotten Corridor is blocking the route to Brendan’s and to some extent Chiiika’s.

It seems rather self-interested that you, the player with the most vulnerable Sepulchre, is making a proposal that makes almost everyone else’s Sepulchres a lot more vulnerable, but leaves yours (and Jumble’s) mostly untouched. Are you allied with Jumble, and is that the reason behind this proposal?

It would make sense to increase the cost of moving Richardo back to his previous location, if you think it’s too powerful. But it doesn’t seem fair to change the map when you do so, removing threats that people were relying on without even paying any Puissance to do so – this is not that dissimilar in spirit to a proposal that just outright gives you extra Puissance (in that it’s letting you shape the dungeon, and that nearly always costs Puissance to do). For what it’s worth, I dispute the “too powerful” claim, because otherwise people would have been using this Feature more often; so far, of the only two uses, one was you using it (and apparently regretting it?), and the other one was added by Blood Frenzy.

If the proposal had added something else in the surrounding rooms to compensate, it would seem reasonalbe, but this is basically just trying to trick people into passing a proposal to change the gamestate in a way that hugely benefits you, by disguising it as a cleanup/rebalance.

@ais - I think you’re (at least partially) misreading this.

At the moment, from crypt entrance, Richardo can move towards four rooms.

If he goes North, he has to get grievously injured, benefiting chiiika, Jumble or Kevan.

If he goes West, he has to get injured, benefiting either Jumble or yourself.

If he goes South, he can escape on a 1 in 3 shot.

If he goes East, he either gets grievously injured, benefiting chiiika, to the north or south, or he continues East - and gets bounced back into the library, where it is again 2/3 likely that he lands on one of chiiika’s traps.

In short - by accident or design - the crypt has effectively become mostly locked down, with Richardo having one extremely marginal chance at getting beyond his second move without taking a serious injury and giving one of chiiika or Jumble a free blood mana crystal. If he does escape, he can only go south-east. This does increase the vulnerability of some sepulchres but only as a corollary of making the crypt entrance area be less of an active tomb.

This proposal doesn’t fix-fix the issue but it does put another escape valve into play.

(for context, lemon and I were chatting about this on slack - so it’s only somewhat inappropriate Imperial intervention)

But you could also fix the issue by building at F6 or G6 (opening up the right half of the map), or building new constructions over the west side of the map, or putting treasure chests down with Roc Feathers in (after they’ve been swapped back to the correct part of the ruleset), or temporarily blocking the north exit from E4, etc.. These are all things that cost Puissance, and are part of the intended mechanics to attack back. Additionally, square F5 is doomed to collapse the next time Richardo goes there, opening up another path through.

This proposal is basically lemonfanta saying “I should get to attack everyone’s Sepulchres – without the usual Puissance spend!”. (Note that the building of the Ancient Vault seems to have been an intentional attempt to get a Rod of Smoothing to hit the Forgotten Corridor, so people are in fact spending Puissance to try to accomplish what lemonfanta is trying to accomplish by proposal.)

Note that opening up Forgotten Corridor isn’t actually very effective in helping people create new traps elsewhere – the odds of Richardo reaching the Forgotten Corridor are only 1 in 8, and any deathtraps along that way become even less likely to be hit. It isn’t going to solve the “people with centralised deathtraps are powerful” problem. All it does is to make it so that, if that 1 in 8 chance gets hit, it’s very likely that Brendan loses his Sepulchre, and somewhat likely that Chiiika will too.

Meanwhile, the proposal makes lemonfanta’s Denizens much, much safer. I have been considering building towards the Chicken Coop in an attempt to get Richardo to kill her chickens, relying on that square being blocked. If she gets to remove the enchantment from that square, it means I can’t attack her Denizens without also running the risk of attacking my own Sepulchre in the process.

So although this proposal looks like a “let’s make deathtraps less effective” proposal, it’s really bad at doing that. What it’s actually doing is protecting lemonfanta’s Denizens, attacking everyone else’s Sepulchres, and not really making the deathtraps any less likely to be hit – it just means that the non-deathtrap-hitting rolls become less likely to hurt lemonfanta and more likely to hurt her opponents.

Oh, also to note: a possible route if this proposal passes is Library of Souls → Forgotten Corridor → Ancient Vault → Broken Stage. So it’s disproportionately likely to attack one particular deathtrap (Chiiika’s), whilst not hurting Jumble’s; in addition to being fairly ineffective at hurting the deathtrap concentration in the centre, it’s also unfair in that regard. It looks a lot like this proposal is intended to help Jumble in particular win.

If the feature is too cheap, let’s make it more expensive.

oh wait josh has an arrow vote, uhh

this isn’t attacking anyone, it’s about balancing the game; the “moves back to his previous location” feature is boring (it effectively removes a room from the game) it’s redundant, and it can happen anywhere at complete random from blood frenzies

*my chickens* are protected by this feature– i don’t see how removing it could possibly make them less vulnerable bc as-is it doesn’t matter what direction they get attacked from they’re essentially invincible as long as they’re there

encounters happen after room effects are applied

It doesn’t protect your chickens. Richardo would move back to the previous room, but that doesn’t end the processing of the current move (neither with my interpretation, nor with Josh’s), and they’d be processed anyway after Richardo had been moved back.

(…is that why you thought it was overpowered?)

hm. the idea that richardo cld fight things that he’s not in the same room as is ridiculous & i think we ought to be changing the rules in line w/ the thing that makes sense then. but yes, that’s why i thought it was overpowered

s/k

I guess the Denizens chase him out.