BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

This dynasty had a lot of potential. I liked the theme and the basic mechanics. It was unfortunate that there were few active players.

After a few dynasties out, I have some comments on common pitfalls dynasties have been falling into lately; they aren’t specific to this dynasty and don’t all apply here, so caveat emptor.

* Dry-ass themes
Some of the dynasty themes lately have been very drab. It is laudable to want to go beyond tropey game themes like wizards or spaceships but those themes are evergreen because they are exciting, because they are wide-ranging enough that they can support many types of gameplay, or because they are immediately understandable in a way that doesn’t obstruct gameplay. It’s worth thinking about what themes work and why.
* Keepaway mechanics
Making an action complex doesn’t make it fun. Complexity can be good but only if the complexity adds interesting decision space. Adding extra layers to an action to make them take longer, or harder to carry out correctly, makes the game harder to play, harder to read, and places a cognative obstacle between a player who wants to do something but who has a try-by-doing mindset to learning systems.
* The Simultaneous Reveal Action System
It’s a good system but it’s been too many in a row and it makes dynasties feel undifferentiated. Time to face the discomfort and, for the sake of texture, re-open the can on some timed or free action game systems. Relatedly:
* Invisible or secret gamestate
With low player numers, the more of the game that is hidden the less there is to inspire proposals or suggest activity. I would suggest that the next couple of dynasties be fully public information with the Emperor’s role being extremely limited.

For the record, the recent Clucky X dynasty had fully public information and seemed to go pretty well, so I agree with Josh on that point.

Timed or free action systems always seem a bit tricky due to the first-mover or last-mover problem, so they have to be carefully guided to ensure that timing doesn’t provide an inherent advantage. I think that’s why most people tend to stay away from them.

I liked the theme for this one, it seemed like a good movie-trope kind of space. I’m not sure how robust the central DNA-to-outcomes mechanic really was, and it was a shame that it never got going so that we could test it - we didn’t even have an Organism leave a Cell, let alone breach the airlocks.

For the record, the six rounds of this dynasty took 5 days, 5 days, 2 days, 2 days, 3 days and 6 days to get through, with the seventh round being at 7 days when the dynasty was chopped short. Unless there was a lot of horse-trading going on behind the scenes, it doesn’t seem like it should have taken more than a couple of days for players to decide which of a dozen letters they wanted to change. Perhaps we need to flag the game speed of a dynasty more clearly, if it’s possible for a slower player to assume (without checking the wiki history to see exactly how many days ago the progress bar moved) that everyone else is being equally slow. (I was definitely fading into the “somebody always takes 5+ days, so I guess I have five days to decide” zone by the end of the dynasty, not helped by Mutation orders being unretractable.)

Perhaps related to that, this dynasty generally didn’t feel much like a Nomic, with most proposals enacting without any discussion, and even the victory condition timing out 2 votes to 1. It was a shame that we had to manually crank Dormancy up one level.

I think hidden gamestate is a good, cheap way to add depth and dilemmas to a game without much corresponding complexity. Deal everyone a face-down poker card and you’ve instantly got some intrigue and surprises, in even a simple game. It also reduces the paralysing option to calculate the optimum move, which can be a bigger deal in a slow online game where players have the option to crunch all visible data - from the outside, Clucky X seemed too daunting for that reason, that someone was probably already running a fun little simulation of the fruit board to test out their moves.

So long as the existence of secret gamestate isn’t itself obscured (as this dynasty’s Hypotheses and ACT payouts were; regular players could keep track, new players could only decode who held what from combing the wiki history), I think it’s a positive and worth using more.

I think the issue is that with a player base that tends to only check in once every few days, secret information exacerbates the problem of engagement.

With completely public gamestate, there’s something visibily dynamic going on, and more players are apt to pay attention. Not a complete truism, but a generalization.

Still plenty of visible dynamism in a card game where you don’t know what specific cards your opponent has, but you can see the cards moving around and know how many they’re holding. This dynasty we could and should have publicly tracked the existence of the hidden stuff: a public gamestate column for “this player has an active Hypothesis”, a mention in the Synthesis reports of exactly who had received an ACT payout.

