BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

First feeling is

You’ve said that you would like mechanics to be included as pies are being added. Here three new flavors appear, which makes it harder to remember their order to read GNDT, and it’s not clear what they do yet.

To spend a week to get a Grand pie and then lose it randomly due to someone having two empty pies…

I’m not against the idea, though, but I would classify pies when it really becomes necessary, and reorganize GNDT to make it easier to track who has which flavors.

There is a balance between mechanics and length of proposal. I originally had selling mechanics here as well, but figured it was better to split them up. Just adding the basic/advanced/grand framework seemed silly without any grand pies.

How do you plan to implement selling? Will it be like trading Spc suggested, or you want to establish fixed prices for different classes?

Depends on what people propose. I’m not against either idea, that was also part of the reason for not including it. I don’t want to be the only one adding mechanics.

I’m probably for trading, so I don’t see point in classes for that.

But like, if you do the “fill these requests” mechanics, it would be nice to say “Pick two basic pies, 1 advanced pie and 1 grand pie” or something like that, so there is less variance in the difficulty of the requests.

“future pie types”

“Each pie has a Class, which may either be None, Basic, Advanced, Utility, or Grand and is listed in parenthesis after the name of the pie”
You should specify “in the list below” or something, cause I’m incline to read this as “everywhere there is the name of the pie, it is followed by the class in parentheses”.

A Dutch Apple pie clearly has more value than an Empty pie; for that reason, I don’t like using classes, and a system that computes the value of the pie would be better in my opinion.

- The Empty Pie has a value of 1
- If there is exactly one upgrade which Output is the X Pie, then the value of the X Pie is the sum of the values of the Input Pies of that upgrade, plus 1. If there are several such upgrades, then the value of the X Pie is the minimum of the sums (plus 1) corresponding to every of those upgrades. If there is no such upgrade, then the value of the Pie is “priceless”.

Basically the value of a pie is the number of days needed to get such a pie using only daily upgrades.
If we have a “Half Pie” and the upgrade to get it is “Input: 1 Empty Pie; Output: 2 Half Pies”, then the value of the Half Pie is “priceless”. This could be resolved by replacing “which Output is the X Pie” with “which Output includes the X Pie”, though I’m comfortable with Half Pies being priceless (seriously, who would buy half an empty pie??)

A much simpler system would be “the Empty Pie has a value of 1; all other Pies have a value equal to the number of words in their name” :D

I find it tough to make judgments on larger new rules like this without knowing what the ultimate win state will be.  Could we prioritize setting some victory condition, even if there’s no way to reach it yet?  Then we can use rules like this to build the scaffold underneath.

@Koen what if I have stuff like “Input: 1 empty pie. Output: 2 shield pies”? How would that work? Generalized classes allow for greater complexity in the upgrade mechanics.

@GreyWithAnE: I’m a strong believer that the point of nomic isn’t to win, its to play with interesting game mechanics. Victory conditions will rise out of the interesting mechanics. If you set victory conditions super early, people just play to win you lose out on some mechanics.

Clucky, that’s exactly what I said:
If we have a “Half Pie” and the upgrade to get it is “Input: 1 Empty Pie; Output: 2 Half Pies”, then the value of the Half Pie is “priceless”. This could be resolved by replacing “which Output is the X Pie” with “which Output includes the X Pie”, though I’m comfortable with Half Pies being priceless (seriously, who would buy half an empty pie??)

The upgrade mechanics are completely free and do not depend on values or classes, do they?

Skimmed it over and missed that part. What if I then have Input: 1 shield pie, output: 1 Super Shield Pie”—is the Super Shield Pie “Priceless + 1”?? Still think generic classes are better here. Pie doesn’t have to be an exact science.

Oh, right. I missed that possibility. Should specify “upgrades which output is the X Pie and which Input doesn’t contain a priceless Pie. Though things may get messy with nested upgrades.
(And now I *want* nested upgrades!)

However I still think such a system of values would be more simple than introducing fifteen new classes to match every pie, when the upgrade system and the name of the pies make it so implicit what pies are worth.

We could as well just decide pies values arbitrarily by listing them in the ruleset, with a line similar to the one that governed tags in the Taxicab Dynasty: “The value of a pie should be related to the number of days needed to get such a pie, using only daily upgrades.”

Anyway, since we don’t know yet what classes/values are for anyway…

I mean you’d still have the problem of “Input: 1 Ying Pie. Output: 1 Yang Pie” and “Input: 1 Yang Pie, Output: 1 Ying Pie” right?

There are not fifteen classes. There are five. Maybe a couple more will get added, but I doubt more than that.

I’m not looking for this to be a way where you can easily attribute a total net worth to your pie collection. I’m just looking for a way to classify pies.

Yes, your Yin Yang example is what I called nested. And yes I said fifteen classes cause sometimes I got a little carried away by my bad faith!
But I still don’t like classes, so

@Clucky: A very fair point about win conditions.  Fun is the prime directive here.

Personally, I do find it more engaging though, to have this thought:

“I’ve baked a Dutch Apple pie, which will allow me to impress the King and bring me closer to victory; as a result, other players don’t want me to do this anymore, so they’ll probably try to throw pies at me, which will make this harder in the future.”

Than this thought:

“I’ve baked a Dutch Apple pie.  How tasty.”

I disagree. But this is a nomic, so the votes will ultimately decide what people want.