Reconciliation only has one L.

Fixed

“Reconciled” also only has one l.

D:

Are you happy now you monsters

I’m just salty from the time I accidentally enacted a proposal containing the (non)word “beserk” and then people voted down the follow-up proposal to fix the spelling.

, anyway.

Would be good to deal with the Emperor idling, but if Naught does so without giving us any further information, this is just a coin toss between Clucky (who is, I think, the only player who can prove their identity beyond reasonable doubt right now) and possibly the Traitor (who can invent a perfect dossier of private information purportedly received from the Emperor and/or idle players).

(Under “Epistemic Knowledge”, it’s required that the “justification for [a] belief leaves no possibility for their Role to be anything other than the Role named” - reasoning of “I recalled myself at the Grand House and my friend here said they recalled me at the Jail, therefore I am the Burglar” leaves the possibility that their friend was mistaken, or deliberately lying as the Traitor.)

And actually I think I see another player who could win the coin flip here. But none of them are me.

I suspect that Kevan’s main objection is the last sentence, but it’s not an unfair one. My argument would be this: if naught doesn’t show up, I don’t think that the effort of retooling the ruleset as it currently stands is worth the effort, and under those circumstances, ending the dynasty seems like the most reasonable path forward. The only attainment of any value in the dynasty so far is having worked out your role, and if that hands Clucky a free win then so be it. I think that the issue of a potential traitor can be worked around, if we want to, and I’d encourage amendments to that effect.

Yes, the potential for “toss a coin to see if Clucky or the Traitor or maybe a third player wins immediately” is my main objection. It would seem very defeatist to wave that through as a rider on any proposal.

I’d disagree that “the only attainment of any value in the dynasty so far is having worked out your role” - there’s also how much players have worked out about each others’ roles. If one of us has an amazing string pinboard which has plotted out most of the townsfolk with only the pinner’s own identity ambiguous, that deserves much more credit than someone happening to have picked the right action by chance, once.

Am reluctant to CoV and fix this later as the strangely superfluous “ceased to be the Past Memory, or otherwise ceased to be part of the gamestate” clause is bothering me. Is this trying to somehow set the clock to 72 hours after the start of the dynasty (when everyone was idled by the Player/Amnesiac bug), so that the coinflip happens immediately upon enactment?

No, as that would be retroactive - the rule would not have existed at any previous time when there was no Past Memory so could not kick in.

Is this just because you don’t like a victory mechanic that excludes you? Because that’s fine, but it feels like you’re inventing problems to try to justify that position, when “I don’t like it because it’s not in my interests” is a perfectly valid position by itself.

Ah, it’s the first rule of Nomic that once you start double-checking for scams, you often start to find them. I’m naturally drawn to the overkill of “or otherwise ceased to be part of the gamestate”, as it seems like the kind of clause someone would only add for a scam. Why bother to cover the situation where Naught didn’t just idle but was somehow vaporised from the game entirely, when this never happens?

I have a bunch of concerns with this proposal

First off, I’m not sure if it does anything. The Dynasty rule says

“BlogNomic is divided into a number of Dynasties. Each Dynasty may be headed by a single Amnesiac, known as the Past Memory. If there is no Past Memory, the Dynasty is a Metadynasty.”, and it is included as part of the list of rules which are an exception to the “idle Amnesiacs are not Amnesiacs” rule, so even if Naught his Idle I feel like they are still the Past Memory. Thus the game won’t ever enter Reconciliation

There are two states the game needs to enter, Reconciliation which it can only enter if there is no past memory, and Resolution, which it can only enter five years from now. If we somehow do enter Reconciliation, people can make posts but nothing will happen until we enter Resolution. But in the current state, five years from now someone can try collect a list of posts that could never have been legally made

This ties into the second problem, which is what happens if there are no Reconciliation posts which are popular. I guess the action just errors out and then nothing happens?

Lastly, this gives too much reward to players who got lucky about the early information they got, which is hardly fair to everyone else in the dynasty.

Well, I don’t have any information yet that isn’t public, so don’t have much skin in the game…

The way I see it, if the Past Memory disappears, then we can’t play a dynasty that’s heavily based on hidden information. So either we just end it with some mechanism that ignores everything that’s happened so far (popularity contest, Metadynasty, or whatever), or else we end it with something that takes the gamestate into account.

