So I think this dynasty was a bit of a miss, for a variety of reasons.

None of those reasons are Desertfrog - the theme was good, the emperoring was on point, the Imperial Styles were kept to in a transparent way.

But the ruleset does have a lot of issues. It is structred weirdly, with important information being kept sepafrately from its context, and core concepts being defined in illogical and hapazard ways. This led to so many instances of people discovering that the rules just didn’t say what people thought they did - it was a scammer’s paradise but it made conventional play borderline impossible.

(On the subject of scams, there was one left for the last race - Stomp Rocket’s discard-to-move counter didn’t reset with each Race, so in the last race each Stomp Rocket would have moved its user forward 24cm by default. Which is, of course, why Habanero and I both have several.)

But over and above basic construction, the core mechanics of this dynasty simply weren’t fun. For all that the last-mover advantage was repeatedly observed in this dynasty, no-one figured out a way to mitigate it, and my belief is that if fun scams hadn’t been found then the dynasty would have been a boring trudge.

That said, activity levels were good, there were lots of good ideas, and there was some fun boundary-pushing in discussions around consistency, the legitimacy of scam readings of the ruleset, and a DoV debate for the ages.

This dynasty was great fun to me. Much more scam-heavy than average (we couldn’t go 5 seconds without running into another issue), which I attribute to two things:

- The rules were incredibly complex and thus easy to find cracks in. Interestingly no single proposal was really all that bad and they were easy to understand in isolation, but every aspect of the game eventually had so many references to other aspects (you can Play, unless you’re hit with the three play limit, or if you aren’t Healthy, but also if you auto-discard a reverse rocket the before doesn’t count, etc. etc.) that it became pretty much impossible to hold the whole ruleset in your head at once.

- At some point (probably starting Race 2 when Josh joined with his Bucket scam), there was a shift in the game attitude from “there is exactly one interpretation that makes the most sense, to the exclusion of everything else” to “as long as you can construct a believable argument for the legality of an action, it’s legal, regardless of how little sense it makes compared to the clear reading”. I think this is overall good for the game. It makes debates a lot more lively. Things feel a lot more like a Nomic when we regularly take dubiously legal actions and then try to convince others of their legality. I’ll probably carry this attitude into future dynasties.

The action system being completely asynchronous was sort of disappointing and led to a lot of stalling while still needing to check in constantly in case someone else breaks the silence. I’d like to revisit the Waking Hour concept in a future dynasty to at least fix the latter issue, but unfortunately things were already so complicated that it fell flat in this one.

As for my gameplay, I suppose now it’s alright to reveal that me and Josh were planning on colluding in Race 5 before the no-cooperation passed. My rationale was similar to the argument ais made in favour of that proposal - the main way I lost was if no one else moves to allow me to finish and I got eaten or put behind the Slug of Death, so it was in my best interests to find someone to collaborate with to finish immediately. Josh was the clear target as the second-highest TR player.

When we were discussing strategies, though, we noticed a scam where the “fuel removed in this way” for the Stomp Rocket arguably includes fuel removed from the discarding of Stomp Rockets earlier, meaning the Stomp Rocket would start out moving me 24cm (as 24 Rocket Fuel was removed via Stomp Rocket in Race 4). This gave me a way to almost guarantee a win even solo (as 4 plays would get me across the line), so after that I really didn’t feel the need to cooperate with Josh anymore. I still voted against the no-cooperation though, just for the sake of honouring our past agreement. I intended to finish at parity with him for the coregency before it passed.

I agree that one of the main issues was “performing any action involves looking in too many places”. Not only were there relevant rules scattered all the way through the ruleset, actions generally had side effects on most of the other Snails which you would need to compute, meaning that there was a lot of effort required to perform even one action correctly.

If I hadn’t seized on the timing scam, my plan to win was to wait 24 hours for item usage to become available, then attempt to knock every other Snail behind the Slug of Death using only 3 Plays, then run to the finish line before any of them could get back onto the track, ending the race. This would have been possible from many starting position rolls due to a bug in the Opposable Radulae equipment: “When you Discard, you may remove and apply the effect of 2 Items from your Inventory.” doesn’t actually stop the primary effect of Discarding going through, so you effectively get to use 3 Items in a single play. For example, from the position rolls on the current Tracker, it can be done using Magnet (attract), Huge Club on Habanero, then 3 Magnet (repel). (Oddly, I would have had enough Plays to do that even if Opposable Radulae worked as intended.)

The main flaws in this plan were a) that other Slugs might move far enough forward early on in a way that I wouldn’t be able to knock them back before the Slug of Death, or b) that other Slugs might interrupt my run to the finish line by returning themselves to the track. Performing my actions at the first possible moment (24 hours after race start) would be the best way to try to avoid a), but that would make b) very likely to happen.

As such, I wasn’t hugely confident that the plan would work; I was relying primarily on the well-known “last mover advantage” to discourage other Snails from moving early. However, I at least knew that the last race wasn’t going to turn into a stallfest, as if that happened I would be able to win it quickly; the situations in which my plan didn’t work would be the ones in which other Slugs were being active.

@ais: Opposable Radulae didn’t actually do anything - Items aren’t in your Inventory, they’re in your Items. Me and Josh suspected that that was your plan, but didn’t want to correct your mistake there.

There was also a bug in the Radulae that it discards from Inventory, but Inventory is explicitly not where items are held - equipment is held in inventory, so the Radulae just straight doesn’t work.

Oh, good point – that would indeed have defeated me. I guess this is the sort of dynasty where you can’t really rely on any of the dynastic rules to function as apparently intended!

