BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Well, I’ve got a proposal ready that tries to reproduce “Well, That Shortened the Queue” in an explicit manner (yep, it’s long).
I’d remove the ability to enact proposals out of order, because ultimately it’s that that put us in this situation.
Failure out of order is a need if we keep this pace, in my opinion.

I think we need to make sure Dependent proposals can’t be enacted if they’re Dependent on a pending proposal.

I think it’s not that bad, but maybe everyone should, well, calm down to the pace this dynasty takes.

Having four or five simultaneous proposals doesn’t need to be four or five DIFFERENT proposals. If Kevan would have sticked to one or two of his ideas, he could have fixed them and not have ended up with a scammable mess in the end, no offense, Kevan.

The rules are all right, I think.

This has actually just been good old-fashioned carelessness rather than pacing - I wrote a proposal, Ayesdeeef wrote a later one that got in the way of it (and nobody noticed), and I killed my proposal for other reasons and reproposed it in a way that was still blocked by Ayesdeeef’s (and nobody noticed). Today’s self-kill of Well, That Shortened the Queue was just because I noticed an unintentional game-ending loophole in my own poor wording. No out-of-sequence enactment required for any of it; if we’d left them all untouched they would just have car-crashed at the weekend instead.

(I do fully expect out-of-sequence enactment to cause the same kind of mess at some point, though.)

But it is getting hard to write a solid proposal when there are maybe twenty others in the queue, which is maybe the bigger problem. I hadn’t really appreciated it before, but BlogNomic generally keeps the queue at the seven-plus-or-minus-two scale that the human brain can keep track of, and doesn’t require us to remember anything that’s over 48 hours old. Writing a proposal on Friday that doesn’t tread on the toes of something you read six days previously (and for everyone to vote at the same level of attention) is maybe a little too much to ask, and it only takes a small oversight for proposals to break.

Maybe we could (but this requires very careful and skilled wording, so that excludes me as the author) have proposals change only a Future Ruleset, which replaces the Ruleset at every Festival? That way it would be easy to keep track of Proposals.

[mideg] I’ve only had a couple of proposals pending at a time this week. And it’s been the same very basic “let’s take turns to choose roles” mechanic all along; the first draft was rushed (because I only had a small window if I wanted it to enact before Monday), the second draft was being voted down for a bug (and the dynasty pace denied me the usual “wait to see if it fails” period so I had to make the call to self-kill it), the third draft fixed the bug. The fourth draft was because another proposal enacted and broke the third draft.

My favorite part of the pace rule is the last provision, allowing proposals to be enacted normally if they don’t affect the current Season. What if we broke the parts of the Dynastic Ruleset that affect gameplay (as opposed to Nomic-play) out into Years as well as Seasons? “This rule and all its subrules have no effect unless the Year is 5103,” with “This rule has no effect unless it is [Season]” under that. New Proposals would be strongly encouraged to have a future Year or future Season when they took effect, unless they were emergency fixes.

I think that would achieve the sweeping changes between Seasons that Josh originally wanted from the pace idea. If we wanted to keep mechanics around, we could propose a “copy the following rules from 5103 into 5104” type of thing at the end of each Winter.

Brendan, I like that.

[Kevan] I understand, but you still had several different endevours ongoing. You can see them all in Elys “The Big One” right now.

I just think that is too much to do at once.

The tricky thing about delayed enactment is that players will have to be careful not to confuse an enacted-but-delayed rule (that they voted on days ago and remember being enacted into the ruleset) for one that they can use. Seasons seem nicely intuitive for that - I’m probably going to catch myself before calling a Solstice Bonfire in Summer - but years less so.

[mideg] Only two mechanics in The Big One are mine. I’d attribute any subconscious carelessness in my proposal writing to the forgiving “repropose as much as you like, just have a final version ready by Friday” nature of this dynasty, rather than my brain being overloaded by small side proposals.

While not being yours, you tried to propose them in one big chunk.

Actually, I’d, and I don’t mean any offense by that, attribute the proposals failure by its chain nature. The Big one by Ely now is as big in scope as yours, but it’s 1 text.

Josh, are you planning on posting something to address the situation today or should I post a years-based alternative? (The risk Kevan points out is valid, but we can try it for a while and see if it’s worse.) I just want to get something in the queue that will be 48 hours old by Sunday night.

(Upon reconsidering The Big One, which will have passed by Sunday night, I think it’s worth giving the Festival system a shot. Let’s do that first.)