BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Coming two minutes after I opened a search in the affected location, this is setting up the dilemma of whether I commit to that search and potentially lose 2.0F Heat, or abandon that search by leaving, giving you the option to just withdraw this proposal and keep the Cellar to yourself, unchanged.

Bad luck on a counterplay being less effective than you’d hoped, but imposing the effect you wanted doesn’t seem a very fair way to make up for that. I’d be open to amending the Cellar in a way that didn’t impose this decision and Heat penalty on me.

Sorry (“bad luck”, should I say?) that this came two minutes after your search; an artifact of the post window rather than a deliberate timing swipe, but also not really sorry enough to do anything about it. I’m sure you’ll manage to get a CfJ passed if you feel really aggrieved about it.

Alright.

But this is doing two things: making the Cellar Draught work the way that (possibly only) you were expecting it to, so that the resources you’ve spent on getting there aren’t wasted and you can carry on doing whatever it was you were intending to do in there; and giving you a lot of control over the outcome of an open search that you’re not part of (potentially getting free stuff if support for this proposal spooks me into leaving the Cellar, leaving you to withdraw this proposal and join the search).

When Brendan misread the consequences of an action early on and ended up in an extremely bad position, they played on and eventually got patched back into the game in an unrelated way. The group can and should be open to compensating players for bold actions that got things moving but didn’t work out as expected, but a mid-to-late-game “let’s say it worked the way I thought it did after all” only seems fair if a majority also thought that it worked that way, and were declining to make the same move for other reasons. I don’t think that’s true of indoor Draughts.

The cellar is by no means immune to draught. If the pork shed gets a second person in it (or tent gets 2 people more people in it), it’s affected.

Honestly, the true problem is probably that there’s 6 spaces in the building but 7 active players. It makes it so easy to find space if even a couple of people stay outside.

No, Kevan, it’s just unwinding the massive native advantage that you’ve successfully given yourself over the course of several votable matters.

Which is obviously not an insult! You’re skilled at this game.

But you know as well as I do that a risk in nomic is that you move too fast and get pulled back in by proposal.

You moved too fast; it is now an open secret that your cellar is yours, you’ll not consent to anyone using it other than yourself, and it *is* a private, exclusive and impregnable resource.

This is the proposal, and it’s as minimal as I can make it.

You’re acting like I applied done retroactivity into this, or that it’s arbitrary or capricious or, in fact, doing anything at all other than putting the slightest game-balance crack into the edifice that you’ve constructed.

You have a game winning position. Why are you arguing that everyone else should ignore that?

Singular, that decision is a complete mystery to me.

You’re happy that it would take the coordinated effort of three people, each of whom are largely jettisoning their own game, to make Kevan pay the bare minimum heat expenditure? And that looks balanced to you?

I hope it will become clearer after the dynasty.

I’ve just made my own proposal this second which acts as a nerf on its own. It’s hard to hide in a cellar if the whole building gets draughty at the drop of a hat.

Josh, this was the gamestate at the start of today:

That’s it. We’re in the same room, with the same stuff, and with not much difference in time and temperature. We were also part of the same search at that time. That’s the whole gamestate. If I’d run over to your Tent instead of you running over to the Cellar, the situation would be more or less exactly reversed.

This is not one player with an unassailable lead and some kind of exclusive, impregnable, private stockpile, and the other a lowly outsider being denied that resource.

The only gamestate advantage I can see that I’ve got is that by happening to start a search first there, I can choose when to close them, and block others from starting them there? But anyone can still join my searches to gain items, from the same pool of items that I’m rolling for myself. And patching searches to reduce first-mover advantage is on the table anyway (in a proposal I wrote myself because that kind of timing stuff always seems like the least interesting part of BlogNomic to me).

Oh this is mealy-mouthed, Kevan. “But anyone can still join my searches to gain items”? I DID join your search to gain items, and you specifically ejected me for it!

Which was a good move, and I didn’t spot it, so fair enough - but the point is that you can do that to anybody. I’m just the person who tried it. It would take two people to break into the duopoly that you have established with JD, both with cudgels - and even that only works until JD gets a cudgel of his own.

Your “not much difference in… temperature” is also 50% further away from unconsciousness than me.

And the nerve of it all is, this is exactly what you were complaining about when I made the tent searchable, except worse, because when I made the tent searchable I at least put a counter-mechanism in so a single determined other player could block it. You’re not even allowing that!

[Josh] I made a single powerful game move which relied both on my being fully rested on 60 Time and you misunderstanding how much it would cost me to Cudgel you. This doesn’t scale up: if anyone else was similarly mistaken about Draughts they’ve now been corrected, and I no longer have 60 Time cached. Ejecting each aggressor from the Cellar costs 45 Time, so I’d have to pass on a couple of searches every time I wanted to set that up again.

Kevan, this is failing anyway, why are you continuing to spin?

