Monday, December 09, 2019

Pentecost

Post-dynastic discussion.

Comments

Madrid:

09-12-2019 09:56:16 UTC

Overall, I’m super happy about the dynasty. You all did really well.

I’m amazed that how something as seemingly unrelated like the mere “team” structure of the dynasty resulted in “scams are OK”. Bizarre and fascinating.

To answer to Kevan who asked if I had made Cate 6 really easy because the others were too hard, actually no. I just made it easy because I was in a rush. I knew what I wanted for the last one, but not the one before it yet and time was running out.

As for the first battle, I was surprised at first that people didn’t go for Fire, but then I realized that it wasn’t obvious to everyone else. I felt so constipated that I couldn’t point it out, but I was relieved once it was found.

Also, I thought Kevan would have gone for Brawn because it applied to your Monster form back then, but he didn’t. Maybe he valued keeping his options open? Or it just wasn’t seen. Also, I think actually going for at least one Bulk instead of full Rot would’ve been better because it buys aprox another turn or more to cash in on firepower.

I was also worried that at any time, a Cathedral-destroying scam might pop up lol.

Card did pretty well as evidenced by their Havoc but they could’ve done better if they had gone for one combat plan (Cathedral damage or killing everyone) instead of changing midway.

I don’t think that Duke’s strategy was the wisest and imo they had the highest chance of killing everyone because they were the healer. Bulks + Fevers would’ve been better I speculate.

I knew that there would be Bampam of “already cashed in Havoc” vs “haven’t cashed in Havoc yet”, and it got especially evident towards the end.

I was turbopissed that apparently Kevan didn’t uphold their argument that was along the lines of “respect this scam because you might have a scam in the future that you might want respected too”.

And TyGuy’s Monster was that future. With such a scam. And it apparently didn’t apply.

I understand entirely that it’s part of the game - it’s in your interest to gain an advantage. It’s fair game. Which is why I didn’t go and do anything about it like usual. But I was gritting my teeth from the spectator balcony.

Having NOI join in at the end was a bit of a surprise, given how crucial it was to kill TyGuy before he got another action. Thankfully it didn’t alter much my perceived balance of “this is just a Kevan/card/Duke/TyGuy game”, as unwelcoming that is to new players.

Also, I got paranoid and thought for a moment that TyGuy was solving the SHA-256 somehow, given how he was nailing so many right and everyone else so many wrong.

Madrid:

09-12-2019 10:08:53 UTC

But also: super thanks for inviting me in to the private team talking channels. It was so cool to see all of the strategy and thought that has gone into the dynasty, and I couldn’t be happier for it.

TyGuy6:

09-12-2019 10:45:55 UTC

So, for the two Catechisms I got that others didn’t: Peter as a pope is the traditional meaning of that scripture, (though my church holds slightly different views on the interpretation,) but I almost missed it, anyway.

144: The Last Dynasty seemed to fit the first verse’s “last” theme, and the second verse’s “12” theme. The other two verses I couldn’t find a match for, they were so crazy different from each other. I’d missed the verse numbers, entirely. So it was a half guess, and I almost went with another dynasty.

I basically took note of the main themes of each catechism, then scrolled through the list of dynasty titles, and clicked on any that looked promising. Witchcraft and Family fit pretty easily by their titles. Assassin I should have gotten, too, but other dynasties seemed to fit as well, I guess.

Kevan: he/him

09-12-2019 11:05:27 UTC

The shifting team mechanic was an interesting one to explore, and the final score seemed a good testament to it working - the first Monster has an advantage in establishing the benchmark for a typical score which future rules wouldn’t drift too far from, the last Monster an advantage in getting to see how all other Monster tactics worked out.

“Scams are OK” wasn’t the mood I was getting: the Humans in the last Battle privately agreed to play fair and fix the loophole that the Battle was accidentally invalid rather than waiting for it to finish, watching what TyGuy did, and (if we lost) declaring it null or (if we won) pushing through its recognition as valid. That was a few hours before TyGuy started pulling Hidden Monstrosity scams.

I don’t see my and TyGuy’s scams as entirely parallel: mine was allowed but didn’t achieve much (I got Firebombed regardless, and the “Monster can start battles” loophole was left open and later enshrined as the default) and I don’t think we ever had a straight vote on whether to allow it - TyGuy CfJ’d to stop my action from working but force me to have taken it anyway, which seemed harsh. TyGuy’s scam was allowed and potentially didn’t achieve much either (it scored them less Havoc and was easy to sidestep once by Wearying) and I proposed to undo it and let them retake the action.

(I actually stood down the second fix because the Humans were happier to have TyGuy taking a lower-Havoc Visage action, than making them undo it and presumably just Fling someone.)

I guessed Cuddlebeam probably wouldn’t pick a Traitor (or would do so at the final moment as a joke), and was just treating the Judas rule as a random guessing game. TyGuy6 was correct that I was just covering my bases: whoever I pointed at I only had a 1-in-4 chance of being correct, so it made sense to point at my main rival to stop them from getting an easy 150 points.

The Catechisms felt like classic Mysterium misapprehension, and a mechanic which I’d thought about trying in BlogNomic. There’s probably a saleable happy Christian Bible game in there somewhere. (And I wrongly assumed that the stuff about Peter might be a reference to Suber.)

I somewhat regret not having a go at cracking the hashes now, if they were just superficial variations on “it is [verbatim name of dynasty]”.

Kevan: he/him

09-12-2019 11:11:44 UTC

And huh, just saw on Slack that TyGuy and I were exactly tied for Merit prior to the Traitor and Catechism scores. Worth mentioning that somewhere permanent.

