I’d like to hear objections to this proposal before voting.

No big objections, here, just not a huge fan of it.

In that due to it making you unable to take dynastic actions? Ones that ultimately don’t matter because you can’t achieve victory?

We’ve had Pooling happen already with Traitor active.

I’m not a fan of it either personally but if other people believe in its magic, then that’s all it really needs to work.

I personally think straight up forbidding playing around with the Emperor mantle is more effective because its a mechanical restriction instead of just a suggestion from the Ruleset. It is more drastic, though.

To give food for thought:
If the Traitor rule is intended to make Pooling less reliable because the ally has some chance to be a Traitor…

Why not have the Traitor rule make everyone Traitors? Wouldn’t that make it more effective because now that chance is a lot higher, and you no longer have chances that someone is “trustworthy”?

It’s not expected to eliminate all pooling, just to discourage (or at least add some drama to) the most boring layers of it, when one player turns to their most tired-looking opponent and asks for a donation of 100 Gold in order to DoV, presenting a chalkboard equation for how they would randomly assign the mantle in return.

Forbidding the Mantle pass seemed like a non-starter (although I didn’t say so at the time, in case I wanted to use it): if I won a dynasty and my first proposal of the next one was “Cuddlebeam becomes Emperor, I retire”, it only needs two voters to agree that maybe the dynasty shouldn’t be run by the guy who doesn’t want to do it. Or I could just agree with my accomplice that I owe them a dynasty and will pool in their favour the next time we’re in a position to. Or to vote FOR all their proposals while I’m Emperor. We’d find other metagame currency to trade.

I’m not sure where it’d go if we were all Traitors - it might actually do a good job of making dynasties more like board games, which rarely end with someone trading all their resources to the player in second place, to change the winner. Or it might just see metagame personalities seeping back in, where two players in Traitorworld can agree privately (maybe even placing a sum of cash in escrow out-of-game) never to betray one another.

[Card] I don’t lose anything from the Traitor rule, that I can see. How would it make me unable to take Dynastic actions? That’s a different Special Case rule.

Cuddlebeam has a point. If everyone is Traitor, the rule just reads: Persons shouldn’t rely on trust with their allies. If that’s the goal, then we could go for the whole hog. Abandon the social contract. Are we going slow to train ourselves into complete detatched self-interested negotiation? But if you like trust in your games, why not go fully with that?

[TyGuy6] i mixed up the Freud reference with it being about the dynastic distance rule when i was typing that comment

Playing a game, I prefer the interaction of “Card is offering me 1000 Gold from the vault to let me win the game with a very generous Mantle pass percentage, if I’ll pay the 100g release fee up front, but maybe they’re bluffing and I’ll lose the money, hmm, this is a tough call” to “Card has presented a very convincing spreadsheet and won’t be lying about it because that would damage their reputation in future dynasties, now let’s negotiate the exact mantle pass percentage”.

Which seems much less interesting than “Card hasn’t even made an offer because everyone is always a liar”, so maybe it’s safe to rope off that slippery slope after all.

i would at least like to test out this rule more consistently over more dynasties. i’m sure some kinks haven’t been ironed out or it might need to be active for a number of dynasties before its social effects are cemented.

Considering reputation relies on the sum of how individuals consider you, I’m just going point out I’m the kind that will hold the same kind of distance towards someone who betrays while being a Traitor and someone who betrays while not being a Traitor.

That said, this proposal either does nothing or something arguably positive for now (Pools are boring) so while I don’t like it, I’m OK with passing it.

I’m noting my abstention for the record.