Proposal: Make Me an Offer
Withdrawn. Failed by Kevan.
Adminned at 17 Apr 2025 06:20:57 UTC
In the rule “Phases” just before the subrule “The Break-In” insert a subrule named “Bribes” with the following text:
There is a list named Bribery that is privately tracked by the Concierge, defaulting to an empty list, where each entry is the name of a Burglar, the name of a Guard, an amount of Successes, and a Status.
If the current Phase is Planning the Break-In, as a virtual action a Burglar may send a Bribe to the Concierge that contains the name of a Guard and an amount of Successes between 1 and that Burglar’s Successes. When resolving a Bribe, if that Burglar already has an entry with their name in the Bribery, the Bribe action fails, otherwise that Burglar’s name, Guard’s name, and amount of Successes is added to the Bribery along with a Status of Pending.
If the current Phase is Planning the Break-In, as a virtual action a Guard may sent an Acceptance to the Concierge that contains the name of a Burglar and an amount of Successes. When resolving an Acceptance, if that Guard’s name, that Burglar’s Name, and that amount of Successes all match the same entry in the Bribery where that entry has a status of Pending, the Acceptance succeeds and the Concierge should perform a Bribe Exchange on that Bribery entry, otherwise the Acceptance fails. Bribe Exchange is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Set that entry’s status to Accepted.
* Privately communicate the route and Preparation Action (if any) of the Guard named in that entry to the Burglar named in that entry.
In the rule “The Break-In”, just before the step that starts with “Post a blog entry” in Breaking In, add the following steps:
* For each entry in the Bribery with a status of Accepted, add the amount of Successes in that entry to the Successes of the Guard named in that entry.
* Remove all entries from the Bribery.
Something Kevan suggested a while back, which was a way to bribe Guards. We have a way to get partial routes, but this is a way of gathering the whole thing, for the price of trading a persistent resource.
Could two Agents pool to bribe Successes with each other back and forth? Absolutely, which leads to a potential other idea of excluding a Guard or Burglar from the next round’s activities if the others on their team have suspicions. I don’t have a good mechanic for that yet that wouldn’t be too punishing.
It feels like this is a bit of an unneeded mechanic. In addition to the flaws of success trading, it’s already possible for guards to share their route and action choices with burglars. If it turns out to be a lie, that’s just a part of the game.
ais523:
Instead, this is a disguised mechanic to allow Successes to be traded directly, allowing a set of pooling players to lump all their Successes onto a single player. (You can tell that this mechanic is intended for making trades in a non-obvious way, rather than for its apparently intended purpose, because it allows bribes sized at more than 1 Success – even if a Burglar were prepared to give up on their opportunity to make any Success profit in order to screw over Guards who didn’t accept the bribe, paying 2 or more Successes removes even that incentive. So, the fact that it allows you to trade Successes in bulk is something that would only have been introduced into the proposal in the first place as a method of doing a large bulk trade.)