BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

“for any” should be “for which any”, i think?

Ta

For the clause: “It requires the collection of an enumerated quantity of resources and that quantity could be collected by a perfect player in less than a week, or could not be collected by a perfect player in more than a month, in the current ruleset as written”

Given that agendas must have two initialisation keys, it’s possible that an agenda with a collection component could be significantly more difficult than just the collection aspect of it. It might be worth taking account of that?

this is very wordy, but i do think i could perform the instructions described here, at least! and it seems like you’ve accounted for each of the current restrictions in some form.

i think that the fourth sub-bullet (“It requires the collection of an enumerated quantity of resources…”) is the weakest one here by far. it feels somewhat redundant with the final bullet, and i’m not sure that i can be trusted to anticipate what a ‘perfect player’ would do, nor do i think that referring to the ruleset as-written is a good idea at all when part of the idea here is that the agendas will inform the construction of parts of the ruleset!!

on another note, maybe “It mentions an initialisation key with no intent to use mechanics related to it” would instead be clearer as something like “It mentions an initialisation key but does not require its owner to interact with mechanics related to that key to fulfil the agenda”?

The effort boundaries are helpful here, but 30 days as the optimum difficulty level (we’re all trying to write difficult goals for our opponents, after all) is going to make for a long dynasty. I’d halve that.

Thanks both, have made changes.

@lemon The rule explicitly refers to the current ruleset as written so as to remove the onus on you to consider the potential impact of future proposals, which is infinite!

Thanks Kevan, have done so.

@Josh i appreciate the attempt at making my life easier, but my entire goal here was and continues to be to see how hidden objectives will influence the /construction/ of game rules!! that clause would restrict everyone to making agendas which relate purely to the current dynastic ruleset for fear of deletion, undermining that completely.

@lemon It’s not about making your life *easier*, it’s about making adjudication *possible at all*. If an agenda says “get 20 cogs” and the current ruleset says “get 1 cog per day”, are you compelled to consider that a proposal might change that to “get 20 cogs a day” and thus reject the agenda? Once agendas are dished out we will all be working to change the ruleset to make our own agendas easier and those of our opponents harder, but mandating that they have to start with a baseline equitable difficulty seems reasonable to me. Are we expecting many maor mechanics to still be stubs when this atomic action is carried out?

You might want to re-add the clause “It gives non-dynastic instructions” or similar. Otherwise I can submit an agenda like “You must own 10 cog components and 2 valves, and must have voted FOR on every proposal that has the word Spanner somewhere in its flavour text or title.”

@Josh i’m not expecting many to be complete stubs (although if /any/ are still stubs, that makes this method of adjudication problematic!) but i do feel that it’s important for players to be able to make Agendas relating to rules that could exist, but don’t at the time of writing.

@SingularByte seconded (altho arguably that’s somewhat enforced by the definition of Agendas as describing dynastic gamestates)

@Josh i agree that this makes adjudication by this metric basically impossible. that means that you’re going to have to either trust my judgement in vague terms, or come up with a different way to have me adjudicate things strictly like this!

@lemon I think my preference is that people not write agendas about hypothetical future mechanics, not least because that is inherently unfair against the person who gets it.

@SB Thanks, have added that in to the third bullet.

I have an issue with this one:

“It mentions an initialisation key but does not require its owner to interact with mechanics related to that key to fulfil the agenda”

Which is different from the current:

“It mentions an initialisation key with no intent to use mechanics related to it”

Because if I as a Machinist can convince another Machinist to do the dynastic actions required to fulfill my Agenda, I should be able to do so. Requiring the owner to do the work directly in all cases seems limiting.

Actually yeah, that is a good point. Virtually every agenda that doesn’t change your own personal values is technically able to be done by other people, so only a small fraction can truly *require* the owner to interact with mechanics - and ones that deal with personal values alone are ones that Lemon has said she wants to avoid.

On an unrelated note @Lemon, when you say that some Agendas could relate to rules that don’t yet exist, I think that ship has already partly sailed with Amended Amendments lowering the time limit. People who have an agenda that refers to rules that don’t yet exist will be able to ditch it in 7 days.

