BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

Kinda crappy. Won’t be retaliating, would honestly expect the emperor to veto this.

I mean, if you’re going to pull this kind of shitty play then at least have the integrity to propose a rule that says “the player called Josh may not achieve victory” and let me go idle in peace

Why not make it a core rule? Nomic! What larks!

It’s in a zone that I’ve always found curious at BlogNomic: when someone employs a strong tactic which is only actually strong if we stop playing Nomic and play the rest of the dynasty out straight. I don’t think that’s in the spirit of Nomic - a single player shouldn’t have the soft power to effectively announce that the game has entered a “no more proposals” phase in regards to a particular mechanic, when they’ve done something that’s clever but easily assailable.

Direct “Josh can’t win” proposals never happen, I think ultimately because players can sense the face-eating-leopard future of them - once the group has set that precedent, each of them could be brought down by it in turn later on (with ever more force, as each new can’t-win player bears a grudge against the survivors). But that symmetry doesn’t exist here: a proposal to knock out an obvious colour can be repeated, until none of the colours look obvious enough and we have to second-guess each other.

The main path to victory under the current ruleset is “build secret colours, but don’t be too obvious”. The downsides of being obvious are that your rivals can use the tools of the game to negate your progress: whether that’s Improving or Reworking that colour off the board, blocking it in to stop you Copying it easily or - since this is Nomic - making proposals.

This could have been a more oblique mechanic with a similar end effect, which you’d have rightly spotted and called out for what it was, so I thought I may as well cut to the chase.

Many recent dynasties have entered this zone and not resulted in direct attack proposals. It’s not just because of fear of retaliation; it’s because it’s crummy, especially in the context of a game with no direct aggressive player interaction and where success is a matter of long, patient building rather than an oblique scam or get-rich-quick scheme.

You say that you don’t want the “face-eating-leopard” nature to take over but have you really thought about what is opened up if this passes? No dynasty will ever have another conventional winner as a proposal to unseat them at the eleventh hour is always justifiable. This precident doesn’t go away with your DoV.

This is a game with direct aggressive player interaction, though: if someone thinks they’ve worked out a colour of your Desideratum, they can Improve or Rework it away, or block it in to stop you from expanding it easily.

Success isn’t about who’s best at creating one new coloured tile every 12 hours (otherwise why have private Desiderata at all?), it’s about the balance of creation and giving your colours away: a player who chooses to be obvious and make a run for it risks the other players bringing them down. You’ve presumably looked at the gameboard and concluded that only one other player (me) has tried to stop your Black Tiles, so have doubled down and started building as many as you can. You’ve accepted the risk that other players might wake up and choose to easily erase most of your Black Tiles: this proposal is just a more direct form of that risk.

I don’t think we’re in leopard country: it feels closer to fool’s gold, to me (or whatever we called the equivalent where someone builds a massive outlier stockpile - fool’s uranium?), that it’s a proposal to diminish one shared branch of a game that you, and possibly you alone, are leaning heavily into.

The privacy of Desidera aren’t a factor here. If the dynastic ruleset had a mechanism by which too-overt desidera could be punished then yes, my play would be unwise and I would have overplayed my hand, but in the dynasic ruleset as written, your insistence as the proposal author is the only weight that the arhgument that desidera have a secrecy component has, and in nomic, authoral intent isn’t anything. In terms of the ruleset as written, there is no difference between this and any other public-information game mechanic, and as such this proposal is no different from a “Josh may not win” proposal in any other dynasty.

If you’d wanted desidera secrecy to be meaningful then you should have proposed that, made it mechanically true rather than just airily implied by the presence of private tracking. You didn’t; and as such, I read the ruleset correctly and acted accordingly, using a legitimate understanding of the tools at my disposal.

Arguing here that this proposal is my fault, and that I should have anticipated it or should accept it as the cost of doing business, is beyond unreasonable. Especially given that, as you rightly point out, you have other tools at your desposal: there’s seven of you and only one of me. If you want to get rid of most of the black tiles on the board then you can and there’s only so much that I can do to stop you. You also have other victroy mechanisms that you could be building up with a view to achieving before I complete mine. These would be reasonable, unobjectionable responses to the situation we’re in.

