Saturday, June 12, 2021

Proposal: No Artificial Favourings [Special Case]

Enacted 5-3. Josh

Adminned at 14 Jun 2021 13:06:23 UTC

In “Favours”, make the following replacements, where the replaced strings exist:-

  • “any Dynastic resource of their choosing” with “any tabular resource of their choosing”
  • “any resource of their choosing that is described only in the Dynastic Rules” with “any tabular resource of their choosing”
  • “a single point of any Dynastic resource” with “a single point of any tabular resource”
  • “a single point of any resource of the claiming Vampire Lord’s choosing, so long as it is described only in the Dynastic Rules and the lender has at least one point of that resource to give” with “a single point of any tabular resource of the claiming Vampire Lord’s choosing, so long as the lender has at least one point of that resource to give”.

Remove the paragraph “For the purposes of this rule, a resource is Dynastic if it is described only in the Dynastic Rules and wiki pages used to track Dynastic gamestate.” from the rule.

Add a new paragraph to the rule:-

A resource is tabular if the only Rules that it is described in are Dynastic Rules, and if it is being publicly tracked as a number, in a table that contains one row corresponding to each Vampire Lord.

If any Sepulchres were created through claiming Favours, while this proposal was pending, collapse all such Sepulchres.

I think we need to rein in the scope of Favours here. It’s a tough constraint on design if any rule that creates a game object (like the Sigils Pokes says they’re considering, or Sepulchres, or Denizens) has to remain alert for “bam, I create/steal one instantly for free!”, from the couple of players who have background Imperial Favours from the previous dynasty. Making all variables opt-in might be too harsh on the Favoured, but we should at least constrain it to something like “a publicly-tracked number in a table”.

posted by Kevan at 12 Jun 2021 09:50:00 UTC Comments (11)

Comments

ais523:

12-06-2021 12:07:17 UTC

for

pokes:

12-06-2021 12:14:33 UTC

against

Raven1207: he/they

12-06-2021 12:17:21 UTC

for

lemon: she/her

12-06-2021 12:36:39 UTC

against personally i feel like the non-numerical possibilities are much more interesting than the strictly numerical stuff, especially when it comes to stealing!!

Kevan: he/him

12-06-2021 13:06:15 UTC

It’s a lot to have constantly hanging over every mechanic we write.

I was already a bit uneasy with the numerical stuff (that we will never see a simple “first to gain three trophies wins” rule again while Favours exist, we’ll always have to multiply it up or explicitly exempt it from Favouring), and it doesn’t feel great that the same can go for any object or building or monster that we care to invent, if it happens to be worded in a way that means it belongs to a player and sounds a bit countable.

Clucky: he/him

12-06-2021 16:58:40 UTC

for

Janet: she/her

12-06-2021 23:26:52 UTC

for

Josh: Observer he/they

13-06-2021 08:50:34 UTC

against I think it would be fun this dynasty to have a much looser favour mechanic; have lots of them generated, spent and swapped.

Lulu: she/her

13-06-2021 10:42:44 UTC

for

lemon: she/her

13-06-2021 11:52:34 UTC

if we’re going to restrict favours to numerical values n then eternally write the rules such that favours cant have a meaningful impact, why even have favours as a mechanic? i say if we’re going to have it in the game we might as well be willing to experiment with it and make it matter :0

(and i say this as the player most negatively impacted by favours rn!! loosening up can only put me at more risk, but i still want to ‘cause its fun)

Kevan: he/him

13-06-2021 12:27:50 UTC

Tabular Favours still look strong from here: although the Unfavoured majority should rationally multiply all variables by at least 10 when proposing something, in practice we’re either forgetting to, or don’t want to lose votes from Favoured players.
They can also be cashed in instantly at any point, even if the dynasty is running on a much more specific clock, and (for Imperial Favours) allow you to grab resources which are otherwise completely unattainable.