BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Would need to include a public announcement about them coming into existance I think?  perhaps in the rule we can create a wiki-page that is a list of all the Lodges, and upon creation of the lodge per the rule they have to link the lodge to that list.

I think that would make the lodge wiki part of the gamestate?

The point is, they’re secret. It’s hard to make gamestate secret or not universally known, so I posted it as a protosal.

I can’t see a secret lodge proposal working without an emperor present to monitor the gamestate and inform people when they’ve joined the lodge.

I think the same as Amnistar

I don’t really like the flavour, and it’s hard to make a mechanic like this work (it seems somewhat scammable). I remember that in Agora, something similar to this was set up via contracts, but interestingly, it wasn’t part of the rules; the players set it up themselves. (And the amount of secrecy involved was such that most of the details still aren’t public.) That sort of emergent gameplay is always fun when it happens; encoding it into the rules, however, is unlikely to work well.

WE actually had a secret society mafia, where the societies themselves were known but their membership, rules and requirements to become a member were kept secret by the emperor until the end of the dynasty.  It was before my time but people spoke highly of it.

“Players may join Masonic Lodges in the way specified in the Code of Conduct of every Lodge.” should read “Players may join a Masonic Lodge in the way specified in the Code of Conduct of that Lodge.”

Wiki pages aren’t secret.

Agreed with Amnistar. Secret rules require someone to know the secret rules, or they can’t be enforced.

[Ornithopter] Only if they need to be enforced. It would be possible to play a game where all actions were legal, but you could only win if you could show - at the end - that all your actions had been within the confines of your secret rules.

Kevan - What you say is true, but I’m not sure I like the mechanic. I remember playing Illuminate (card game with friends) that often we found ourselves saying - oh, I won 4 rounds ago. That sort of uncertainty made the game much less fun.

Illuminati is okay so long as you know what sort of scope the secret rules are going to have. As I remember the game, it has a lot of speculative “wait a minute, if he’s representing the Bermuda Triangle then he only needs three more Power to win - we should block his attack just in case!” stuff.

Masonic Lodges whose secret rules were drawn from a visible pool of possible rules would work. Maybe with the requirement to post an MD5-encoded description of all your rules to the wiki when you found it, so that you can’t change them to whatever fits your past behaviour.

If the secret rules both are drawn from a limited pool and have a public hash, they can be deduced by brute force.

Well, you’d salt it.