BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

So are Mysterious Actions just Power Actions that don’t set the crypt timer?

“Give Richardo this item” feels like exactly the kind of thing you would want to be able to respond to.

To keep the flavor of “Mysterious” actions, what if the list of items wasn’t public?

aye, i think if clucky’s suggestion was added i’d vote for this :o

Hmmm, that’s an interesting idea, but the infrastructure of privately notifying the Emperor to track things is always laborious. Josh, how do you feel about it?

I have two very major issues with this.

First, the costs are way too low. Derandomizing a chest is a pretty strong mechanic as it is. This is much stronger (because it triggers 100% of the time – no waiting for Richardo to find the chest and randomly choose to open it), and the cost is negligible (a single hit of the Library of Souls allows pretty much every player to afford it regardless of whether they’re paying attention, and only one player has to do it to affect everyone – this isn’t something that people have to do individually, they can all pool their resources and/or take turns). For just 2-3 Puissance per Expedition, you can pretty much negate a dynastic mechanic of your choice! Don’t like Denizens? For 3 Puissance, you can entirely remove any chance of them injuring Richardo. Don’t have a Glyph? Bandages or a Roc’s Feather will prevent Glyphs from getting any reasonable Puissance gain. Don’t have a Sepulchre? Just spam Secret Passage Maps and you’ll destroy everyone else’s at random.

It’s worth noting that I got randomly dusted earlier in the dynasty purely due to a derandomized chest shooting down random Sepulchres; that wasn’t anything to do with customizing the map, it just happened to pick mine.

My second issue is making this, an action that affects the next Journey (and isn’t particularly spammable), a daily. This is going to lead to some of the most awful timing scams ever; for an action that’s this powerful and this cheap, many players may well want to spam it. But normally Expeditions happen around once every 24 hours as it is. This means that in order to spam this ability, you need to intentionally delay the game, e.g. by taking a Power Action every 12 hours, in order to buy yourself more dailies. I’ve posted rants before about daily actions leading to unfun (and Real-Life disrupting) optimal play. This one’s even worse because the correct timing depends on when Josh happens to be online, meaning that it’s harder to plan your sleep around it, and putting the Emperor in an impossible situation because now he’s advantaging or disadvantaging various groups of people depending on when he does the action.

(There’s also the more minor issue that trying to slip this in just before Josh is online is almost certainly optimal play, given that it doesn’t delay the Crypt entry action. Based on the flavour text, that’s intentional; it might not be a bad idea for some actions, but for this one in particular, it’s such a gamechangingly powerful effect that people probably deserve an opportunity to react.)

I woke up while this was still in the edit window, so this is my feedback; but I’m planning to vote AGAINST regardless unless there are some really major improvements to how this works.

This is a scam, and I only just realised.

Say a player is ahead (maybe only slightly ahead), and has a confederate, and Dracula has spawned. This proposal gives the conspiracy everything they need to make their lead unassailable, and bring around the end of the Dynasty quickly:

– Richardo can be given Bandages to prevent anyone else realistically being able to catch up;
– Richardo can be given a Crossbow or Stake, as appropriate, to advance the next stage of the victory sequence;
– Richardo can be given lots of Holy Tinctures to almost guarantee he reaches the appropriate square;
– All these have a cost that’s trivially easy for a 2-player conspiracy to afford day in, day out, given that they don’t need to do anything else to aim towards winning (I was wondering why the cost was so ridiculously low, and this is likely the reason).

It wouldn’t surprise me if a team of, say, Jumble and Brendan were intentionally seeding this possibility into the ruleset, planning to use it later in the dynasty to force a win once Dracula had spawned.

That’s a very good argument for keeping things publicly tracked, ais. The costs I picked were arbitrary and I’d be fine with changing them, but Jumble, as I’ve just learned that we are conspiring, please reach out to me at your earliest convenience to inform me of my victory share.

yeah, per ais’ criticisms, i think i’d much rather stick with predermined chests as far as weaponized items go :0

To answer the question raised upthread, I’m happy enough to track simple information.

s/k to speed along the queue.