BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Yeah, I’d originally drafted the portcullis mechanic before Dracula had arrived. But it feels like we shouldn’t 100% repeal a rule, or make a longstanding base rule look weird, when all we actually want to do is switch a couple of things off during endgame.

why not? makes the rules simpler, and avoids stuff sneaking through the cracks if we ever wind up in a situation where the “Denizen named Dracula, or if a Room includes the Effect “Richardo encounters Dracula’s Sepulchre”,” clause somehow no longer holds (such as making Dracula not a Denizen, or if Dracula gets slain outside of a run)

Partly aesthetics; the final ruleset of a game is usually all the rules we agreed to play it under, where the only ones that are missing are the ones that didn’t work. Someone looking back at the ruleset a year from now to check how we wrote that Ancient Actions rule will be able to see it without any digging; someone looking at initial player stats won’t assume that we all started this one dead.

And partly gameplay; if we agreed to prolong the game by asking Dracula to come back later, we shouldn’t have to re-enact the rules we switched off for endgame. And if there’s a scam that involves destroying Dracula some other way (or, you know, renaming him to Alucard) to temporarily release his power over the Ancient Vampires, fair enough, that seems like good Nomic and good narrative.

i guess we just disagree about scams like that. my feeling is that its better to proactively block them than leave a window for them to happen

per kevan

It is possible to kill Dracula without giving him a Sepulchre, if the room he’s in collapses. That could arguably do with fixing, but it means that this isn’t just a straightforward fix.

per Kevan.