This latest obfuscation continues to pretend that you and JD aren’t working together and that he doesn’t also have his own pile of hours to work with, and won’t eventually find his own cudgel. Yawn.

You can dance around it all you like but the fact remains that even if this passed the Cellar would be the best place to be, and a place that you and JD with his likely eventual cudgel would find very easy to defend. Even with this enacted it would still be a much stronger version of the mechanic that you raged against when I proposed it for the Tent; even if this were to be enacted it would still require a player to make no actions in the pursuit of their own game just to apply to you the same basic costs that anybody else has to pay anywhere else. Again, the passage of this would simply normalise the cellar. It is not eroding your earned progress in any way.

With it not enacted - which, again, is the current likely outcome - it would literally require the concerted effort of three other players to force you to ever pay even the smallest, most basic cost for any game action. Two players could slow you down. One player could probably be juggled by you and JD to no real effect. No-one else is in that position!

But, look, this is failing so you won. Be a good winner! I am not enjoying this enough to keep having to write essays that no-one will read!

Failing? It’s only 1 to 2 right now.

This doesn’t just normalise the Cellar, it has a chilling effect on actions there while it’s pending, which you have control over because you can choose whether to withdraw the proposal at the last minute. I pointed that out in the first comment and you said you were “not really sorry enough” to want to address it in a fairer way during the edit window.

Which is fine, players are free to make punishment proposals for whatever reason, and others are free to vote on them. And the player it targets is free to question the proposer’s characterisation of events.

So, sorry, what exactly was your objection to this again Kevan? It seems to be a bit of a moving target.

Is it that it’s unnecessary because “anyone can still join [your] searches to gain items”?

Was it that the act of ejecting anybody who *does* join your search is expensive so you wouldn’t be able to do it all that often?

Or was it that it just messes up one search for you one time?

Because I’ve raised responses to the first two points which you’ve brushed over, so it sure seems like it’s just the third one… Feels like the conversation would be more productive if you focused in on the issue that is actually at stake rather than raising all the chaff.

(We can both count, btw, and both know that this is failing; I got my pocket Brendan vote, but once your pocket JD vote comes in it requires every other active player to vote for to enact… I don’t have much hope on that)

My objection all along is still the one in my first comment (and it’s actually affecting two searches now). The rest of this thread is just responding to some of your justifications for why I’m in such a strong position that the impact doesn’t matter, or is deserved.

The target that’s been moving is yours, I’ve been responding to your main points as you raised them. I suppose we’re both being cautious about how much to correct the other player’s understanding of the game, so it’s been dragged out a bit.

But yes. First you say that I’m in a “game winning position” where the cellar is my “private, exclusive and impregnable resource”. I disagree on the grounds that you were literally standing in the Cellar while typing that, and that our gamestates were not dissimilar.

You then clarify that because I cudgelled you I “can do that to anybody” who tries to join a Cellar search. I argue that I cannot actually do this.

You then say I could cudgel more people if JonathanDark agreed to perform all actions I asked, and also found a Cudgel. You don’t break the numbers down, and I naturally decline to analyse that for you.

So is that the focus? You suspect two players are working together and could be in a strong position later, so believe that some proposal collateral damage against them now is justified. And I don’t think it’s justified, because I am one of those players, and don’t feel that my position is as strong as you’re making out.

https://giphy.com/embed/10Jpr9KSaXLchW

None of my target is moving; I believe, as I have consistently and throughout the entire dynasty, that the Cellar is an overpowerful location that you have steadily accreted further advantages to through the careful min-maxing of proposal advantages, and that this proposal is a simple attempt to bring it into line with the game that the rest of us have to endure.

In previous proposals you have underplayed the strength of your position, only to have it revealed it later through the voluntary disclosure of the possession of your cudgel and the involuntary disclosure of your alliance with JD and your ability to control access to Searches in that location.

This position has never waved and has never been anything but consistent. Your continued attempts to weave circles around it and obfuscate away from the overall picture have done very little to erode its essential truth.

you were literally standing in the Cellar while typing that, and that our gamestates were not dissimilar is a great example they were dissimilar in two important ways - you had an ally present and enough Time to carry out a Shove and complete your search. I did not. Given that that move was decisive I would call that a major gamestate difference, but it couldn’t possibly matter. It’s just an obfuscation.

I may be misinterpreting JD’s gif but it certainly doesn’t look like they have received the memo if the attempt is to continue to pretend that you are not effectively a pools resource at this stage.

Out of curiosity, who is this conversation benefitting now? Do you think anyone is actually reading it apart from you and me? Or is it purely an intellectual exercise?

https://giphy.com/embed/6pJNYBYSMFod2

Just wanting to respond what felt like a misrepresentation of my position, really, although it’s been intellectually interesting to see which chases we did and didn’t cut to, with gamestate at stake. Does seem best saved for washup at this point, though.