BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Just a small thing but I think “explicitly co-operative mechanisms defined” should be “co-operative mechanisms explicitly defined”.

“consideration in any future dynasty in BlogNomic” feels too vague if you ask me.

Weather or not you uphold a promise made in one dynasty is made with consideration of future BlogNomic dynasties in mind—you don’t want a reputation as someone who doesn’t follow through on their word because then people won’t work with you in the future

Maybe just replace “An Vassal should not trade actions in BlogNomic for favors or compensation outside of BlogNomic, nor trade actions in any other game for favors within BlogNomic.” with something like

“An Vassal should not trade actions in BlogNomic for favors or compensation outside of BlogNomic, nor trade actions in any other game for favors within BlogNomic, nor trade actions or favors in one Dynasty of Blognomic for actions or favors in another Dynasty of Blognomic”

Maybe I’m in the minority here but I resent the idea that a “favour” is a Thing to be regulated by gamestate and not just like, hey, I did Josh a solid that one time and maybe if he’s cool he’ll do me a solid again in the future.

I think there is this supposition that the more informal social interactions are written out of gameplay, the fairer things will necessarily be. That can be an outcome on a case by case basis, but when people are supposed to pretend that sociality resets at the end of the dynasty that seems to me to just favour those who have the most experience and therefore the best appreciation of the meta. That is, Josh doesn’t need to owe Kevan a favour in order for them to reliably predict each others’ behaviour.

On similar grounds I’m equally against codifying “favours” as Things that are tracked as an explicit resource. Like let’s just be normal for once.

This might need some of the language that was being drafted on the Discord, particularly the aspect of “forgoing” actions - a deal can be made around one party not doing something. The existing “actions in any other game” bullet point does seem to have worked fine for the couple of years that it’s been there, but I assume it’s had much less “but what if I” pressure on it, that a cool Agora scam would get short shrift here regardless.

What’s your case for mantle passing being a good standard way to play BlogNomic? There was a strong support for defaulting it off in 2022 - although with not much context or discussion, I don’t know if there was something about the end of the Battlebots Dynasty that made it an obvious thing to do. Have any Emperors actually chosen to switch it on since then? (The two mantle pass victories in the History are both down to Alliances rather than regular mantle.)

“No Cooperation” seems a bit of a philosophical puzzle when applied to any game - if players use a non-cooperative mechanic cooperatively, was it just a cooperative mechanic all along? And for a Nomic there’s always an intrinsic thread of small cooperations in the process of voting on proposals.

Yeah, I think you could argue that “the dynasty allows apple-trading, therefore trading all my apples for the win is dynastic cooperation”, but maybe it’s one of those “the point of this rule is to set social expectations” things where it shouldn’t matter. I’m assuming the exemption is meant more for dynasties that are explicitly team-based or full coop.

@Vovix Yeah, exactly; dynastic rules supercede core so it’s not strictly necessary but it’s important to signal these things sometimes.

To satisfy my own curiosity, I’ve now updated the History of Victories table to include a tag and some other context for mantle rolling, to give a clearer view on where the practice fits into the history of the game, and what we’d be going back to if we made it a default again.

As far as I can see from the records, true mantle rolling (where a player who can’t win helps someone else to, on the strict agreement that the winner will, on the outcome of a die roll, possibly pass the mantle to them) first happened in 2015.

The idea was forgotten for a few years before reappearing in 2019, where it would go on to run for the next couple of years, with 40% of dynasties ending with a mantle roll. In October 2021 a rule was brought into restrict mantle passing - it was allowed by default, but Emperors could choose to turn it off. (And the majority of Emperors did: over the next 12 dynasties, 7 chose to disallow mantle passing.) In September 2022 we voted to have mantle passes off by default, and no Emperor has chosen to turn them on since then.

Does seem like the general mood there is that classic mantle rolling isn’t that good for the game, and as a Building Block has been superseded by the more nuanced Declared Alliances.