BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I guess I’ll kick things off with a few observations:

* I’m disappointed that the dynasty never got beyond being an elaborate dice roll. The Gas stuff - okay, I see the flaws, especially as a couple of them were deliberate scams. But it would still have been nice to have seen some meaningful decisions come into the game. Audience Actions ended up getting us some of the way there but of course the dynasty was ending at that point. A sense that there wasn’t any meaningful interaction and that the dynasty was essentially a ‘dice roll with extra steps’ was a part of my motivation to flip; what’s the point in being loyal to a team when all the team is doing is hoping to roll good dice so someone else can win?

* That said, I didn’t hate that the game was constrained to a smaller pool of winners, and feel like this may be an occasional mechanic we return to, as it helps ease the gap between the players who want to win and the players who just want to be present. Perhaps part of that was also the condensed nature of the game, I don’t know. Striking that not one player went idle in the dynasty.

* Scams I had left in my back pocket: if I (or any player) had idled out and unidled then my Team would have been reset to Brendan’s team automatically, as “Whenever a Realtor becomes unidle for the first time in this dynasty” doesn’t contain an exemption for those who were already active in the dynasty; doing so would have given my Team an illegal value but I think that would result in me bouncing to Brendan. I think that most of the others (especially expedited Audience Actions) got caught.

All in all, 8/10 mini-dynasty, I reckon.

it was fun, simple, n lighthearted!! i think that’s an excellent way to resolve a potentially tense dispute about who won between multiple parties. if we do it again in the future i’d love to see a more interactive main mechanic, but not necessarily a more complex one!

I felt like the mechanical stagnation might have been down to the two-team system putting everything on the knife-edge of quorum - that any proposed mechanic would have to be crafted perfectly neutrally (or be slightly bad for the proposer’s team) in order to pass. In practice that probably wasn’t true, though, the voting wasn’t always as much of a bloc as I expected.

The dynasty didn’t feel like a meaningful tiebreaker to me, and I wasn’t that excited by the fact that however well I played this dynasty, I couldn’t (without some amazing scam) win it - that the best outcome I was hope for was to earn some probably-fool’s-gold for the dynasty after it.

(I still don’t understand at all why the last dynasty needed a tiebreaker, when it was built around a merit-random endgame mechanic that happened to break, but which was still right there in front of everyone.)

The team thing did feel a bit tense for putting pressure on the weakest players not to let their side down.

One thing our side was keeping under its hats was the fact that TyGuy had miscalculated the likelihood of Finishing Moves, I think quite dramatically: the maths is a bit beyond me, but the internet suggests that the odds of rerolling your way to any five-of-a-kind in Yahtzee is 3.4%, so (I think) rolling a specific set of five faces would be a sixth of that. Which is 0.5%, rather than the 14% that TyGuy had calculated. But maybe TyGuy’s estimation was itself a bluff.

I also haven’t worked out the actual numbers of it, but (at least without rerolling) a five-of-a-kind should be less likely than a specific combo of five dice in arbitrary order; the combo can be rearranged 120 ways but the five-of-a-kind can’t.

* Great concept for the effectively 2-player dynasty, even if the gameplay didn’t get beyond dice rolling; It was redtara I think that suggested maybe doing a 3-player one next time, which could fix issues caused by having everything on that quorum knife-edge.

* Even if it were just dice-rolling, that’s fine, it’s not my favorite, but Yahtzee is a classic for a reason. Some teamwork would have been nice but I think it may have been more the length and not the team structure.

* @Josh, I had considered the oddness of “becoming unidle for the first time in this dynasty” might have something in it but in the end I don’t think that would have happened? Why wouldn’t you become Enhancement Talent?

* Good to know that the implicit Josh-Brendan alliance that occurs whenever they’re both active does trump other allegiances.

ngl torch passing kinda ruined the dynasty but it was also inevitable given the whole knife’s edge quorum thing

@Kevan I stand by my (rough) estimate of 14%, assuming you choose a finisher that is reasonably near the optimal of 5 different faces, including 1 miss. Internet suggests 3.1% to roll a large straight on the first roll in Yahtzee, which is the same as two finales (1-5 or 2-6). I guess that makes the first roll odds 1.55% for a single finale. The odds go up from there with two rerolls.

It seemed wild to me that some people chose Finishers with 4 or 5 of a single face. Clucky’s Finisher would have actually lost him 3 points, before gaining him 5. I encouraged my team to make these people Up more often.

@pokes I would have, at the end, but enhancement talent was only the rule for the last day or so of the dynasty.

I don’t think I completely agree that there’s an implicit Josh-Brendan alliance; Brendan and I are philosophically very aligned as players that makes it easy to manipulate each other. I assume that Brendan posted the Bridge proposal with me in mind, knowing how I would evaluate it… But anybody could have made that proposal and I would have looked at it the same way. Voting FOR on it was just objectively the correct strategic choice for me. The trick is that Brendan knows enough about how I react to spot the opportunity and make that proposal, which is not universal and what maybe leads to the impression of an alliance.

[TyGuy] Ah, fair enough, that makes more sense. I was assuming the lack of any pure Finishers backed up my belief that the odds were very low, but I suppose not everyone was rolling for them every single turn.

A Leap-Heavy Finisher doesn’t seem too bad: it makes it safer for that player to try for a regular Leap each turn, by turning one of its possible fail states into a prize.