Not sure that we’ve been overusing simultaneous reveal - from a skim of the past twenty dynasties it looks like only five of them had any such action system. (212, 219, 222, 225 and now this one as 229.)

Zack II, which I hadn’t read before, was interesting for apparently not waiting for everyone to submit orders and just having the Emperor run all pending requests as a daily action whenever they felt like it. That seems like a good way to blur actions just enough to prevent the “I now need to be the first player to perform an action immediately after the Emperor/my opponent/midnight/enactment” timing stuff.

fwiw 226 also used simul turns. not sure about the others

I didn’t even bother to try to get into this one as I was gonna be out for a bit at the end of October and then was just too busy to even try to see what was going on so can’t comment on this dynasties specifics

I do think hidden information can help create more engaging gameplay but you do gotta be careful about how you use it.

Darknight 2 had I think a good balance of secret information. A lot of it was information you learned during the dynasty. But it was also split it to rounds, and then at the start of the round you’d know just from all the public info how far behind you were. (Though it was also still possible to apply computational power to figure out the optimal guess for the big one’s name)

I do wonder if the “this dynasty generally didn’t feel much like a Nomic” is worth drilling a bit more into, because I think that has been a bit of a common theme

the entire second half of Clucky 10 also had very little nomic stuff going on. Lukas had the clear path to victory and no one really used the nomic mechanics to push him on it. This shows that its not enough to make information public, people still gotta engage with it. But the small player base (4 players, one of which was an emperor player) didn’t leave a lot of room for tall daisy trimming.

Darknight 2 was better in that regard (I was able to push a catchup mechanic through and then take advantage of it and win despite other players definitely putting in more effort). I also think that dynasty had some really good turn mechanics—did have a bit of the gotta time stuff so you’re first to act problem, but overall no waiting for everyone else to go and you couldn’t actually make a move every day, so you were still fine checking in every couple of days if you want.

JonathanDark 5 was pretty light on nomicy stuff—I do think public insight into how many points the leader had would’ve certainly helped in this regard

ultimately I’m unconvinced that the low player counts we’ve seen as of late are really a result of dynastic contents though. Maybe a bit of it. But I know stuff like EE’s slowness has driven people away. idk. maybe we should ask people in the discord who aren’t active why they aren’t playing.

Re: dynastic contents. It’s one of the reasons I mentioned the idea of Emperors polling the player base for dynastic themes rather than being the sole chooser of the next theme. Just getting other players involved in the choice might create more engagement in such a dynasty once it starts.

Seems likely that recent low-player counts are due to Low-Player Mode, which was active from 20 June through to 31 October. I’m still very much of the view that three-player Nomic is generally a proposal-free standoff, as soon as somebody takes the lead.

Polling inactive players sounds a good idea. I’d also hope that Precondition Unidling would serve some of the same purpose, that feedback of “I would play this if I knew what hidden gamestate existed” can be expressed as a ruleset amendment.

I don’t think the current low player counts have anything at all to do with Low Player Mode. It looks way more likely to me that it’s simply a post-covid reversion to the long term trend of diminishing interest in esoteric game experiments, especially those being played through the relatively deprecated technology of blogs. I don’t have access to the long term record of Agora player numbers but I do see that the rest of the nomic ecosystem has been declining for a while now.

We can and should do what we can to arrest the trend but the rhetorical argument for Low Player Mode was and remains that we need to design the game for a world where lower player counts are fundamental rather than temporary.

I would like to question what you guys would think about hidden alignments but public actions?

A hidden alignments/public actions combo is fine, as long as the public actions are ones that anyone of any alignment might reasonably take, i.e. the public actions either don’t give alignment away until a critical point, or provide deniable plausibility as to that player’s alignment.

[Josh] Sure, the pool of possible players in the world is slowly diminishing, I mean the counts of people joining each of the last four dynasties. The presence or absence of a “dynasty must have four players to proceed” rule will affect how many players it gets. I don’t recall anyone pinging @bn-idle on Discord to say that the Fishing or Fruit dynasties could use some more players, which they would have if they’d approached a live Dormancy.

I think the “bit of a common theme” of minimal Nomicking that Clucky observes is just that proposals tend to stall when a Nomic only has three people playing it.