At present, this early in the dynasty, being lucky is pretty much the only thing that could have given a particular player an advantage; but playing the dynasty well could have given someone more opportunity to get the luck they needed. It seems more fair to take events in the dynasty so far into account in our recovery mechanism, than it does to just arbitrarily ignore everything that happened so far as being too luck-based.

[ais523] Some players will have taken informed information-gathering actions during the first two weeks, eliminating possibilities in the process. Others will have traded information with others and made a call on their trustworthiness. As written, this proposal is setting up an endgame that ignores all that and instead hands victory to a player who simply got a lucky reveal in the first week, as this is the only way to meet the “leaves no possibility for their Role to be anything other” requirement of Epistemic Knowledge.

It’s not beyond our wit to craft an endgame that measures that kind of thing. The Treasure Hunting dynasty - where players had to determine the unique resting place of buried treasure - did something like that by having everyone submit a list of possible sites, giving victory to the shortest list which included the right answer (with various tiebreakers), for that player being the most confident.

@Kevan remember that in this situation we don’t have access to the “right answer”.

But, you know, if it’s not beyond your wit then propose your solution, I’m not wedded to this, it was just the best that I could do. You give us something better and I’ll happily vote for it.

I can prove that I would have known my role after searching my pockets no matter what item I pulled. Unfortunately, naught never responded to my pocket search. I was actually very ahead of everyone in the game if I pulled binoculars. Thus, I feel like I should be in the coin toss too if there is one.

We could have something where everyone simultaneously reveals a full list of their suspicions (“I think that Josh is either the Bandit or the Woodcutter; I think that Clucky is the Samurai; I think ais523 could be anyone but the Samurai”), then everyone reveals a list of their 100% proofs (“Clucky can only be the Bandit because…”) and partial proofs (“ais523 must either be the Bandit or Samurai because…”), and we use the proofs to give each of the initial lists an accuracy score, in some way or other.

I’ll try something over the weekend if we think Naught might be genuinely off-radar now and likely unable to even provide us with a list of roles at the end.

Without my pocket search I don’t know my role. So, it sounds like my information would be pretty unhelpful in something like what you’re suggesting, although it would have been quite useful in the game.

That said, there is a lot more at stake here than just me and my desire to win, so I’d still be down for a solution like that so we can have a reasonable resolution to the game that basically correlates with the information we’ve been gathering.

Also btw I’m pretty sure with the way things are going that ais straight up does not have a role

I want to see Kevan’s solution, so I guess I’m voting since this precludes that

You don’t know your role but you sound like you’ve eliminated some options: that’s the kind of partial proof I mention. (If you can prove to our satisfaction that you’re either the Butcher or the Baker, we can give zero points to Josh saying “I think Ayesdeeef is the Candlestick Maker or the Tailor”, but some to Clucky saying “Ayesdeef is definitely not the Tailor”.) It may even be possible to calculate every player’s role, once we start comparing our partial notes…

I guess we’d have to switch the Traitor rule off for all of this.

Right, what I don’t get is credit for literally having taken all the actions I needed in order to be able to know my role for sure

I would be interested in some sort of “you win if you can prove your own role and your reads on other players’ roles are the most accurate” mechanic, and would probably vote for it in preference to this one if it were well-written. Perhaps something similar to this proposal, but with a tiebreak that’s more merit-based than randomly selecting between the players who Remember their roles?

I think ayesdeeef’s point is that players who asked for their information before the Past Memory have an advantage over players who took the same action but didn’t get a response. I’m not sure if there’s much we can do about that, because we don’t know how useful the information would have been.

Hmm… I’m out of slots, but what about something like this, which should fix ayesdeeef’s issue: in order to be eligible to win, you must be able to prove that, as of the Past Memory revealing all the information that they “should” reveal based on actions submitted so far, you would know your role for certain; among the Amnesiacs eligible to win, the winner is the Amnesiac who identifies the most other Amnesiacs’ roles and/or has their role identified by the least other Amnesiacs?

Yes ais, I would feel pretty good about something like that.

We also need to decide who we need to have information about. Pokes and jumble likely have roles, ais likely does not.