I’m not certain about the Honesty/Humility ones, the cost is percent based but the gains are static amounts. Is there a purpose to that inconsistency?
Also the 1,000 default defiantly should change soon after this is enacted for people who join later.

The percentage/static play is intentional, yes.

Is like that so that the value of certain things goes up and down. If everyone’s a prick then being humble gains more value, for example.

Likewise, if everyone is humble, then being humble too yourself isn’t too noteworthy.

But what if your Influence goes negative?

But what if your Influence goes negative?

Changed it to “non-negative”

Made “Claim they are Obnoxious” into less of a grind.

But aren’t negative values of influence a real thing?  Shouldn’t we just prohibit these actions (with the exception of Humility) if your Influence is negative?

Unless the grand total of influence is negative, the percentage based costs are going to be positive.

@Jumble: Then I should change it back to just “Integers”? Just let me know what text you want. I think that would be easier, it’s all very much the same to me.

Change it back to Integers and restrict any player from taking actions if their Influence is less than or equal to 0 (with the exception of Humility).

Got it, done.

Wait, do we round down or up when using a fractional part of our Influence?

If Social actions are costed in terms of Total Influence, that implies that their cost is paid from Total Influence.

But I’m not really a fan of this kind of artificial social currency, when Nomic is all about actual, real social bargaining. The main payouts here - One-Upmanship and Mutiny - are already covered (and easily counteracted) by bending the ear of the Captain or the three Mates.

[Jumble] The glossary clarifies a lot of these kinds of cases. (“If a rule implies that the result of any calculation should be an integer (for instance, by attempting to store that result in, or add it to, a gamestate variable that can only hold integers), the result of the calculation is instead the result rounded towards 0.”)

“If Social actions are costed in terms of Total Influence, that implies that their cost is paid from Total Influence.”:

Yes. That’s the trick. I was expecting that it would be the player’s job to try to stop other players from gaining an in-game advantage, not the Emperor.

“But I’m not really a fan of this kind of artificial social currency”: Its just choice of aesthetics. It’s all just a sort of abstract arithmetic in the end, regardless of this mask.

I don’t think it’s ever been codified and I’m sure it varies from dynasty to dynasty, but I’d say the Emperor’s duty was always to keep the rules of the game healthy. It’d certainly seem wrong to give a flawed proposal a seal of approval and gather up DEF votes for it.

Maybe it’s worth drafting an Imperial Manifesto of how an ideal Emperor should behave.

As for aesthetics - they change how we think about game actions and how we play the game, and (like your talk last dynasty of Treasure Hunts that involved no actual hunting) choosing words carefully is often a key part of Nomic. Call a tradeable currency “Gunpowder” and people would be cautious about handing it over to a player who might not return it and could fire it at anyone; call it “Influence”, though, and some players will think less carefully about what it actually means to give it to another player - there’s some instinctive but entirely unsupported sense that you could retract the Influence and get it back later if you changed your mind.

1) Alicia performs Honesty, disclosing 5 of her goals and gaining 500 Influence.

2) Alicia performs Honesty a two thousand times, disclosing the same 5 goals over and over again, but not gaining Influence because of the repetition.

3) Billy claims Alicia is obnoxious, one thousand times. Alicia loses 10,000 Influence.

4) Total Influence is now very negative. Billy can perform any Social Action of his choice, and when doing so, he will gain Influence instead of losing it.

The social moves were limited to daily, thankfully.

Hrm, maybe also a policy ticksheet would do to introduce the Emperor, if its difficult to persuade everyone of a common Manifesto.

And OK.

But I’m not my in-game character lol. My whaler dude or whatever he becomes to be and his imaginary relationships with other people’s avatars have little bearing of how I choose to socially interact with the rest of real persons in this game, regardless of how much “Influence” they have.

Or are imaginary social relationships somehow bad (rather - the gears and mechanics you can draw by outlining them?), I don’t get it.

^ @Kevan

(To clarify, “have little bearing” in comparison to just any other regular in-game resource. I’ll obviously kiss up more to whoever has more riches, bananas, influence, whatever we’ve chosen at the time. It’s all the same to me.)

Trying to gamestate social relationships seems particularly unnecessary and misleading in Nomic, when there are always behind-the-scenes pacts and negotiations. You can already “Mutiny” by getting a quorum of players to vote for a proposal that makes you Captain.

As this is now six hours old and includes a scam which would require Goals to be reset.

Again, my in-game toon’s relationships =/= my real life interactions with players!

Its just a mechanic!

And yeah and whatnot.

It gets weird when those two levels are at odds, though, and we end up with one player leading a “Mutiny” on the grounds of some spreadsheet relationship data (“you said you trusted me when you gave me 500 Influence two weeks ago, which means you’re going to help me kill the Captain now”), even though every single other player is dead against a mutiny happening at that point.

I think Nomic is cleverer and funnier (and much easier to build on) when all the metaphors make sense and mesh together, and disappointing when something nonsensical or unintuitive happens and we shrug it off as “just a game”. I have died on this hill before, though.