What if a noble man comes back from the dead? Is the heir obligated to give the stuff back to the un-idled player?

Is this a pooling mechanic?

I dunno, it like a step back: a lot of the action in this dynasty has been about disincetivising Noblemen from blasting themselves into debt holes, and this re-opens runaway inflation as a mechanic, just at the expense of opening up player elimination (also not a mechanic I particularly enjoy). I do acknowledge that those Noblemen who started occupying debt holes early on, before the dynasty have formed, have yet to be offered a compelling way back into the dynasty, so selling participation rights for victory % might be the only way to keep them involved in the game in any tangible way, but my mild preference is to keep working at making a game that doesn’t exclude people. So it’s a weak from me.

Our fair king hath spoken!

[pencilgame] I think not doing so would be a fun way of generating umbrage. But as far as I remember, there currently IS no mechanic for donating items to another Nobleman.

[Josh] It’s entirely at your discretion whether this is a pooling mechanic or not—any inheritance has to be an action explicitly performed by Louis XIV.

I also suspected this of pooling. But why exactly would a person pool? It benefits the heir, not the idler.

If we had a victory condition of “first to get ten Items wins”, two players with five items each could agree to toss a coin: the loser idling and passing their items to the other, who wins the dynasty. (They’d only rationally do this if they felt they had less than 50% chance of winning otherwise, but that could easily happen if a third player was about to win anyway.)

Yes, I just got done reading all of the essays in the wiki and see now that I didn’t think it all the way through.

Agreed with Josh.

The pooling part of the mechanic is entirely optional on Louis XIV’s part. If he doesn’t want to do that, then they’ll be put up for auction. I, personally, find more items = more auctions = better game, so