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.

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.

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.

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

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

to speed things up