Ascension Address: Legislature At Work
With the decline of the Royal Court in the late 18th century, its legislative body, once the seat of power for an empire, no longer served any useful political function. However, organisations of this age and venerability don’t go down lightly. Lawmaking started out as politics, but it evolved into an art, and eventually a sport.
Nowadays, the Legislators still meet, more out of tradition and camaraderie than any sense of duty, and set about inventing bureaucratic hoops for each other to jump through, and raising points of procedure to stymie their opponents, and coming up with the most elaborate and impressive acronyms they can to title documents. They worry about whether they might be able to talk their competitors’ ordinances down, or survive letting them through, or even stoop to the level of voting them down.
Any sport needs its referees, and the Legislature is overseen by the mysterious Wielder of Vetoes. Sitting on a pedestal to one side of the room, the Wielder observes the action, and reads the documents, and cross-checks them against all the relevant law.
And then says No. Over and over and over again.
Change synonyms as follows: “Worker” to “Legislator”; “Factory” to “Wielder of Vetoes”.
Do not retain any dynastic rules.
Set the Special Case rules “Seasonal Downtime” and “Dynastic Distance” to Inactive.
Change the dynastic tracking page to “The Legislature”.
The theme of this dynasty: proposals! I’m looking for a dynasty for which the gameplay is primarily based around proposing and voting, as opposed to the gameplay primarily being something else, with the proposing and voting on the side. Note that this is proposals specifically, with CFJs and DoVs behaving as normal for BlogNomic; when making rules related to voting, please be careful to not disrupt how CFJ/DoV voting works.
I’m normally fine with Seasonal Downtime, but it has a bug in it that interacts badly with dynastic rules that override core-rule actions – we’re quite likely to get some of those this dynasty. So it seemed safest to simply just turn it off, especially as it seems very unlikely to come into play this dynasty. I’m turning Dynastic Distance off partly because I prefer to exclude things from the Emperor on a case-by-case basis, and partly because it affects “dynastic rules which do not deal with voting” and that seems like a status that may change unexpectedly and/or to be hard to define.
I’ll leave the blog template changes up to everyone else, partly because I’m not great at that sort of thing, partly because the BlogNomic playerbase as a whole is generally great at that sort of thing, and partly because I’m not an admin. Could we work a veto icon into the blog header somehow? (Also, I’d prefer it if the header didn’t contain a marquee tag this time.)
ais523:
Imperial Style:
Proposals: somewhere between Gardener and Onlooker (even though I’m usually a Guide). Unlike many of my dynasties, I’m intending much of the gameplay in this one to be about trying to steer the ruleset in a direction that you think would be good for your playstyle, and I don’t want to interfere with that too much.
Protection: I’m naturally Preservationist, but for this dynasty, I’m probably just going to AGAINST-vote rather than veto proposals I think are too unfair to the leading players. That said, depending on how the dynasty plays out, it may become somewhat unclear what “leading” means.
I do want to move away somewhat from the “build up a gamestate over the course of the entire dynasty or you have no chance” nature of the last couple of dynasties – I don’t necessarily think that that’s a bad thing, but I do think it’s time for a change.
Workload: I’m expecting to have my hands full with all the vetoes, and don’t want substantial additional workload on top of that. I’m probably going to be OK tracking secret information as long as I don’t have to actually do anything with it.
Attitude towards scams: I’m going to try to stop scams hitting the ruleset. If they somehow make it past me, though (and I’m far from perfect at catching every possible scam), I’m going to go with the exact wording of whatever ends up there, even if doing so would benefit a scam.
Attitude towards vetoes: Mechanical was invented for this dynasty. Apart from that, mostly Benign so that I don’t disrupt veto-dependent mechanics too much, but I’m going to be more paranoid than usual about catching potential core rules breakage (for all I know we’re going to end up breaking the proposal system with the dynastic rules, but that isn’t a huge issue if we have working CFJs
and DoVs to fix it).
Predictability: Somewhere between Methodical and Instinctual. This dynasty is somewhat different from what I normally come up with, so I’m still finding my feet to some extent. (This was a “backup theme” – my first choice was too similar to the recent couple of dynasties, so I’m saving that for the future because I think having variety in dynasties is good for the game.)