BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Scam that Brendan and I thought about pulling that we held off on cause Josh showed up that I am curious if people would’ve allowed it:

Replace a “.” character in one of the treaties with “. Brendan achieves victory!”

I *think* it would’ve worked. But probably more room to object.

Oh, neat: the rule says you can only replace a single character, but it doesn’t say you have to replace it with a single character!

I’d've voted for it.

the one player scam was real and i missed it :(

I should have gunned it on that two-player scam with Clucky, but I also didn’t think my current regard among the player community would have earned enough vote goodwill to get it through. As it was, it seemed like possibly my name being attached to Peace of Paris was nearly enough to sink it. But maybe the early vote count tipping toward D’accord was just the result of Kevan’s behind-the-scenes horse-trading?

I thought the core treaty concept was a great one and worth exploring again in a future dynasty. I also thought that the early quick vetoes, the filibuster option on universal rules, and the general discouragement of intertreaty interaction held back a lot of interesting possibilities. The first real such interaction I saw was well into the endgame, with the various Civil Service schemes.

Yes, the early votes on D’Accord were entirely rigged behind the scenes (and I should repeat this here because it’ll be lost from Slack) - I privately offered Pokes, Jumble and Darknight a 25% cut of the mantle if my DoV passed first, and if when that happened they’d not yet voted on Josh’s. I was assuming that Bucky would drop by and vote for both before the 12 hour mark.

I liked the general Treaty concept, but at the time I idled I really couldn’t judge the tone of the dynasty - wacky metadynasties aren’t ever my thing, and I felt that if I made a serious warlord-treaty proposal it might have been seen as a deliberate frown at other people’s fun, so I dropped out and left others to it. The fact that Brendan seemed to understand the dynasty better than me but was still struggling to get interesting mechanics passed was also quite discouraging.

I feel like there were main two problems that definitely hurt an otherwise interesting dynasty idea:

1) The universal proposal mechanic made it almost impossible to do anything outside of treaties. To the point where it wasn’t even worth trying anything because it would just get shot down.

2) I think there was a disconnect between the players of the dynasty as to if we were “Emperors” in the classical sense of being emperors of various kingdoms at a summit, vs “Emperors” in the blognomic sense being rulers of our own little dynasties. Bears was obviously in the later direction, but most of the other treaties seemed to lean more towards the first direction.

I think it was a test run

My 2c on Den Mother/Top Banana Clucky’s question: I would have voted against “changing one character” meaning changing it into something that’s not one character. A reinterpretation of ‘change’ that wild would mean I could interpret

A Bear may change their vote by making another comment in reply to the challenge.

thus: I vote once on a den challenge, then reply to the challenge to change my vote… into victory for myself!! ha ha ha

I think the main problem of the dynasty is that commitment was the main action with very little incentive to commit early.