I guess I’m supposed to broker a cabal as an idle Player?

“Players may not use third party proxies to facilitate communication.”

how do you even enforce this

@ jumble i mean to be fair almost all rules of all games are enforced by of social contract first & foremost, so this would be much the same?

that said i would be sad to see this activated a lot because scheming is very fun. but if its default state is inactive & a dynasty leader has to choose to enable it, i guess its nice to enable people to have optios if they have a specific kind of vision for a dynasty

so a hestitant from me

@jumble we’d enforce it the same way we enforce fair play rules: the mere existence of the rule would prevent the negative behavior from occurring 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time we can examine the specifics of the infraction and determine the path forward when and if it happens.

@lemon The thing with scheming is that its fun in moderation, but when every dynasty turns into “who can form the best cabal” we sometimes want a change of pace

“Private communications are considered to be anything that another average player could reasonably be privy to” is missing a negative somewhere.

I’m not sure I see smoky backroom cabals as a problem: they add some intrigue and tension to the game that wouldn’t otherwise be there. The sudden revelation of a secret conspiracy is always more enjoyable than public “hi, I need someone to pass me five tokens, can offer 3% of mantle” brokering, to me.

The possibility of cabals even spices up a dynasty when nothing is actually happening, when players jump at shadows and worry about why exactly a player just did something unusual, and who they might be working with. Turning on all the lights risks revealing a largely empty room.

Are secret cabals really a problem? What’s a dynasty that’s been spoiled by them, and how much would this have changed that?

I think the issue is more that they’ve become the default in a way that’s a little stultifying.

The public “4% of mantle to anyone who can pass me three grommets” stuff casts a much larger shadow, to me, but maybe I’ve not seen some of the cabal activity lately.

To the best of my knowledge, five of the eight non-Emperor players ended this dynasty in cabals.

All of which is to say,  but I think wording will need to be tightened as we go.

I feel like private cabals can leave some players feeling left out if they never get to be in the cabals.

There are also dynasty ideas that just don’t work if you allow cabals (things like “everyone secretly do X, now try and figure out who did what”)

I’d expect public cabals to generate that same feeling, perhaps even more acutely, if whichever players are being left out at the moment were now visibly being picked last for the team (or not being picked at all).

Would be an interesting constraint for a dynasty, though.