But this isn’t that. This is an extraordinary attempt to specifically and targettedly disqualify one player from winning for no other justiable reason than that they read the ruleset better than you and established a lead that you don’t think you can erase through legitimate dynastic means.

[Josh] The bald facts of the game are that we’re building different colours, can overwrite (and avoid copying) other players’ colours, and win if our colours are dominant. You can play that how you like, but if someone guesses one of your colours they can bear that in mind when deciding what to overwrite or copy. Time will tell how much actual cost there is to that.

“If you want to get rid of most of the black tiles on the board then you can and there’s only so much that I can do to stop you.”

Well, yes. If players decide they don’t like Black Tiles they can team up to remove them, and that’s what this proposal is. It’s switching to a different gameplay mechanism - the proposal - to achieve something that’s already on the table.

So you admit that this proposal is being offered as a way of superceding the dynastic rules? Rendering the dynastic rules irrelevant? Trivialising all dynasic gameplay?

You want to take your turns erasing black tiles, you just don’t want me to be able to respond, and you don’t want to have to wait 12 hours, and you don’t want to have to go through the bother of coordinating - so you’re just using the proposal to shortcut all of that, pretend like you took those turns instantly and freely, and prevent me from responding - and you’re arguing that this isn’t unfair? How? And more importantly - why?

It’s manifestly unfair! It’s “give every player but Josh five hundred extra turns” unfair, it’s “prevent Josh from making any moves for the next week” unfair, it’s “Josh may not win” unfair. Why are you arguing this? Just say “yes, it’s unfair, I want to beat you and I can’t do it any other way except this way”. You’ve basically already accepted that premise, so why not just say it?

I don’t see the line you’re drawing, there: proposals are part of the game and part of the dynasty, they can alter the ruleset or gamestate. That’s Nomic. If I made a proposal to create a rule of “once per week a quorum of Monks may agree to nuke a colour from the board”, would that also strike you as extraordinarily outrageous and unfair and have you worrying gravly for the future of BlogNomic?

No, that would seem very distinct to me, as it’s not something that relies on me being able to get a proposal enacted next week in revenge and it allows me to strategise around it.

The fact that you didn’t do that is itself telling.

What you’re doing here is using proposals to bypass the whole game. In which case, what’s the point? Let’s all just spam “I win the game” proposals on day 1 until we all get bored and one of them slips through.

It’s almost exactly the same. If couldn’t get a revenge proposal enacted, you couldn’t get a quorum-nuke agreed either. Imagine a slightly different version of the rule, if you like, where the quorum-nuke took a minimum of 12 hours to resolve and could time out and so on.

In fact, imagine a proposed rule of “Any Monk may make a proposal to change the Colours of Tiles, these proposals are known as Papal Decrees”.

Or even “Any Monk may submit a Proposal to change the Ruleset or Gamestate”, which you can find in Rule 1.5.

So you’d have no problem with me passing a proposal that said “Kevan may not win” in any dynasty, then?

You wouldn’t see that as being a substantively different proposition from a situation in which the first proposal of the dynasty had been “In this dynasty, a quorum of players may rule that the player in the lead may not win” and you had, through negligence, allowed yourself to be in the lead?

Because the latter situation happened, in Versailles, and those affected by it took it like champs.

So next dynasty we’re both in, I can propose “Kevan can’t win”, out of the blue, and not hear a squeak of opposition from you?

Anyone can propose anything in any dynasty, that’s the beauty of Nomic. I would vote against “Kevan can’t win” and expect other voters to judge it on its merits.

I appreciate your motive for theatrics in putting this proposal on a par with a shocking “Josh can’t win”, but like I say in the first comment, I’m just cutting to the chase rather than making an oblique “players can cover squares more easily now” proposal which you would have presumably have pulled the mask off and then also shouted down for daring to cover up your Black Tiles, as happened over Purest Green (where that wasn’t even an intention). Both seem equally valid mechanically, in a game of Nomic - I’m surprised at the general implication here that an opaque or less explained version of this proposal (like your recent one to lock out poorer players from disrupting your Black Stone) would have earned more respect.

