BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Well, I personally came here simply because of the Nomic-game-idea, not because of this dynasty. I found the idea of the dynasty interesting, however, the lack of engagement plus the fact that it would end a few days after my arrival led to me waiting for the next dynasty before actively participating. Also I was more intrigued by being part of a dynasty from the start than getting into one that already started a while ago (That it would be a few days before the end didn’t make it better). This is also the reason for me registering here and not for example on B Nomic :)
Additionally, I think there were too little possibilities for players to actively interact with each other. The lock picking idea was a proposal in the right direction, I think, but with everyone having their own garage, there was room for improvement on the player interaction side.
This is just my opinion on this dynasty, I do realise that I came here late for that dynasty and could not really experience how it actually felt, but thats my thoughts about it.

Josh says the players weren’t engaging with the Marks mechanic, and I think that was maybe the problem - not necessarily that we weren’t engaging with it, but that we didn’t know we weren’t engaging with it, by the very nature of its secret bidding. (I still don’t know if Larry was cleverly double-crossing me, or just messed up the statement submission, on the School Run.) If a mechanic is clearly being underused then we can propose to fix or repeal it, but it wasn’t clear what was happening with the Marks - were players not trying to complete them, or was the Emperor not taking time to close them?

It was also a bit of a “dungeon master” mechanic. If you give the Emperor the power to create a gamestate item daily, that builds an expectation that he will at least create such an item on a day when no useful items already exist. If he isn’t doing that (and I think we had a solid two weeks with no new Marks, while the old ones remained unresolved) then it can start to feel like the Emperor isn’t terrible invested in the game, which can be bad for morale.

The other problem with the dungeon-master thing is that if the rule is as open-ended as “the Emperor declares challenges at whim”, it’s hard to know how best to play to that. If we assume the Emperor is a fair one, then he will create fair challenges scaled to the stats of the players, so there’s a reduced incentive to actually do anything beyond the mediocre. (I might be called to contribute 1 or 2 Narcotics to a Mark, but there’s no point knuckling down and stockpiling 10, as the Mastermind wouldn’t announce a 10-Narc criteria that only one player could meet.) In retrospect I think we should have made the entire Mark generation system a deterministic one.

I think there’s a rich history to Emperor-determined mechanics, but the lack of player participation feeds both ways. If players aren’t engaging with a mechanic, aren’t making proposals and aren’t contributing any kind of meaningful activity, it seems a little unfair to pin the blame solely on the emperor for getting discouraged over a single mechanic. If there is a dynasty-specific originate cause for inactivity, it’ll be bigger than that: there, direction, pacing, fundamental mechanics.

Theme, not there, in that last sentence.

Oh, on the marks: Acknowledging that the Kevan/Larry pairing didn’t go as planned, had anybody successfully put together an attempt at a mark (which isn’t hard to conceive - they all had public requirements and the requirements were designed to be generally achievable with two people) then you would have had much more output on what kind of outcomes there were.

Ultimately, while I acknowledge Kevan’s point, I think that - give that he was the only person in the dynasty to PM me about a mark at any point - I can see this being this is a problem that basically afflicted him and him alone.

I will second what Sphinx said completely. It isn’t that I didn’t want to participate, but got here to late to actually make any sizeable contributions towards it. I had fun with making bombs, and stealing Larry’s identity, but as a new player I couldn’t get fully engaged so late in the game.

Oh, I’m blaming the rules more than the Emperor - we enacted “the Emperor should make up off-the-cuff missions, maybe as frequently as every day”, and we could have added further checks and balances, but didn’t. And requiring the Emperor to generate complex missions seems like a tricky position to put him in - either he is “fair” and risks making the gameplay a little bland, or he is capricious and risks frustrating the players who do badly out of it.

Is there really a rich history of dungeon-mastering? The only successful Emperor-makes-up-a-mission type actions I can think of offhand are Brendan’s School of Witchcraft, Elias’s Piracy and Devenger’s Body Count, all of which had a very narrow range of choices and were mostly flavour.

Really, it sounds like we mostly just needed a louder feedback mechanics for failed Marks. Visible inactivity can be a call to action (either to seize the day and grab the loot that nobody else is going for, or to amend or repeal the rule), but invisible inactivity is easy to mistake for smooth-running conspiracy.

As players, I think it was a mistake to build a core mechanic whose rate of activity was only visible to the Emperor.

You’re right, though, I may be seeing Marks as more significant than anyone else was - they seemed like quite a central mechanic to me (all the equipment Stats fed into them, they paid out game-winning Attention points, and they felt like the primary source of story driving from the Emperor), but maybe others were just treating them as a minor and entirely optional subgame.

The Lego Dynasty was also fine for emperor-generated missions, but I don’t think you played that one. It’s kind of an infrequent mechanic anyway as it tends to rely on both the emperor wanting the workload and the playerbase trusting them.

As a general point, though, humans can generate most situations than rules can automate, so from a personal perspective I would think that it’s a good option for securing long-term variety.

I didn’t participate much because I was out of regular computer time, so at the start I only really voted. Then Respraying happened and I went for the Con Man spot, but then the Street Race got subbed in for it. I didn’t mind, even though Kevan was a heavy favorite. Me and the Turtle were hatching a dastardly plan to take his car. I gave him a dirt cheap respray, and tried to pass the Lock Picking. Had the Race happened a day later, we would have swooped in, and quite possibly have taken the car. So there was some co-conspiracy behind the inactivity, on my part. If I had more time to access this game in the first place I would have gone for Marks. All in all, I think inactivity by the players fed into inactivity by the Emperor, which flowed back into inactivity by the players, and so on. No one really jumped for the Marks, so there was less incentive to make them. I had always been angling for Con Man, and I think others were also waiting for their preferred spot to get its backing. So when Kevan went for getaway driver not many others went to challenge him, and his car just grew and grew. And then the Street Race happened, and all the possible plots fell apart. Oh well, I might well have contributed to this downfall. In short, I think some inactivity was due to Crooks waiting for their road to victory to get made. In retrospect, such Crooks should have been making those roads, myself included.

I personally thought the identity theft was a really cool mechanic.

The marks were weird. They required working with people, and knowing they’d work with you. I didn’t feel like putting in the effort to contact people in hopes they might respond, and apparently neither did anyone else as nobody contacted me.

I tried a couple times to get people to go in on a Mark with me. Would anyone have accepted if I’d PMed them instead?

The main problem I had was lack of ways to get more cash (other than Marks which have been covered, and identity theft which was tricky to balance against the cost of Justice). I should have proposed selling stolen cars for parts.