BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Why the “next sentence is flavour text” dance instead of just saying “If New Ganymede is Understood, the Pathfinder with the highest Prestige has achieved Victory”?

Prestige is all about grinding. I strongly object to that. We need a more complex victory condition

@Kevan I kinda feel like keeping the word “victory” as flavor text until we need it is safer and given that I like to scam I also like to throw in security theatre when I’m really genuinely trying not to scam

@derrick Prestige is currently about grinding but I think we can come up with better and more creative ways to earn it. It’s clearly the “score” metaphor for the time being

It’s riskier: an additional step of “when X, make Y stop being flavour text; when Y is not flavour text Z happens” just adds another vector for a scam - if you can later rearrange the order of those paragraphs, insert a new rule break in between them, change how flavour text is interpreted, etc. If someone pulled a scam to make New Ganymede understood straight away, the flavour text clause would make no difference to that.

I don’t think coming up with a better way to grind is the answer. I like prestige with the “cannot win” clause because it make it clear that prestige gave you perks, but wasn’t actually a scoring mechanism

@Kevan Changed in line with your suggestion.

@derrick Not much I can do about your objection, really. I’m not sure what it is that you’re looking for - saying that Prestige is always going to be a grind seems to imply that you want Victory to be tied to something other than a numerical stat, which is fair but I think a bit beyond the scope of a proposal like this.

I’d also be happier to see some clarification that all these things are not understood by default, which our usual defaulting appendix rule isn’t great at covering (it does numbers and strings and lists, but not binary true/falses).

@Kevan Thank you; that change is made.

Mostly I’d like prestige to avoid being the default victory condition. We could say a random pathfinder is chosen, for instance.

I’m opening my voting with caution of an early victory conditions, particularly one that comes with untested extra wiring that may well immediately light up with “New Ganymede is Understood” when plugged in.

(Determining “if every piece of Equipment has a known Effect” when Equipment has defined Effects which may be Unknown definitely raises some Rumsfeldian questions: if we know that something has an Effect called Unknown, is that Effect known?)

Conceptually I like this a lot as an endgame trigger, though.

because I didn’t intend Prestige to grant victory

per Cuddlebeam

I like the idea of tying victory condition with exploration mechanics, it’s very thematic, but I’m not sure I like prestige determining victory.