My concern over a random endgame is just that the randomness has the potential to outweigh how well someone has actually played the game.

A player who’s judged the group well, has avoided being stuck with useless outlier resources, has made some clever deals and rule amendments, maybe grabbed a few resources through minor scams or timing windows, etc, could be end up being heavily outscored if they happen to get the worst possible endgame rolls while a trailing player gets their best possible ones.

Whether it’s “six Downsides instead of two” or “two Downsides but bigger numbers” doesn’t make much difference; if you make the game more unpredictable towards the end, it increases the degree to which luck matters.

this is either the same amount of predictable or less, though, right? the potential outcomes are drastic, but limited to a specific few (with the exclusion of the upgraded version of the “0-2 downsides” one, which i opposed on principle and now for material reasons, but which im including here because it exists in the standard set of downsides too. i wouldn’t mind it being replaced later). in the “3 random downsides” version, it’s very likely that you’d find yourself unable to avoid any decrease in, say, Food, because there’d be six chances for it to get rolled. in this version, you get much more choice & control over the outcome than that.

randomness was baked into the core of the dynasty with your first proposals! this is just reducing some of the randomness that already exists in the ruleset, hopefully making it more manageable & interesting to deal with.

On a second reading these are a bit more nuanced; “Lose People equal to 25 minus” and “three random Downsides” were just a very big opener and closer.

I’ll leave it to the players how much randomness they want in their game, and whether this seems a more tempting wager. I was aiming for just “input randomness” with the dynastic structure (“here’s a randomly generated thing, what do you want to do about it?”), but if people want some output randomness gambling as well, I won’t push against it.

Logistics: is the final “apply that number of Downsides from the rule “Upsides and Downsides” to yourself” result meant to be rolling on the original list, or the new one? From “instead of the Downsides listed in “Upsides and Downsides”, the following Downsides exist” it reads like the latter, but your deliberate callback to the name of a rule makes it sound like you maybe aren’t intending that.

I do think fewer but larger Downsides makes more sense. More Downsides just means more likelihood of both Downsides being the same, which leads to the choice being less Dilemma-like, so greentick from me for this change.

in favour of the anointed ones

This was a fine idea by itself, but I’m liking Josh’s idea more. With a re-skin to make it more epic, I think a change in mechanics for the end game will be interesting.

(That vote above should be ignored, it was me being logged in from the wrong account.)

@Josh @JonathanDark can i ask why you two are voting against this when it doesn’t contradict The Anointed Ones? this is better than our current unfinished/overly-random Storm, and if both proposals succeed, Josh’s will override mine anyway. as it currently stands, if The Anointed Ones fails, we’re just left with the worst & least interesting version of the Storm!

when i say “unfinished”, i guess i actually mean “half-baked” — i don’t wanna imply that this proposal alone Finishes The Storm. i’d be happy to see it expanded more :0

Fair point, CoV in case Anointed Ones fails

@lemon I don’t like the storm as a mechanic and would honestly prefer to see it fail. If keeping it in an unfinished state prompts a genuinely interesting successor mechanic then that’s more appealing to me than voting in a compromise.