Monday, January 21, 2019

Proposal: Sharing the evidence

Self-killed. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 22 Jan 2019 12:19:17 UTC

Replace the text of the rule “Clues” with:

When a Detective finds a Clue, the Chief selects a Possibility at random. If the Possibility is a Quality of the Murder its Description is “Proof”, otherwise its Description is “Disproof”. The Chief constructs a sentence (“the Evidence”), that contains the Possibility, its Description, and an integer chosen arbitrarily by the Chief. The Chief then privately sends the Evidence to that Detective.

If the Chief has not done so in the past 72 hours, he should perform the following atomic action, known as a Search:-

* For each Detective, roll a ten-sided die: on a result of 6 or higher, that Detective finds a Clue. (This is known as the Search Roll.)
* Post a blog entry announcing that a Search has occurred, which contains a list with the MD5 hash of each Evidence from each Clue found in that Search.

(Whenever the Chief resolves something at random, that decision is secretly random.)

Taking the idea from the Activism dynasty: I tried to make this effectively be the same as the proposed “Clues”, except that Detectives can share the Evidence, and prove that it is real Evidence, without needing the Chief as an escrow.

Comments

Kevan: he/him

21-01-2019 16:42:05 UTC

against The Activism mechanic was more of a side effect than a desired feature, I think. It seems much more of a game if players have to decide how much to trust each other.

pokes:

21-01-2019 18:15:29 UTC

To add some color to this - it allows for an in-game distinction between telling someone that you found Isabel’s diary which proves she did it, and showing them the diary. I think that could provide for a richer spectrum of deciding how much to trust someone.

Kevan: he/him

21-01-2019 18:41:01 UTC

I think that would quite quickly boil down to “proving the hash = telling the truth” and “refusing to prove the hash = lying”. Any backchannel communication is always an exercise in trying to build trust - why would anyone decline to verify that they weren’t lying?

Clues as objects is good if there’s some physicality or constraint to that, if the answer to “prove it” can be clouded by the diary having been mislaid, or stolen, or destroyed (or none of these things and the diary owner is lying about it). But if the only answer to “you can easily prove it” is “I choose not to prove it”, this feels like a largely dead end.

Trigon:

21-01-2019 19:22:54 UTC

imperial the Emperor has a vision for the dynasty and I shall leave the final decision up to him.

edelopo:

21-01-2019 19:25:14 UTC

against

derrick: he/him

21-01-2019 19:36:31 UTC

imperial

Kevan: he/him

21-01-2019 19:46:18 UTC

Ah, it’s not a vision thing, it’s just whether we’re shutting out the more interesting way to play this.

pokes:

22-01-2019 12:06:09 UTC

against to speed things up