BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’m not a Snail, but I’d say the first option is maybe best

With maybe 12 Fame (one extra ceremony)

The trick is finding a value that rewards Habanero enough without being an insurmountable value that makes it impossible for any other Snail to overcome Habanero’s resource gain, while also trying not to nerf Fame just because Habanero is the only Snail that has a lot of it.

That said, I like the idea of one extra Ceremony, counting in the Fan Favourite bonus, so I could agree on the first option with 12 Fame for Habanero.

Also there’s the possibility of losing all your Fame as Fan Favourite, so it won’t really be the case that others can’t overcome the Fame no matter how much we let Habanero have

Fame does nothing so I don’t really see the problem or any reason to reward Habanero with anything.

@Clucky, I disagree that Fame does nothing. In Pimp my Snail, which is on track to pass easily, Fame is used to purchase the ability move farther per Move. Unless Fame is nerfed to no longer be the currency by which Equipment/Upgrades are purchased, Habanero would be able to afford all possible enhancements to continue to do better in future races.

Whether or not gaining Fame from future Races will be part of achieving victory, it will certainly make it less fun for other players to attempt to play in the dynasty as-is if they know that it will be unlikely for anyone but Habanero to be the best at each Race. What would be the point in trying?

I do see Desertfrog’s point, though, about losing Fame if even one Race is lost, which means it’s even more important that “infinite” Fame cannot be used to buy one’s way into winning future Races, just to prevent that from locking out all other Snails from ever getting the top Fame-earning spot.

I don’t think this is quite the same as the Brendan thing. There, Brendan had pretty much a stranglehold on the dynasty with infinite Heat (an already very critical resource where you literally can’t do anything without it), so it was hard to imagine any victory condition not being fulfilled by him and therefore hard to imagine any victory condition passing. Also, Habanero I was already quite old at the time of the scam; this dynasty has just begun.

Here, Fame does nothing, so I’ve essentially just fool’s golded myself. No one will allow anything that gives Fame a purpose through, and we’ll drift away from Fame as the central resource. Also, I’m the Fan Favourite, so I’m one bad race from completely losing my lead. I think it’d be silly to call for a chop so soon after I have obtained a pile of a useless resource liable to evaporate at any time.

My main problem is that people aren’t actually playing enough. When I proposed Marvellous Mollusks, I was sure someone would notice what I thought to be a very obvious scam, but it just floated right along unopposed (or maybe someone did notice and didn’t say anything, which I really hope is the case). With Kevan idling, it’s just me and you as the significantly active players. Frankly, this is a little depressing; us and Desertfrog are trying our best to build an entertaining game here, but I see little point when most of the other players can’t even be bothered to crawl a good distance out of the way of TSoD given three whole days to do so. I fear things are just going to decay into a competition between me, you, and perhaps Clucky. I would really prefer this not happen, since I won’t have the spare time to be an active player forever and would rather have a base of active players actually doing things, even if it hurts my chances of winning. I used the scam now instead of holding on to it until it actually accomplished something because I am saddened by the lack of activity (not just this dynasty, but the inactivity in a lot of recent dynasties was why I unidled in the first place) and would like to generate activity. I’m more just doing things for the sake of doing interesting things than doing things to win.

That was a pretty aimless ramble. A little more relevant to what actually happened, I will obviously oppose any attempts to strip me of my Fame via votable matter. It’s hard to imagine a Fame-based victory condition while I have so much of it, but at least I will get to enjoy rolling DICE12 instead of DICE10!

@JonathanDark probably should get you and one other person to change your votes on that proposal then

[Habanero] “My main problem is that people aren’t actually playing enough.” - I’d sadly and strongly agree with this. It does seem to ebb and flow, we had a bad stretch in 2021-22 that we tried to address with a Dormancy change. It may be an issue of social norms, where one person not actually playing (especially over several dynasties) signals to others that it’s fine to do this.

Minimally-engaged players were okay when BlogNomic had a much higher active player count, but in a smaller group they can really swing the game. It’s definitely a strategy to make a scam or a selfish proposal sound fun and simple to get some votes from people who aren’t really playing, and to hope that an active opponent only calls it out for what it is after it’s already gotten some of those votes. The less active players probably won’t change their vote in time to stop it enacting, if they care to at all. This doesn’t seem much fun, though.

I actually changed my mind on this one. While Habanero will certainly be able to get Equipment/Upgrades for free, there is currently only one Equipment/Upgrade that will be available, and it’s just DICE12 instead of DICE10, which isn’t that much of an improvement.

The truly easiest thing to do to allow Habanero to reap the reward of finding an exploit and yet keep the game playable for everyone else is to not add any more Equipment/Upgrades. We already have another proposal to add Items, so put new stuff there.

On the topic of getting players more interested, I’m really not sure what to do there. I’m starting to think that we need to lean in more to today’s mobile game style of giving players small rewards more often, with a bigger prize dangling in the distance.

I’m not yet sure how to adapt that mentality to a Snail race.

If some players weren’t engaged enough to perform the very small and highly dramatic gameplay action of “roll DICE10 to try to evade the Slug of Death”, with the big outcome of not losing the first race, I don’t think small extra rewards would help.

I noted in washup for The Great Machine Dynasty that it seemed to help to have a big, complex, compulsory game action to shake out the less active players, who balked and dropped out: we went into the second act with an engaged subset of the starting players. So complex actions are probably better than simple or optional ones, to make it more apparent to a player that if they aren’t taking the actions, they aren’t really playing the dynasty.

There may be a misperception among some BlogNomic players that being very minimally present in a dynasty helps the game (because Nomic is better with more players), when it can actually make things worse (by having contested proposals waved over the line by players who aren’t keeping up with the game).

That’s quite helpful. I forgot about that wrap-up comment in that dynasty.