What’s the reasoning behind allowing secretly random for all random selections? I don’t mind doing that, but I’m trying to understand the desire to keep secret all random selections, when many of the results wind up being public anyway.

Mostly to make your job easier as Gridmaster; as a player I’d trust you if you wanted to use tabletop dice or a spreadsheet or something to save some time.

It also makes proposals easier to write if we don’t have to remember to define Gridmaster rolls as being “secretly” random all the time.

Any interest in removing the “secretly random” phrases in the current ruleset, since they would be redundant if this is enacted?

In the dynastic rules, that is

As written, I think this would delete all firewalls. You could pick two adjacent cells that don’t have runners pretty much at random, and in all probability they’d count as “orthogonally-connected Cells where none have a value of ‘Firewall’, and none have identifications which are the Location of a Runner”.

Maybe not all, but there will be a lot fewer Firewall cells for sure.

There might be a less complicated way to do this, if we’re willing to ignore the case where a Runner is inside the blocked-off area:

Then, for each Cell with a value of “Firewall” that is orthogonally-connected to at least two other Cells that also have a value of “Firewall”, set the the value of that Cell to “-”

Maybe add a:

starting with the Cells with the most orthogonally-connected Cells with a value of “Firewall”

or:

processing each such Cell by random selection

I’ve taken another more careful run at defining a Dark Sector. I think allowing blocked-off but occupied rooms - where the map can split the group in half for some Strata - is probably interesting enough to keep around.

By the way, is there a reason this proposal goes back to the “value of Firewall” type wording rather than “Contains a firewall” that Preprocessing uses?

[SingularByte] Preprocessing might have failed, and it didn’t seem a big enough deal to spell out a conditional edit.