BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

interesting mechanic but too cheap if you ask me

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.

@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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

« “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?

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?

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.