Thursday, January 24, 2019

Proposal: More tasteful red herrings

Reached quorum 5 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 25 Jan 2019 18:49:02 UTC

Replace the paragraph beginning “When a Detective finds a Clue” in the rule “Clues” with the following:

When a Detective finds a Clue, the Chief performs an atomic action known as Discovery, which has the following steps:

* Establish the Target to be the Detective mentioned when describing the performing of this atomic action.
* Establish the Target’s gullibility as:
** 3 if the target is Credulous.
** 1 if the target is Discerning.
** 2 otherwise.
* Select a Possibility at random from those in the Scope of the Target. If the Possibility is a Quality of the Murder, its Type is “Proof”, otherwise its Type is “Disproof”.
* Roll a twenty sided die.
** If the result of this toss is higher than the Target’s gullibility, privately inform the Target of the Possibility and its Type.
** Otherwise, privately inform the Target of the Possibility and the opposite of its Type. This is known as a red herring.

If More to Life has passed, add two new Traits to the list in the rule “Traits”:

* Discerning (Positive) Affects Discovery.
* Credulous (Negative) Affects Discovery.

Otherwise, replace the second paragraph of “Traits” with:

Each Trait has a Name and a Nature (either Positive, Neutral or Negative). Observant, Dogged, Forensic, and Discerning are Positive Traits. Scruffy, Alcoholic, Arrogant, and Credulous are Negative Traits.

Introducing: the atomic action dynasty

Okay seriously though: I like the idea of red herrings but the other proposal wasn’t doing much for me. I’m not sure this is any better, but I do want to propose it to get some opinions.

Comments

pokes:

24-01-2019 02:13:56 UTC

I think I’m on board with this now with tweaked numbers but would also want to bump up the 6 in “If the Search Result is 6 or above” for finding a clue, otherwise information will come out really slowly

Kevan: City he/him

24-01-2019 09:01:36 UTC

I still don’t like the false negatives here - either thematically (a “red herring” is something that looks promisingly like the thing that you’re searching for, but isn’t; it’s never the other way around) or from a gameplay perspective (where if you’re following up a lead on the murderer and get a Disproof result, you have to follow it up one more time to make sure).

But I’ll leave it to the gameplayers to decide if they want this.

imperial

pokes:

24-01-2019 12:25:36 UTC

for

derrick: he/him

24-01-2019 14:38:48 UTC

for

I agree that having something a touch higher than 50% might be nice for investigation triggers, and I agree with Kevan that false negatives are annoying and should probably be eliminated. Once this proposal passes, it will be easy to tweak.

Allo:

24-01-2019 20:43:05 UTC

for