TyGuy6:

09-12-2019 11:37:48 UTC

I was very worried that there’d be some big change to make early/late monsters strong or weak, and the game just go kaput. I figured first and last monsters had the highest chances for that reason. If Kevan had used 1-2 Bulk in his Monster, he might have been unstoppable, maybe have hit the 1000 limit. (How would you play the game after that, if nobody can literally ever score higher without some kind of rule shift?) But things became more or less constant, even though Kevan almost repealed the Bulk strategy away from me, entirely! I had had my Monstrosities pretty much planned out since after Kevan’s round.

I might have seemed like I took advantage of a technicality to reroll myself into last place monster, but I THINK I would have rerolled anyway, had the outcomes been reversed. Hard to say I didn’t have a bias, but it wasn’t that strong of one.


I hadn’t planned the Hidden Actions scam, per se, until I started my round…

In Kevan’s round, you might’ve noticed we almost hit on a scam to allow infinite human actions, but Kevan was retreating so we couldn’t target him with it before Duke’s well-written patch would render it moot.

Well, I kept thinking, on my own, and realized I could destroy the Cathedral at that point by (something like) taking medic, and slashing plus healing 1000 times, (I can’t remember exactly what I thought would work at that point,) then insta-win based solely on being 10 points ahead in lore merit. I got all excited, until I realized the scam relied on the same missing-if-and-only-if argument that had fallen flat back in Farsight 1! So I dropped it, but I suppose that was when I first noticed that the Monster still had some scammable language.

Madrid:

09-12-2019 11:47:14 UTC

Also, I haven’t forgotten about Ty’s Monster pic. I just haven’t gotten a chance to go for it yet

TyGuy6:

09-12-2019 11:52:16 UTC

Card secretly offered to vote in favor of my Brawn still being allowed when I became a Monster, (something I really wanted, and Kevan noticed immediately,) in exchange for my agreeing to take a retreat action during his Monster round. Then he voted in favor of everyone getting a reset on their boons, and I called him on removing my advantage. So we decided on a no-deal resolution, instead, and carried on. I wanted to take the opportunity to try going solo this dynasty, anyway.

I only suspected card of traitor because of his dealmaking, though I did believe him that he hadn’t meant to be wishy washy. Duke’s guess was the extra push I needed to also want to point the finger.

TyGuy6:

09-12-2019 11:54:48 UTC

Lore was a fun rule; I didn’t expect to get as into it like I did. 150 words came pretty easily once I was trying.

card:

09-12-2019 13:46:52 UTC

Looking back on it I think I should have taken one rotting presence. Even if I only got the same amount oh actions I should have gotten about 200 more merit and possible some more turns because The Duke of Waltham would still be healing.

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

09-12-2019 17:53:17 UTC

As everyone knows by now, I chose to Point at Card pretty much randomly, hoping to have some fun by acting as a catalyst for other events – in which I was mostly disappointed, as nothing seemed to happen in consequence – and perhaps gain Merit from an unexpected source, considering how badly I’d done in my Battle.

Which was very badly. First of all, I had no idea what level of tactics these battles would inspire, and the first one didn’t help me much because we were still ironing out the kinks; when claiming all three Hidden Monstrosities, I failed to appreciate how useful it might have been to keep you guessing about which ones I had, and thus prevent you from adopting a successful battle plan earlier. As to the selection of Monstrosities, Reverse Mother could still have proved useful, but (as I’ve mentioned in Slack) Voidwalker was definitely a mistake, seeing how we were too few to make this work: I could only hope to have a single Adventurer Retreating at any given time, making this no better than the Claw. A second Bulk Monstrosity might have made all the difference, even without my, erm, misplaced first round.

It’s a bit odd how many things weren’t really used. Revival, for all the discussion it inspired, ultimately came to nothing; if it had any worth at all, it probably was in influencing people’s planning as a sort of “fleet in being”. Some people mention Healing; I believe I’ve only ever used it on myself. Other Battle Actions were completely ignored, and the Cathedral’s Max HP of 10,000 was so overoptimistic that Befoul never had a chance of being taken out of its box. I understand that most dynasties are not turn-based like this one, but I felt at times as if I were beta-testing a game that didn’t want to be improved beyond a certain point.

It was, of course, my very first dynasty, so for me it will inevitably serve as a standard by which I measure all others, and I am interested in hearing which aspects of it you feel were ordinary or extraordinary – to the extent you can agree amongst yourselves!

One thing in which this dynasty does seem to escape recent precedent, from what I read, is that it didn’t rely on pooling. It was a mostly straightforward victory, also devoid of that big, final scam that pulls the rug from under everyone’s feet – though I’m sure TyGuy found his two smaller scams useful in paving the way to victory, and Kevan’s scam also helped put him at the top of the Havoc list.

I actually did have a plan of my own to bring the Cathedral down, but the more the dynasty progressed, and the Battle rules bedded in, the harder it was for me to put the pieces in place. I also lacked motivation: suddenly ending the game wouldn’t favour me, so I’d have to offer this as assistance to a front-runner. In exchange for what, though? I couldn’t be the next Emperor even if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. It’s too early for me. So I just filed the idea away, in case I can use it in another dynasty.

PS: Cuddlebeam wrote about Catechesis that “I knew what I wanted for the last one, but not the one before it yet and time was running out.” I’m amazed how putting up a ceiling makes people think they have to reach it… It happens with so many things in life (like speed limits).

Kevan: he/him

09-12-2019 20:44:17 UTC

Befoul was certainly an option at the start of the final battle, when it would have dealt 15 damage to each Human. Less total damage than a Claw and less total Havoc than a Fling, but it could have been useful for discouraging too much Fire, if every Human was starting at 85 instead of 100.