Also nb using this post title now so you’re not looking for it in a scam proposal later.

Snoozing in the sense of someone missing a single Break-In by being offline for a couple of days, or someone not playing the dynasty at all?

The former will be tough on that player and the rest of their team, especially if it’s been 23 hours and they still don’t know whether their snoozing Dextrous-but-Clumsy agent is going to be able to take the safecracking route as discussed, or if they need to divert their Dextrous-but-Noisy member as an emergency replacement.

For the latter, timeouts are a perennial question. I’d much prefer a gameplay-passive player to say (as some did in the Great Machine dynasty) “oh, everybody is waiting for me to perform a complex action that I don’t understand? Sorry, I’ll go idle” than “okay, this ‘break-in’ mechanic is optional, I can ignore it”. (I will be working on the best way to get that situation across to players, based on the past dynasties which haven’t quite managed it.)

The conditions here are slightly wonky. After the first time the Concierge Puts Out The Call and subsequently Breaks In, I think the condition “If the Concierge has Put Out The Call in not less than the last 24 hours” is always true. In future cycles, the Concierge can Put Out The Call and then immediately Break In.

(Personally, I’d also like the timeout a little longer - say 48 hours to match the proposal voting period, which allows a reasonably active player to check in once a day, but not necessarily the same time every day, without missing anything.)

Actually, re-reading the clause, I can see how it could be read the other way… I would feel more comfortable if it was completely unambiguous though. Perhaps “If the last time the Concierge Put Out The Call was at least [X] hours ago, and they have not carried out the Breaking In action since then”.

@qenya There’s an ‘and’ clause there that you missed - “If the Concierge has Put Out The Call in not less than the last 24 hours, and has not carried out the Breaking In action since the last time they Put Out The Call…”

Ah I see you didn’t miss it… I’m not sure that I see an alternate read though

If the Concierge Puts Out The Call and Breaks In normally once, and then subsequently Puts Out The Call again, I believe both conditions are true:

(1) The Concierge has Put Out The Call not less than 24 hours ago (the first Call, which was well over 24 hours ago at this point)
(2) they have not carried out Breaking In since the last time they Put Out The Call (the second Call)

Ah, I see. Thank you, amended

I think it’s arguable that you can probably also read “has Put Out The Call not less than…” as “has not Put Out The Call less than…” but I would rather we didn’t rely on that bit of grammatical sleight of hand.

Unfortunately after your edit it’s the other way round: the Concierge can only Break In less than 24 hours after Putting Out The Call!

Doesn’t this allow for a scam where, say, all the Burglars decide to submit routes at the first possible moment in the hope that not all the Guards are online within 24 hours? Waiting for stragglers is one thing, but the “half the players” isn’t enough for the rest to be considered stragglers.

In any case, I think a) there probably will be a problem with people not submitting in the future, but b) we may want to wait for the situation to arise before working out what the best fix for it is, as the details of non-submission may vary a lot in practice.

(If the dynasty does end up as a teamwork dynasty, like my coregency with Josh was, then we can possibly expect teams to do nothing for a while and then suddenly submit all at once, when their plans are determined. But the way it’s currently going, it looks more like the dynasty’s going to be more about players on a single team competing with each other than about actually trying to act as a team, so submission timings might work differently.)

Note that this also probably causes last-moment timing scams: if each team has a mole in the other team, then each team gets an advantage from acting after the other team does (so that they can adapt their actions to the other team’s). Having a hard deadline would thus give an incentive to act at a particular time (and set up for ais523-style scams of trying to cause the “half the Agents have submitted” time to happen at an awkward time of day). We would need either a soft deadline to avoid timing scams, or some other way to deal with non-submitted plans.

24 hours is a reasonable length of time imo.

Thanks Qenya, fixed it again!

Will very much be giving this a Timekeeper AGAINST or veto if gameplay is going to depend on how quickly players can react to things, or whether players are online in time for a deadline.

“Is our Dextrous-but-Clumsy safecracker going to confirm that she’s ready to take the A-B-Q route in the next 15 minutes, or should we assume she’s missing this one and switch to plan B? Maybe she’s betrayed us and is just pretending to be offline because it’s Sunday!” is narratively great stuff, but it can be done in other mechanical ways without the real-world clock being a part of it.

Ok, withdrawn. Let’s see what the impact of the problem is then legislate to deal with it. 

I have an alternate idea for us getting “stuck”, which would be focused less on enforcement and more on reminders.