I liked the mechanics of the dynasty overall and felt that it had potential, but as I mentioned earlier, I think we got into the rhythm of when to execute dynastic actions based on 48-hour timers and weekly timers, with not much to do in between.

The Opportunities were a nice way to have something else to do and allowed for player interaction, but we couldn’t seem to expand on those.

I wonder if an overhaul of Be Productive would have been better. Something that required players to actively respond to a post to earn resources in their Vocation, with maybe some inter-player interaction to determine some extra bonuses or penalties somehow.

I think it’s been noted before that the tendency is to get basic mechanics going in the first two weeks and then never revisit those again. It’s the resistance to any overhaul, even if it’s causing stagnation, that seems to doom some dynasties.

It was a strange Dormancy outcome that Darknight unidling to uncritically vote through a chop and then a DoV to (as they said on Discord) “help things along” was less fair to the dynasty’s players than just leaving the dynasty in Dormancy and letting them negotiate a chop with a three-way vote on a CfJ.

Not that it mattered, as it was only less fair to Raven, who was already taking the same “help things along” role. The endgame definitely played out as a two-player Nomic, after Habanero had left: that a proposal or DoV would only pass if Josh and JonathanDark were both in favour of it, and would fail if they were not. (Which I think is a recipe for stagnation; my view on two-player Nomic is that it can work, it just stops having proposals once somebody thinks they’re ahead and doesn’t want to risk disrupting the status quo.)

That’s true; I didn’t bother proposing at all in the back half as anything I would have wanted on the books would have been correctly viewed as partisan.

I think this dynasty taught us a lot about late-game proposals.

Any given proposal is likely to increase the victory chance of some subset of players and reduce the victory chance of the others (it is possible that the chances will remain the same, but that doesn’t normally happen for proposals that change dynastic rules).

Suppose the effect on the victory chances is known or easy to work out. Then there are three basic possibilities:

a) a minority of players benefit, and a majority become less likely to win;
b) a majority of players benefit, and a minority become less likely to win;
c) a majority or all players benefit, and the others do not become less likely to win.

Proposals in class a) generally do not pass, unless a substantial number of players are willing to vote against their own interests (e.g. because they think that it will make the game more fun, and are willing to trade victory chance for that).

Proposals in class b) also generally do not pass, due to being considered unfair – players who would benefit are often reluctant to vote FOR, and emperors often explicitly have a policy of voting VETO on these (in the case of this dynasty, my policy was to vote AGAINST, and I specified this in the ascension address, although it didn’t come up).

Proposals in class c) can only work by reducing the chance of the dynasty ending with no result, and that chance is often low or zero towards the end of a dynasty, thus that sort of proposal is impossible in the late game.

As such, there are few situations in which a proposal can actually pass late-game (and this is a pattern we frequently observe at BlogNomic – most dynasties have a point beyond which the only proposals that pass have no meaningful effect on the dynastic gameplay). In order to continue the nomic gameplay, something has to break the assumption made above of “the effect on the victory chances is known or easy to work out”. There are a few different ways that that can happen: either the tactical and strategic implications of the ruleset are complicated enough that few players can figure them out; or significant parts of the gamestate are unknown due to hidden-information mechanics; or pooling is prominent in the dynasty but the pools aren’t generally known, and players can have an information advantage due to knowing information about which pools exist, and that can cause a proposal that looks bad for a player to be good for them or vice versa.

As an example, my coregency with Josh had proposal-based gameplay most of the way until the end (although most of it ended up not mattering). That was partly because the ruleset allowed action-pooling in an attempt to produce an immediate win, and those pools (unlike the randomly selected teams) were unknown. It was also partly because despite relatively simple rules, the scope of things you could do with those rules was very large, meaning that the effects of any given proposal were very unclear (even things like the exact wording of a rule in the proposal could cause it to affect the game very differently).

This dynasty didn’t have any of that sort of thing – the ruleset and gamestate were easy to understand, action-pooling was possible to some extent but it is unlikely that players would have chosen to do so due to the low player count (and pooling options weren’t that strong and might have been beaten by a solo player), and there was no information hidden by dynastic mechanics. So it’s unsurprising that it rapidly reached the point where no proposals were likely to pass (even as the Emperor I couldn’t think of any proposal that would be likely to pass, so I made a couple that I expected to fail in order to reduce the chance of players accidentally idling due to having nothing to vote on).

The problem with all that is that if it happens too far from the end of the dynasty, the game isn’t particularly fun to play. This dynasty was starting to get close to the end just on the dynastic mechanics, but there was still some time to go to see whether Fame or Savvy would be more important in determining the winner (and it would probably be possible to work it out if someone wanted to put in that effort), and I think there was still too much to go for players to be interested in playing it out.