1.) I think it was successful, if I had to rate it binary, but 1-10 I think I’d say a 6? Aside from the kerfuffle at the end, Apocrypha worked alright; it opened the way to a lot of scams, but they were generally… self-regulating? The mechanics didn’t cohere together as well as they could have, which is partly the fault of simple difficulty, and partly because it often wasn’t attempted. Bringing in Scoring was a large help, in that regard, I think.

2.) I liked the theme, especially at first, though I think in the future having a secondary theme, to sort of shape where one takes the collection at first, might help.

3.) I think most of the GNDT stats didn’t work too well, though a few did. Moving was a nice system for what it was, though I feel like there wasn’t much to do with it, but introducing more places to move to could have likely turned into a grind? Probably an expansion on Proxies might have helped, without making a grind. Relaying and Towing were good steps, but there wasn’t all that much to do with them, and I didn’t have a good idea for something to add. Official Positions worked well, though, I think.

4.) As mentioned, I’d probably just have replaced “The long way” with “Otherwise”; While I was getting weary of things since before then, I think that’s the one error I made that actually messed things up. Failing that, I’d have gone back further and voted against that Proposal that made “Proxy” an Official Position, which was the other mess of the Dynasty. (Which I really didn’t help with.)

5.) While I think a lot of Dynasties work best with the usual binary victory conditions, I think more Dynasties could use Scoring type conditions. Barring that bit at the end, I think they worked really quite well in this one. While any attempt at a single victory condition probably would have been difficult to broker and just kind of a mess. I’m sure there are plenty of others that they would suit quite well, and in others could be a nice change of pace. In general, I think Score like conditions should be a good thing to remember the next time we have a Dynasty with some good variety in the stats being tracked, or accomplishments that could be made, that has gone for a while with no clear victory condition yet. Though I’m not very certain how often those situations come along?

Re: Raichu on 3: The whole point of having Energy-limited actions is that it’s slightly less grindy than a simple daily action, because it lets you make up for missing moves with extra actions later.  But it’s just extra paperwork if scribes get too much energy to spend anyway.

Yeah, I think Energy worked well at alleviating the daily grind; I was more meaning that it could easily have turned into a grindy weekly cycle?

Not a bad baseline for a system, but it would probably need to be better fleshed out, both in terms of locations that do things, and other things to do in lieu of moving to those locations and doing those things, if something like it gets adopted again. Which, in retrospect, it probably would, in a more normal dynasty.

1) Do you think this dynasty was successful or unsuccessful? (or rate it 1-10)

This dynasty had a lot of potential, but there was a fair bit of kerfuffle even before all this ending stuff. Still, I’d give it a 6 or 7 given that there was a couple good scams to liven things up despite the length.

2) Did you like the theme of this dynasty?

I really liked the theme, but feel like more rules being added per week could have improved things some. We’ve barely scraped into the double digits apocrypha wise.

3) What mechanics worked well, and what mechanics didn’t?  What was your favorite mechanic?

There was a lot of mess with proxies and official positions, but over all they enriched the game. Deliberations were something I probably would have enjoyed more had we more time to use them. Energy was a pretty good addition, despite there being not much incentive to move around, but I’m not sure stress ever played much role. Most of the GNDT stats were definitely iffy, but combining them into each other is probably somewhat at fault.

4) If you could go back in time and fix one thing about the dynasty, what would it be?

There was a lot of CFJs in regards to the legality of changing the ruleset(and of what to do about illegal changes), and I think I’d have tried to resolve those problems sooner. But in reality I’d probably try to fix some of the problems that plagued proxies, and official positions overall.

and finally:

5) Do you prefer Scoring-style victory conditions to binary ones?

I’m not really sure. I do feel like Scoring would have been better had we organized things so that Scoring conditions weren’t added and used one at a time. Having different goals for people to shoot for is a good thing in my eyes.

6. (except for the end)
Yes, but i agree that there should have been a second theme
My favorite mechanic was when we brought in the Speaker, apocrypha could use some fine tuning. Ditto about stress
skip
yeah, per gp

maby id change 1 to a 5

stuff I liked: the mismash of various old rules combining into something new

stuff I didn’t like: Brendan objecting to my map that used a different energy rule to do more different stuff. kinda zapped my enthusiasm for the dynasty. Too much power was in Brendan’s hands

the scoring style is okay I guess. makes it hard for other players to catch up though, especially when often the only way to score is through a weekly event

I think the main problem with catch-up this dynasty was that half the scoring conditions were Looks-based, and Looks were particularly grindy and hard to catch up on.

And my own answers:
1) I’d rate this dynasty a 7.  It had some subtle problems, like Ousting being cheap enough to keep strong OPs from being proposed and Map Guesses chilling Map usage.  But I think it could easily have been fixed up into a 9/10 dynasty if the “too long” faction had more actively proposed fixes to their concerns earlier in the dynasty instead of waiting and then blowing it up at the end.

