BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

I’d probably explicitly make evidence reduction into a daily action, unless there’s a specific reason to avoid that.

It’s worth a shot, though it could probably be a little more mutable

Yeah, I wasn’t sure which parts should be mutable, so I kinda hit the middle, figuring if people liked the overall mechanic we could tweak it later.

Slightly conservative; we’re bumping up on the number of mechanics I think are easily retainable and I’d rather consolidate than expand for a while.

Coverups don’t work as worded – they require you to select the participant to cover up only after the dice roll (because you can’t perform a heist action until the roll is successful and selecting the participant is listed as a step in the atomic action), but they also require you to specify the participant in question when rolling.

Instead of making that an atomic action, you could just write “As a Heist Action, a Participant may decrease any Participant’s Evidence by 1. This is known as a Coverup.” In general, simpler rules text is much better when it works – it makes the ruleset easier to understand and reduces the chance of rules breaking in unexpected ways. In particular, Atomic Actions should be a last resort when tnothing else would prevent scams, as they have very unintuitive timing properties, rather than something to use by default in rules text.

Snitching has the same issues, and can be fixed the same way.

I would probably be voting AGAINST even if that problem were fixed, though. For one thing, I share Josh’s concern about this creating too much “essential” ruleset complexity – if we’re adding complexity it should almost certainly take the form of new actions (that players can ignore / choose not to take) rather than mandatory side effects of existing actions.

I also have balance concerns; 3 Heist Actions is not very many, especially because the act of doing a Coverup creates evidence for yourself (i.e. it just shifts evidence around, it doesn’t reduce the amount), so the total amount of evidence in the game can’t decrease except as a consequence of the Locked Up daily. (Besides, making a near-mandatory daily seems unfair on the less active / less invested players; in the current ruleset they can just take a Heist Action every now and then when they feel like it, but after this proposal they would have to grind, and would probably drop out of the dynasty instead. I prefer to avoid daily actions, or daily-ish actions like the one in this proposal, where possible.)

CoV per ais

I appreciate the feedback.

Withdrawn