BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

A bunch of things just happened very fast. They’re based on a dynastic rule exploit. The rule “Attacking” states that the steps for a given attack must be carried out in order. It does not specify how much time, or what other actions, might elapse between steps.

1. Kevan crafted a Thrall and donated it to me; I salvaged it for half its crafting cost: 1 AP. We repeated this three more times, giving me 8 AP.

2. I spent 1 AP to start an attack on That Pesky Dragon. For step 1, I invoked Dead Shot and took a result of 10, then added my Dexterity of 13, plus 2 for my equipped Swamp Dagger. That total was equal to the Dragon’s Dexterity of 25, so the attack continues.

3. Step 2 is skipped because the Dragon was not Stunned. For step 3, I again took a Dead Shot, adding my Strength of 8 to an effective roll of 5. I reduced the Dragon’s Health by 13.

4. Before finishing the remaining steps of the first attack, I spent another AP and started a second attack, taking Dead Shot again for both rolls and hitting it for another 13.

5. I repeated this start-an-attack cycle six more times, spending my remaining 6 AP. This took the Dragon’s Health to -4, making it Dead.

6. I completed steps 4 and 5 of my first attack, then my second attack, etc. This took me to -35 Health, making me mortally wounded.

7. In step 5 of my eighth and final attack, I elected not to distribute Loot.

8. Kevan Plundered the dead Dragon, taking possession of the Golden Crown.

9. Kevan flipped a coin to decide which of the two of us would take possession; I won the toss, so he traded it to me.

still voting I don’t think doing all the actions simultaneously is legal

Seems fine to me. Great play!

Make a CfJ then, Clucky.

No need for a CfJ - if enough players would vote in agreement that it was illegal, that same number would be be enough to vote down this DoV and prevent the win.

[Clucky] I think it’s reasonable to read the Attacking rule’s “then performing the following in order” as allowing a gap of seconds, or minutes, or even hours or days between each step. If you accept that, there doesn’t seem to be anything ruling out taking other game actions in between those steps.

Although I’m a bit inclined to think achieving victory is an action, even if it’s a passive one. I would like to hear other Orcs interpretation of this.

“If an Orc is Mortally Wounded they may not perform any action defined by the dynastic rules other than Rest.” [Health rule]

“Affect: The Orc who holds The Golden Crown has Achieved Victory.” [Golden Crown sub rule]

CfJ is redundant at this point. If this fails can just rollback the last 7 attacks set the Dragon’s health to 87 and Brendan’s health to 0.

[Kevan] But that doesn’t automatically fix the issue of the gamestate, as there would still be a disagreement of the rules’ interpretation if this DoV fails, I think.

Its my belief that actions like that are always atomic. Might be good to clarify that in the glossary, but I don’t think we need the clarification in the glossary for that to be the case.

@IceFromHell Its not even a passive action. Could’ve maybe tried to argue that Brendan couldn’t do the “loot the crown” step, but as he didn’t I think that part is fine

that being said, “A single Item may not be traded more than once per day”

Is “single Item” a “single *instance* of an item”? Or could the hack to give Brendan enough AP to pull this off be invalid as well?

Obviously I have a vested interest in certain interpretations here. However: the case for steps of an attack being discrete and separable is strongly implied by the Poison Barb, which can be dropped—a separate action—”when an Orc who holds a Poison Barb causes a Creature to lose Health,” not after an attack.

Clucky’s last point is something that bugged me for a while when that was being proposed, but I forgot to send my comment at that time. I honestly don’t know what a “common english” interpretation of that really is, so I don’t have a saying in this.

The Trade action is to ”[remove] an Item from their Inventory” and then to ”[place] the removed Item in another Orc’s Inventory. A single Item may not be traded more than once per day.”

Items in an Orc’s inventory are created by an action which “add[s] one instance of that Item to the Items held by that Orc”, so the things being removed and placed - the things being traded - are instances. The verb “trade” cannot be applied to a class of Item.

It is at-least implied that you have to do things all simultaneously in general as alot of dynasties would not have worked right otherwise. I’m going to look over stuff and see if this has ever come up before and what people thought. This seems like it breaks any action that has ever not included the words “and may not take any other actions during the steps” which we don’t include often.

Not sure how to feel about this. However, it could technically be argued that the trade rule can only transfer a single item per day regardless of the sender or type of item. Going to wait a little while before voting.

From memory, lists of stepped actions are quite rare, and are usually confined to gamesmaster-type processing from the Emperor. This is the only player-action-list I can find offhand, and gives no obvious incentive to pause and do something else mid-list, so the scam didn’t arise there.

Josh had a good go at sorting out imperatives a few months ago (where “must” would explicitly become “cannot take any other game actions until you do this”), but it didn’t get picked up again. I’d certainly like to see something like that added to the ruleset for future dynasties.

@GenericPerson how so? I don’t see a way to argue that. I think they are right so

I didn’t say the argument would be very good. It would involve an iffy interpretation I doubt would work.

We have quorum and Larry is for, so congratz :)

(But I think we should really take the time to make something about this timming stuff that came up. It’s possible that some actions are still gamestate [cause they never got concluded or something] and generally it’s not a good idea to have it like that. You never know.)

to speed the game along