It was certainly way more successful than the other 2-month dynasty.

2) The theme wasn’t so good, partly because the random rules kept dragging everything off-theme.

3) Apocrypha and Weekly Reports were great, Maps were good, RFM was nice glue.  Ousting and Bathing were the weak points of the dynasty.  The Stress/Energy/Location economy and Proxies had potential, but didn’t get the attention they needed.

4) I’d have pointed out and foiled the proxy gold-to-paper scam in advance; it stifled the development of the Paper economy.

5) I’m *really* biased on the Scoring mechanic, because of my past history with it.  I think Scoring was necessary for this dynasty to continue to function all the way to the end.  It was similarly necessary the first time I proposed it, and I was Emperor the third time and thus wasn’t in a position to evaluate the victory condition.  I think Scoring is better than the average dynasty’s victory condition, but part of the purpose of this survey was to get a less biased assessment.

I give a full list later but one thing I dislike is waiting on the emperor to do things. Nothing against Brendan at all, I just dislike it in general. I think an advancing time style mechanic that everyone can do works better for the moving things forward each week events.

I felt like there was one other major problem with this dynasty; I was carrying a disproportionate amount of the proposal burden.  I usually had two proposals in the queue, often dealing with urgent fixes, and as a result didn’t manage to propose some cool ideas like more positions and meaningful locations. Meanwhile, the queue was usually <5 proposals deep.  And a lot of you had issues with the dynasty that weren’t being addressed, there were a bunch of loose mechanics that needed tying together, and a bunch of existing mechanics were only a little work away from being useful.

This dynasty’s enacted proposals…
...written by Bucky: 37
...by everyone else: 39

Hm. A lot of the problems I had, I couldn’t come up with a good solution to?

And, by the time I was getting bored with it as it was so long, I was starting to lose my drive to propose more; which can be a vicious cycle that I should try to stay clear of, moving forward. I feel like I fall into it a lot, and I often don’t have many Proposal ideas anyways.

A personal note on the Dynasty: I had a fair few timing scams based on Votable Matter enactments, most prominently the Proxy Gold to Paper, but I also feel like I was resolving a large fraction of them, anyways? So I’m curious if that’s actually the case or just a mistaken impression I got.

And here’s the full breakdown:
Bucky: 37
Raichu: 9
GenericPerson: 7
Brendan: 6
Clucky: 5
Larrytheturtle: 4
Sci_Guy12: 3
qwertyu63: 3
Izzoboetam: 1
Kevan: 1

You know, nine times as many successful Proposals as Kevan sounds pretty good.

Normally I’d feel alright with nine, but I am actually kinda surprised it was that few, considering how long this Dynasty lasted.

Hm, how many did I make that failed…

...Although I should add that Sci_Guy12 was a more active proposer than the breakdown indicates, but we didn’t adopt most of his proposals (such as the Historian position)

Seven of RaichuKFM’s proposals failed, including a veto.
Eight of my proposals failed.

And I have one Proposal that’s still pending, but would have been a pass if I hadn’t, well, won.

And the Veto, as I recall, was because the Proposal wouldn’t do anything if it passed due to explicitly hinging on an earlier, failed Proposal, and clearing the queue. It was a failing throwaway Proposal anyways, though. I was just trying to see if I could get people to vote for Larry’s “I gain 5 Paper” if I offered a “If that passed, Larry loses 5 Paper, and everyone else gains 5 Paper”, out of curiosity.

And also to maybe bribe something out of Larry with a self-kill if it worked, I forget.

Mostly just to get my weekly Proposal Paper, though I wound up making an actual Proposal that week.

As the Dynasty’s foremost proponent of :D, it may be unsurprising that I am delighted by the way this all turned out. 10/10, would Edit again. Blognomic has been pretty quiet for the last year or so—notice that I kept Two-Player Mode in the switchover just in case it wound down to that again—so having this many old players unidle, and new ones join, more than fulfills my personal goal of “create a dynasty where people show up to fuss at each other a lot.”

Thank you all for the work you did to send it careening dangerously through the history of the game over the last couple months, and particularly to Bucky for being proposal MVP. If I had decided to play equitable instead of egalitarian with the Scribe of the Week award, it would have been you every week.

I think :D did the dynasty a lot more harm than good because it scared off Kevan.  But it could have gone a lot worse by killing the dynasty.

Actually, from what Kevan said, I think the :D was completely irrelevant, it was real life stuff? Specifically Brexit, at least at first.

...I guess the comment is ambiguous, but “Get people to vote for a thing that lets you win” sounds like what most Nomic is, really.

Also, expect an AA in a bit.