BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

A little bit uncertain about introducing two types of distance and adjacency, but also claiming that one specific variant is the “default” distance;  isn’t explicit better than implicit?

(I’ll vote for anyway, just discussing a bit before locking the proposal)

We already have places using the default term for adjacency. Feel like distance should work the same way. We just need to define the other terms so people can use them. But this helps nudge people in the direction of, when it doubt, using Taxicab Distance and Orthogonal adjacency.

Oh god, why

Per Josh. Five different adjacency keywords is excessive - perhaps the first two are meant as setup for the others, but as written it sounds like the game is encouraging tools and mechanics to use all five terms.

It’s also unintuitive to me to use “diagonally adjacent” to mean “diagonal but not orthogonal” rather than “diagonal or orthogonal”.

Better to pick one term and use it for everything, I think. Straight orthogonal adjacency seems plenty for a game about embedding tiles into a mosaic.

So right now we already have three different adjacency keywords to cover orthogonal, diagonal or orthogonal, and diagonal. There were concerns raised that defining diagonal to mean “diagonal or orthogonal” didn’t seem right to some people. This (and previous proposal) were attempts to clean up that terminology. As some people go “diagonal adjacency intuitively means any of the eight neighbors” and some go “diagonal adjacency intuitively means only the corners”, and we’re already using diagonal adjacency in the rules, its clear we need the term defined.

Distance definitions were intended not just to setup the other two but also to allow us to use distance in the future for other purposes. You could imagine, for example, rules about making sure that tiles of a certain type have to be a certain distance from each other.

I think the fact that different terms feel variously right or wrong to people means that it’s better to pick one strong term (whether that’s “adjacent” or “touching” or “nearby” or anything) and use it as the main term for the game.

If you lock it down, it’s easier to remember - if you encourage rules to use both terms with one being the default, it becomes harder to remember which that default is, when you encounter the term “adjacent” in isolation.

Same goes for distance: pick chessboard or taxicab, and tell everyone to write rules that use that one.

that is a good point

unfortunately, we’re already using “diagonally adjacent” (see Grinding stone)

maybe define distance to mean taxicab distance; and then make it so that Grinding stone just works at a distance of 2 instead of 1?

I was originally for many different kinds of adjacency, but I’ve been convinced otherwise. I agree that we should probably just stick with taxicab distance and adjacency as taxicab distance 1 and only make mechanics that use one of those.

getting a head start on clearing out the queue