Saturday, January 18, 2025

Proposal: Hot On the Trail

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 20 Jan 2025 03:19:08 UTC

Add a new rule named “Law Enforcement {I}” with the following text:

Each Participant has a publicly tracked number named Evidence which is 0 by default. Each time a Participant performs a successful Heist Action, their Evidence must be increased by 1. A Participant whose Evidence is at least 3 is considered Wanted.

There is a publicly tracked Jail, which is a list of Participants and is empty by default. A Participant whose name is in the Jail is said to be Locked Up. A Participant who is Locked Up cannot take any dynastic actions except the following:

* If their Evidence is greater than 0, they may decrease their Evidence by 1 (to a minimum of 0) if they haven’t done so within the last 24 hours.
* If their Evidence is 0, they may remove their name from the Jail.

In the rule “Law Enforcement {I}” add a subrule named “Snitching {M}” with the following text:

Snitch is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Select a non-Mastermind Participant who is Wanted.
* Add the selected Participant’s name to the Jail.

As a Heist Action, a Participant may Snitch, adding the selected Participant’s name to the comment in the Dice Roller when performing that Heist Action.

In the rule “Law Enforcement {I}” add a subrule named “Coverup {M}” with the following text:

Coverup is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Select a non-Mastermind Participant who has an Evidence greater than 0.
* Decrease the selected Participant’s Evidence by 1, to a minimum of 0.

As a Heist Action, a Participant may Coverup, adding the selected Participant’s name to the comment in the Dice Roller when performing that Heist Action.

A way to make trouble for Participants who get too successful at Heist Actions unless other Participants are helping cover their tracks.

You can Coverup a Participant who is Locked Up. This is intentional as a way to break them out of Jail early.

Comments

SingularByte: he/him

18-01-2025 07:14:17 UTC

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

Habanero:

18-01-2025 14:27:16 UTC

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

JonathanDark: he/him

18-01-2025 16:29:48 UTC

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.

Josh: he/they

18-01-2025 16:31:57 UTC

against 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.

ais523:

18-01-2025 17:09:29 UTC

against 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.)

Habanero:

18-01-2025 17:19:50 UTC

CoV against per ais

JonathanDark: he/him

18-01-2025 17:53:19 UTC

I appreciate the feedback.

against Withdrawn