Thanks, have sharpened it.

@SingularByte 7 days is 3-4 proposal cycles. i still think that changing the ruleset to fit your agenda will be a much more expedient & safer strategy than waiting 7 days with a dud and /then/ waiting for me to amend it :0

strongly because this not only disincentivises, but /makes impossible/ the type of agenda that i want to have in the game!

additionally, as i said previously, the “under the current ruleset as written” clause requires us to comprehensively flesh out the ruleset before moving out of initialisation phase two, which was supposed to be much shorter than phase one.

@lemon: you have expressed two contradictory statements, at least to my understanding:

“part of the idea here is that the agendas will inform the construction of parts of the ruleset!!”

and

“the “under the current ruleset as written” clause requires us to comprehensively flesh out the ruleset before moving out of initialisation phase two”

I don’t quite see how we can satisfy both. Either the Agendas should be based on a fully-fleshed out ruleset, or they should be written for a gamestate not yet affected by the current rules but by potential future rules from future Proposals.

Which is it that you really want?

@JonathanDark you’re misunderstanding completely. the first statement is a thing that i /want/. the second statement is a thing that /this proposal would make true/, which i DON’T want!

Ok, got it. So in your mind, ideally, we should have never expanded the stubs at all until after Phase Two.

Re-reading the conversation between lemon and Josh, I’m getting a better sense of the struggle here. We want a ruleset that’s fleshed out enough to write Agendas where the difficulty of achieving the Agenda can be guessed at, but not so fleshed out that someone could achieve any of the Agendas that they own without any other change to the ruleset.

Does that sound about right?

Although I feel like this will simply result in a stagnant ruleset, as everyone votes against everyone else’s Proposals on the basis that those Proposals are merely to make the author’s Agendas easier. The only time one should vote in favor of a Proposal after Phase Two, if you adopt the most defensive strategy, is if the Proposal happens to help one of your own Agendas, and it’s worth it to make someone else’s easier if it makes yours easier as well.

yes, that sounds about right!

i suppose i’m okay with some Agendas being achievable under the current ruleset, but i don’t want it to be enforced across all of them. and this proposal requiring me to /delete/ every single Agenda which can’t be fulfilled “under the current ruleset as written” enforces exactly that.

on that last point about the stagnant ruleset, i feel like that would be more easily avoided if we’d fleshed things out less, because then advancing the ruleset would be necessary for play.

this was never intended to be a “build a complete playable ruleset before we start playing it” dynasty, and i’m not pleased that it seems like it might turn into that! but phase one lasted way too long, i guess.

i dispute that it’ll /completely/ stagnate the ruleset, though? after all, almost any nomic proposal can be assumed to further the goals of the author in some way if they’re treating those proposals like the game moves that they are!!

I do think having missions be incompletable initially and fleshed out later is an impossible ideal.

Let’s say for instance that there’s a mission to get a lockdown value of 15 days, but then people disagree on making it even possible to reach it. Literally your choices are:

a. Keep pushing different variants of that rule, making it obvious to everyone that it’s your mission. (Plus, someone will know from the outset that *someone* has that mission so they have a vested interest to stop it being possible.)

b. Drop the mission after a week and re-roll it.

Now, some proportion of players will have completable missions at the start and others won’t, given that different keys have been fleshed out to different extents. Given that b) is the only logical choice if you have a mission you can’t complete at the outset, this means that any player who gets randomly assigned an incompletable mission will essentially be being hit by a 1-week penalty to their progress.

@SingularByte point A is going to be less of a problem for the Agendas that i write, which will be fully secret. so /i’d/ like to be able to write those, at least!

@Lemon If this passes, I would support a further amendment that gave slightly slacker restrictions on Agendas that you write yourself.

@Josh i appreciate that, at least! i’d still prefer this not pass, though, ‘cause i think having us flesh out the whole ruleset before play starts sounds a bit tedious :0