For what it’s worth, the main rules-writing lesson I take away from this dynasty is that we should be aiming to write rules in the form “you do something; at that point, the action updates the gamestate, and you should then update the tracker accordingly”. (The “do something” could be, and often is, updating the tracker; but in that case we want the action to happen even if the update is slightly wrong, as long as we can identify which action was performed.) This isn’t always possible, especially when random actions are involved, but it helps to make the timing much clearer when it’s possible.

The other main rules-writing lesson is to co-locate the related operations whenever possible. I know that I tend to be lazy about this when introducing new concepts, as I’m sure others are, but this laziness has led to the scattering of relevant information as pointed out earlier.

It’s a better ruleset when we take the time to create Proposals that rewrite the existing text to smoothly integrate the new concepts into existing rules, rather than creating a new rule each time.

Ruleset sprawl and gamestate illegibility is often in the individual players’ interests; your opponents might (as happened here with Items/Inventory) trip over something later if you choose not to tidy up. Perhaps it’s an inevitable hazard under a provocateur/onlooker Emperor. I suppose we should have been more cautious about taking a generous “we can remove it later if it doesn’t work out” attitude to rulebuilding at the start, in light of that.

I bailed on this one after a week, anyway, when it seemed established that the dynastic game was going to be about reacting within minutes to blog comments (in a month where I wasn’t sure how much I’d be online) and making lucky dice rolls.

I did have one big doubt about the legality of the DoV, reading over it, but didn’t weigh in as I wasn’t playing. I think we might benefit from tightening the game’s magic circle a bit on both sides, if it’s possible to do that; this dynasty did suffer a bit from players who said they were playing but then didn’t really do anything (Darknight and Raven1207), and players who said they weren’t playing but then tried to do something (Bucky arguing against the DoV on the Discord). It helps to know who’s actually playing.

The first part of that is something I’ve been thinking about - an ‘observer’ status between active and idle that conveys limited voting rights and offers an expedited unidling route.

The second part is harder as the ruleset is rightly reticent on how it governs the behaviour of idle players. It might be an informal change - something like making #current-dynasty read only to anyone who is not currently playing, perhaps

More statuses could help. Maybe we should consider a venn diagram of the types of things that players do (play the dynastic game, make dynastic proposals, make core proposals, vote on dynastic, vote on core, watch the dynasty, advise others, socialise, etc), and see which overlapping zones are meaningful, which ones people would ever want to stand in. It feels like we’ve maybe got a small group in the “vote on dynastic, watch the dynasty” box, and I’m not sure what we should do about that.

Idle behaviour seems ultimately an etiquette question of whether it’s appropriate for a player to try to influence the dynastic game while remaining idle. (Bucky unidling just before Race 5 and then critiquing the DoV when it happened would have landed differently, I think?) If there was an agreement on that, it could be left to dynasties to build around it - maybe even moving into an age where endgames, as well as DoVs, disallowed unidling.

I’m generally suspicious of things that prevent unidling because, if they go wrong, they may leave us confused as to what the playerlist is. Endgame lockdowns can be a good idea but I generally prefer them to be of the form “if you unidle, your statistics are set in a way that prevent you from having any influence on the game” rather than an outright ban.

That said, it’d be hard to prevent that having an influence in situations where players disagree about how to interpret the rules! There are a couple of reasons why it’s better, at BlogNomic, to leave the interpretation up to the players who are actively playing. One is that participating in the gameplay gives you a good idea of what rulings are needed to make the dynasty work and what core rules are generally being relied on to work in particular ways, and a player who isn’t participating might not have that experience. The other is that thinking that a DoV is invalid is a much greater motivating force to unidle and complain than thinking that a DoV is valid – so if a small minority of idle players think a DoV is wrong and a much larger majority think that it’s right, allowing votes from outside might cause the DoV to fail even if most of the idle players also think that the DoV is valid.

On the subject of “more statuses” – a few have been tried at other nomics but most of them didn’t really work. One that does seem to have worked well is “is a player in most respects, but doesn’t count towards quorum” (a status that gets removed instantly if the player votes (including any implicit author vote), updating quorum immediately, to prevent proposals being voted through with less than half the players); the idea is to prevent players who are participating in tracker gameplay, but not in proposal gameplay, from doing the equivalent of holding up the queue. I fear it might be hard to track correctly, though, and might have to be modified slightly to make tracking easier (e.g. some sort of “counts as idle for the purpose of proposal voting” that’s tracked on the wiki tracker, with players being able to remove the status from themselves at any time).

Seems like a curious player status to be in. “I just want to play the game that other people are proposing and creating, even if a proposal comes up that works against my interests.” Obviously, it happens, I just don’t know what to call that.

That said, if we had said status, I could see players initially get a “fully active” upon unidle, but on lack of blog activity, instead of going fully idle, they go to this “can’t vote but can still perform dynastic actions” idle, as long as they are making trackable dynastic actions.

I could imagine a situation where I’d want to be in that kind of status, e.g. if I’m too busy/tired to really think about voting but still want to casually make game actions every now and then. (this would of course require that the dynastic gameplay doesn’t expect all players to actively participate)

As for the dynasty, I think at least part of the complexity was due to the nature of the core mechanics. Moving on a 100cm line by performing actions encourages having different kinds of actions that trigger different effects and have different kinds of restrictions. It would work better in a computer game context, where everything is done automatically

It’s actually quite fun how the dynasty ended up being pretty much the opposite of what I originally had thought.

My intention was for it to be casual and accessible yet still somewhat strategic, and not particularly scammy — and the result was: a complex but not very strategic dynasty with a lot of scams.

Much like being a gamemaster for an RPG, you can never truly anticipate what your players might do, and often it’s the opposite of what you planned for.