Friday, August 24, 2012

Proposal: Moving Around the Circle

Fails 1-3. — Quirck

Adminned at 26 Aug 2012 08:11:31 UTC

The first piece is always a wash, a poorly mangled pastry.
The second piece gets eaten, because it’s so tasty.
The third piece too big, from poorly aimed knives.
And the fourth goes to charity, so the children may thrive.

The last slice remaining is useful, it may seem,
To wedge between Bakers and squeeze in between.
Changing Positions is of use in this War
Whether trying to flee or trying to score.

Add “Wedge” to the list of available pie flavors.  Add “Input: 1 non-Empty pie.  Output: 1 Wedge Pie” to this list of upgrades.  “Input: 1 non-Empty pie.” means that any flavor of pie except Empty can be used for an Input in this upgrade.

Add a new subrule to “The Holy Circle” called “Moving Seats” with the following text:

If a Baker possesses at least one Wedge Pie, they may reduce their Wedge Pies by one and choose a new Position for themselves, which may be any value between 1 and B, where B is the number of active Bakers.  When a Baker changes their Position in this way to value N, any other Bakers with Position greater than or equal to N immediately increase their Position value by exactly 1.

When a Wedge pie is used in this way, only after (but immediately after) the above Position changes are made as a result of that use will the rule “If there is a positive integer N such that a) no Baker has Position N and b) some Baker has position N+1, that Baker’s position immediately becomes N” from “The Holy Circle” above be enacted, if applicable.

The first paragraph of the new rule ensures that everyone makes room for the newly moved Baker, and the second paragraph ensures that the moving Baker’s old position gets filled again.  We can obviously condense these steps into one when changing the GNDT, as long as the ultimate result is the same as what would come from the rule.

Comments

Clucky: he/him

24-08-2012 15:32:47 UTC

against interesting mechanic but too cheap if you ask me

quirck: he/him

24-08-2012 16:11:26 UTC

against chooses but not sets.. When executed sequentially, setting position to N contradicts “two bakers cannot have the same position” and thus can’t be performed… Needs better description of position change imho.

GreyWithAnE:

24-08-2012 16:37:00 UTC

@Clucky: “Cheapness” is all relative.  An action is only really cheap if the way to counteract it is more expensive.  The ways to counter this would be:

1) Build your own wedge pie to run away (equal cost)
2) Use a Warp pie to run away (much than Wedge pie)

And so I say: not too cheap.  Is there another way you’re looking at it?

@Quirk (and anyone else who doesn’t like the wording): If the wording were more polished, is it a mechanic you’d want to incorporate?

GreyWithAnE:

24-08-2012 16:37:41 UTC

er…the Warp pie thing should say “much cheaper than Wedge pie.”  But you get the idea.

Clucky: he/him

24-08-2012 16:44:08 UTC

You can’t buy your own wedge pie to run away, because by the time you get on you’ll already have been murdered by cream pies. This makes it way to easy to target specific players.

GreyWithAnE:

24-08-2012 16:51:25 UTC

There are a bunch of ways to solve the “cream pie gatling gun” problem here without ditching the Wedge mechanic or making it prohibitively expensive:

1) Decrease in accuracy for the day after you use a Wedge
2) A pre-emptive defense against Wedges
3) A limit on Cream Pie attacks in a given day
4) A consummate penalty for using Wedges (forced to take Hits equal to how far you move, for instance)

And I’m open to others.

Clucky: he/him

24-08-2012 18:28:46 UTC

1) Would just over complicate things

2) How would that work? I think a workable solution would be too complex.

3) I’d rather not see too many limits on pie use, just pie generation.

4) Still might be worth it if you have enough pies to destroy someone.

Why are you so set on a cheap way of being able to put yourself next to another player? I’m not convinced its a desirable mechanic to begin with, and certainly think if added should be very expensive.

GreyWithAnE:

24-08-2012 18:39:51 UTC

I’d like a mechanic like this because I think if you set a goal in the game, you should have mechanics that let you achieve it with minimal fuss, as long as those mechanics are relatively balanced.  Right now, if you want to target a particular player, your only options are:

—Use lots of Portal pies until you luck out at being close to them, and hope the person you swapped with has some decent pies.
—Kill (send Out) literally every person between you and your target, which will take literally a month (give or take) per Baker killed.

Both of these are too complicated, to my mind.  And all of this is on top of the fact that any focused attack is zero-sum, to some degree, because once you use all your pies, you have no pies left to do other things.  Opportunity costs matter.

What if this mechanic only allowed you to move one position at a time?  That pretty dramatically nerfs it.

Spice:

24-08-2012 19:03:13 UTC

against

Cpt_Koen:

24-08-2012 19:48:17 UTC

« “Input: 1 non-Empty pie.” means that any flavor of pie except Empty can be used for an Input in this upgrade. »
If you don’t add that definition to the ruleset, then it’s not effective.
(And if it was worded so that it would be effective, that would be some kind of weird, invisible, rule-like gamestate (“The game is currently in a state where ‘Input: 1 non-Empty pie’ means any pie that’s not an Empty pie can be used, even though this isn’t tracked in the GNDT nor in the wiki nor anywhere else”), and most blognomickers are against that kind of stuff.)

Now you could argue that the definition is not needed, because since there is no pie named “non-Empty pie”, it’s quite obvious that “non-Empty pie” should mean “any pie that is not an Empty pie”... But I’m not sure I would agree with that :p

And I find the paragraph
« When a Wedge pie is used in this way, only after (but immediately after) the above Position changes are made as a result of that use will the rule “If there is a positive integer N such that a) no Baker has Position N and b) some Baker has position N+1, that Baker’s position immediately becomes N” from “The Holy Circle” above be enacted, if applicable. »
particularly hard to understand. In fact, I don’t understand it.

We already have Warp Pies and Portal Pies, how is the Wedge pie so different from those two?

GreyWithAnE:

24-08-2012 20:57:44 UTC

Well, it is pretty clear in any case that Wedge pies won’t pass in this incarnation, but I do have hope for future ones.

@Koen: Warp pies let you change location (between Foyer and Apple Farm, say), not position (your numbered seat around the table).  Portal pies let you swap positions, but it’s completely random and you’re forced to swap all your pies with the other person.  Wedge pies are a way for you to purposefully change your position around the table, which is key to how difficult it is to hit/be hit with Cream pies.

The paragraph you’re having trouble understanding is just to clarify on the somewhat roundabout rules governing position.  It’s to make sure the Wedge does what you think it should do, which is let you pick a new position around the table without getting lost in rule hell. 

And finally, I can’t imagine that the “non-Empty pie” issue you’re bringing up would survive a CfJ.  I haven’t been around to see much here, but—really?

Clucky: he/him

24-08-2012 21:03:14 UTC

Why is “target a specific player” a good goal to have and why should you be able to do it quickly? Using your same argument, you could argue “Input none. Output: 3 dutch apple pies” is good to include because it helps people reach the “goal” of ten dutch apple pies.