Okay, since you’re committed to being obtuse, let’s be clear; yes, arguing over the marginal benefit to self-interest is part of the the nature of Nomic, no, that doesn’t mean that you can extend the logic to a paradigm in which the dynastic rules should be thrown out at the eleventh hour because above quorum players know they aren’t winning. This isn’t a Pennsylvania recount situation.

I’ll note again that you still haven’t owned up to the underlying dynamic here: that I am winning legitimately, that you want to beat me, that you can’t see a way of doing so via the dynastic rules, and that you are therefore using this route as a way of discarding the dynastic play to date. If we’re going to continue this discussion then you should have the integrity to own up to the fact that this is a naked power play.

But neither of us knows who’s winning, Desiderata colours are private. I can’t tell how much you’re bluffing over the reduction of one of your three colours being tantamount to losing the game, and obviously have no interest in tipping my hand by explaining exactly how I see my position in the game right now.

But yes, this proposal is a conscious reaction to a single player building lots of one particular colour with nobody stopping them, rather than something I wrote absent-mindedly for no reason whatsoever.

The lesson I’m getting seems to be that you’d have morally preferred a proposal of “create a new rule that allows a quorum of Monks to nuke a colour” or “create a new rule that allows colours to be changed a bit more easily”, both of which you’d have still railed furiously against, but without making the easy “this is basically saying I can’t win!” comparison.

Do we get a rationale for that?

because it goes against the spirit of nomic?

the main gameplay loop is manipulating tile colors through the various dynastic actions. not just doing it through proposals.

furthermore, blatantly negating another player’s strategy late into the game just feels wrong

Right, thank you!

I genuinely thought I’d slipped into mirror dimension or something

I agree with Clucky. If you want to turn Black tiles Blue, do it using the normal mechanics for changing tile colors.

I don’t think there’s a “spirit of Nomic” there. Players vote against “take down the leader” because they know it could bite them if they, later, become that leader. This proposal was “take down all players who have Black in their Desiderata”, which could have gone either way in voting. Players vote for “close that outlier strategy over there” all the time.

The gameplay loop is currently “make the board have more of your colours than other players’”, with the ability to choose which colours you cover up or box in. If you know which colours other players want, you can factor that information in when deciding between possibly placements. I’m baffled by Josh’s proud claim that he’s decided not to bluff as a brilliant strategy because bluffing isn’t mandatory, and it would now be unfair if we used all this revealed information to his disadvantage.

Josh’s strategy looks like him noticing that I’m the only player who’s been covering up his Black Tiles, and reasoning that everyone else either has Black in their Desiderata, or has taken their eye off the ball. He’s taking the risk that the points gained from spamming Black are worth the downside of alerting everyone to the fact that he’s vulnerable in this colour (and his “players without Guilders can’t remove Black Stone” and “Black Tiles are now enormously harder to improve” proposals were plainly to defend against that).

Other players are now in a position to react to that. Like I’ve said, this proposal could have been “a quorum of Monks can agree to nuke a colour” or “it’s now easier to remove Tiles” - I was just cutting to the chase, personally not seeing much difference between a mechanic effect and an enactment effect. Would adding Tools or Creeds like that be acceptable to the Abbot, or is that “blatantly negating another player’s strategy late into the game” too?

It would depend on the tools and the creeds.

If there was a tool that was just “change all the black tiles to blue” I’d still quite possibly veto that, because it would be too strong of an effect.

I’d also probably be against something like “a quorum of monks can agree to nuke a color” because I don’t think that really fits the current gameplay but I might just vote against that.

Something like “remove a tile” depends on what you mean. If it reset the tile as white, I’d vote against but not veto it because I don’t think it breaks the game just prolongs in it when really we should be trying to complete the mosaic. If it removes the tile from the equation completely… I’d probably just not vote as to not influence something like that one way or another. But would really depend on what the actual text said.