BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Post-match commentary for the previous dynasty:

Did anyone else notice that you couldn’t get your Diet back after you’d died? Changing diet was a “once per dynasty” mechanic, and dying reset all GNDT variables to defaults. I was holding off on picking a Diet for as long as possible, knowing that it could give me a big advantage over someone who’d picked a Diet earlier and then been killed.

Oh I was wondering why, but I guess it didn’t matter so much since you could go pretty much the whole distance without needing to eat.

(didn’t see that loophole.)

Nice transition from the previous Dynasty :). I’m sort of disappointed at the lackluster endgame but I couldn’t find a way to propose something to improve that. If anyone has any insight on what could have made the dynasty more exciting, and any suggestion as to how I may may be a better emperor next time (if there is a next…) feel free.

Also, I didn’t really follow the daily actions but was there any actual fighting between players ?

grinding isn’t fun (unless it is)

@Kevan: I did. But I didn’t find it particularly useful aside from waiting to slip and not realize it sooner or something.

Also, yes, daily action grind is cancer.

from waiting for someone to slip*

The timing issues were a bit annoying - Card and I informally agreed that if it turned out we could both cross the finish line on the same day, we’d toss a coin for it rather than both racing to post at 00:00:01am. But the daily actions seemed closer to a turn-taking boardgame than usual, in that one.

It certainly wasn’t as bad as cancer.

Which killed someone I knew last week.

(Sincerely sorry about your loss…)

In retrospect I think the distance idea should have been scrapped altogether. My initial hopes for the game was for Failed Experiments to wander about in the city or the woods (depending on how suspicious they were), scavenging for food, finding ways to heal, trying to survive long enough to figure out a way to live free. Distance put too much of a movement mechanic into play. We could have just had “places to visit” (supermarket, doctor, lake, whatever), each providing various necessities but with their own requirements and risks.

I thought the Distance mechanic was pretty strong, particularly the requirement to traverse the route three times, there and back. If there’d been more scope for player interaction (which I guess Card and I were uninterested in proposing as we were doing okay in the lead), the gang back at the lab would have made for an interesting threat to whoever was in the lead.

My condolences Kevan, I was speaking in black humor.

And yeah, I agree with Kevan there. Once you have a lead, there really isn’t much of an incentive to “fix” the game, even if the gameplay required for you to win is bleh. You just go collect your win and be silent about any problems.

But yeah, I generally dislike proposals and the “live” game being mixed together. Because proposals are the strongest move in the game, and it becomes a “nothing really matters except the last few proposals” kind of thing - since winners don’t care/want to propose, and the losers will only propose to change the game to their advantage: which means subverting previous build-up in gameplay. And that subversion, repeated means that only the last couple of proposals really matter. In which case why not just make a game that has an endgame much sooner rather than later. Why wait 2-3 weeks, it’s not like our proposals or gameplay before then are going to matter much at all anyways.

It happened before in Pokes II and it felt bullshit (I won that one btw, and was part of the conspiracy which unfortunately lead to that). A much lesser form of that has happened again just now, and it still feels bullshit (although a smaller one).

So I don’t much like proposals mixed up with live gameplay lol. I think the Blogsball Dynasty had the best format for Nomic thus far, and there was very little proposal/live gameplay mix in comparison to others.