Sunday, March 09, 2025

Ascension Address: Our Goal in Life

Plenty of people have sought the meaning of life. One way to look at the problem is – if life were a leaderboard, then who would be on top? It’s hard to compare success. Some people want to become rich, others to become famous, others to become knowledgeable, some to make their mark on the world.

But if you want to keep score, you need a way to pick a single winner. If you have a group of people, they will naturally all claim that it’s their own achievements that are most important. And to be acknowledged as the best? Just make sure you move the goalposts in the right direction.

Of course, everyone else will be trying to move them too.


Change Meeple to Seeker and Monarchple to Custodian. Do not keep any dynastic rules. Retain the Building Blocks “Precondition Unidling” and “Edit Window”, but remove “Reinitialisation”. Change the gamestate tracking page to “Life Goal Progress”.

Imperial style (unofficial, because an “official” imperial style has to be in terms of the Imperial Styles page):

I don’t want to constrain myself in terms of what proposals I make this dynasty – I’ll likely be doing a combination of trying to improve the game design, keeping the dynasty tidy, and injecting new ideas. However, note that unlike many of my dynasties, I don’t have a firm idea of where this one is going, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing where the rest of you take it.

For player protection, I will attempt to protect players with FOR/AGAINST votes but will not attempt to protect with my veto. (I may deploy the veto for other reasons, most likely trying to prevent rules breakage.)

I don’t want to have to dedicate too much time to imperial duties; I may volunteer for some that I find interesting, but am not in the mood for handling complex update actions (which means that we should probably try to avoid those).

My attitude to scams this dynasty is Averse to wording scams (or to unbalanced mechanics hidden using overly complicated wording) but Neutral to mechanics that are unbalanced/exploitable in ways other than their wording.

If I notice what I think is an error in the gamestate, I will probably make a blog post about it rather than trying to correct the tracking page directly (largely because there are often disputes about whether something actually is or isn’t an error, and because making a correction CFJ before determining what actually went wrong often ends up causing further trouble).

I will try to be a little more Methodical than usual (but probably not fully Methodical).

I do not want to make this into a fully Solitaire game, but I also don’t want easy/direct trading mechanics to exist, i.e. any cooperative mechanics should be primarily based around trading actions rather than trading resources, and should aim for a balance where two cooperaing players are less than twice as effective as a single solo player.

Comments

ais523:

09-03-2025 10:40:29 UTC

Unless I messed something up, the Dynastic Reset is now complete and we are no longer in Interregnum.

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