look to the future forget the past

I’m ambivalent towards the idea, but only because I have played in or observed every dynasty since I joined in Kevan’s second, back in 2003. I would resist an attempt to simply rehash an old dynasty, but if someone thought that they could take an old theme and give it new life then I wouldn’t be adverse. Certainly I wouldn’t mind seeing Keitalia’s come around again.

Also, it makes me sad that a lot of the early dynasties have no history, especially as the old BlogNomic is gone.

I really like the fact that we’ve managed to get through sixty dynasties without any repeats, and that we’ve been consistently imaginative along the way. Reading the list in order, it’s not as if we ran through ten “obvious” themes at the beginning, followed by twenty less common ones, and are now scraping through obscurity. It’s all been good, and continues to be so.

And I think most themes can be rejuvenated with a tweak of direction. The ones you mention here (Est’s Robot Factory, Myke’s Kingdom, Lyndse’s Robin Hood and Geran’s Agriculture) would only need the lightest change of context, if players felt they’d missed out by not getting to play a dynasty with robots, royalty, banditry or farming.

(archive.org seems to have a lot of the old BlogNomic blog in it, by the way. I don’t know how easy it’d be to try and scrape it back.)

The problem with rejuvenating the fun ones is that they were already fun; like Hollywood and remakes, you run the risk of not clearing the bar. I was already lurking for the end of Est’s dynasty, and I remember enjoying it massively, but any attempt to recast it would mean immediately ruling out many of the proposals that were effective the first time around.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s necessary to replay a Dynasty, but there are certainly parts of them that we could revive in the context of different dynasties.

I also wish the history was complete.  : (

There have been a few repeats:
The first few dynasties were very similar, at least by later standards.
The Third Dynasty of Amnistar(Politcs) was largely a rehash of the First Metadynasty (Hats)
Kevan’s Third and Fifth dynasties (Thing/Werewolf) shared a lot of themes and rules.
And I don’t remember enough about the First Dynasty of Doremi to talk about its resemblance to the current dynasty.

It seems like even the repeats Bucky noted had enough things be different to make them unique.

So, I’m extremely new to this game.  I joined largely because I really, really like Nomic and this seemed like the most accessible online version.  And, having been reading through the history on the BlogNomic wiki, I understand where you’re coming from.  A lot of the dynasties seemed like cool, interesting ideas that I’m sorry I missed.

But that doesn’t mean that repeating them would be worthwhile.  Like Kevan said, old themes can be easily rejuvenated with new directions and new mechanics.  (Some future BlogNomicker might independently have the idea of an action movie-themed dynasty without using scriptwriting mechanics at all.)  And even beside that, who needs old dynasties?  I could probably rattle off ten new, workable theme ideas right now, if asked.  It’s time to look forward.  I, for one, would like to see more fluid core mechanics (rules 1 and 3) and better interaction between them and the dynastic mechanics.  How this will work out remains to be seen.