@tyguy the point of my finisher was to take away the risk of just keeping leaps and not rolling a kick/grapple/punch

“That said, I didn’t hate that the game was constrained to a smaller pool of winners, and feel like this may be an occasional mechanic we return to, as it helps ease the gap between the players who want to win and the players who just want to be present.”

Yeah I did like this!

Per Josh’s first comment here, I too was pleasantly surprised that no one idled out until pokes did at DoV time, and that indeed the vote percentage on proposals stayed quite high right through the end—especially since there was no direct victory option available for most of the voting body. If you assess Blognomic as a game of chance, though, it makes sense: a single reward with low odds of success seems like it can make players feel hesitant to invest and loss-averse (it certainly does for me), whereas the incentive of more small rewards with greater odds of getting them has a much lower bar for engagement. Possibly I am just recapitulating basic game theory.

I did post the Bridge proposal thinking it would probably be enough to flip Josh, but I thought it was entirely possible that another player would beat him to the punch, too. I could have just proposed to change his team directly and see if he took the bait, but I was curious to test the sense of team loyalty arising from such a short window. Any single Face vote would have been enough to end the game, with that player gaining at least 8 Contribution out of it. Another tally in the column for “players will often vote against self-interest in favor of group pressure or thematic constraint,” which… I guess confounds the game-theory assertion I made above.

This dynasty played to things I enjoy most about Blognomic. I was made a team leader, and given a probability puzzle. I really enjoy games of chance that I can calculate, maybe even master. And getting to call the shots (when people agreed to it) is sort of a power fantasy. All of this, plus helping out my niece, Silverwing, gave me enough to do that I wasn’t doing much proposing.

The success of https://blognomic.com/archive/torch_the_bridge demonstrates for me that people were less into the dynasty’s gamestate dynamics than I was. Josh voiced his dislike for the chance-based portion relatively early in the dynasty, after his attempt to change things up with Gas lost momentum. And every member of team Brendan was willing to vote to win by proposal, vs by gameplay alone.

It’s satisfying to me to think that I was at least able to use rules I voted against to accelerate our team’s progress to the point that our gameplay victory was almost inevitable. (Though I get that some people don’t see it as so likely.) Good timing for a betrayal, if ever there were, and as a bonus it punctuates Josh’s high value for personal gain over team play.

I still believe the 2-team system could be redone, though it seems like it needs a more robust betrayal deterrence mechanism. If https://blognomic.com/archive/no_more_betrayal had passed in time, it would only have kept the votes under quorum, with our exactly even teams, and the proposal still could have passed at 48 hours, or whenever another teammate realized it was inevitable, and cut their losses.

The main problem I see with forming a two-team dynasty is that if the leaders were winners from last dynasty, it’s hard to justify guaranteeing one of them the next emperorship. They’re kind of already getting (half of) that. Maybe you could try it with the three top players, though? If an emperor would commit to remaining impartial, and to vetoing proposals that heavily favor one team, then maybe the runner-ups from the last dynasty could be made team captains. It’s a thought, anyway.

Yes, I want to think about a medal system where players can earn merit medals in dynasties and when two or more have, say, three or five it triggers a tiebreak meta.

Aesthetically I’m not a great fan of “nobody won First Dynasty of Trapdoorspyder” or “Brendan won the First Dynasty of Trapdoorspyder and the Tenth Metadynasty”, whichever of those just happened here. The previous dynasty could have contained its own tiebreak minigame.

I should have said so earlier, but I offer here a salute to TyGuy6, for two weeks of intense and serious competition without apparent rancor. This is the Blognomic atmosphere I like best.

It is really nice to have had a properly contested endgame that was conducted calmly and with civility

Oh, right, some scam reveals:

*Trap pointed out the team name scam very early on. At that point, I told my team I was hoping to avoid scams, because I wanted to buy into the roleplay as a Face. But Trap and I erased our comments about the team name scam on the team discord, to prevent potential leaks, and I told him I wasn’t against trying this instant win type of scam, if we failed to win conventionally. (Like Josh, I still do love a good scam.)

*I requested my teammates volunteer to go “Inactive”, to do audience actions for the remaining teammates. Only Silverwing and myself did. The interesting thing is what happens if too many people in your team go Inactive. It increases the frequency of the remaining wrestlers going Up, and therefore becomes easier for the opposition to get to choose as the Opponent “any Realtor they do not share a Team with”. This opens a scam where they can choose a Realtor who is already Up, which means there are only 2 Up, afterward, and then a random Active Realtor would be made Up.

If you follow all that, you’ll see that too many Inactives becomes a liability, so the system was pleasingly self-balancing. There was, however, one point at which the baton was passing fast enough that maybe our team could have done it naturally, (we had to choose Kevan, once, as he was the only one over 24 hours,) but I didn’t mention it because of the Face roleplay.

*For a while there, we were planning to (in spite of my anti-scam intentions) fire off several duels toward a teammate with 0 Contrib, have them throw the duel, and collect team points while they couldn’t go below 0. But we scrapped it when team Brendan targeted both of our 0-players, still had 2 of their own 0-players, and may have just done the same if they saw it happen. Also, it would have been a lot of extra work for just +1 Contrib per duel (and a one-off +2).

*Not sure it’s a scam, but if anyone had tried to hold onto an impact for too long, they might have lost it if the player who next made them Up got any points in their fighting action. (Step: “If they have gained at least 1 Contribution during this Fight action, optionally removing an Impact from their Opponent.”) I wonder if Kevan intended Rowdy as a decoy impact, because, if gained via Taunt on your own turn, it would often have been lost in that way before it could have been used on your next turn.