I was ambivalent about the toothlessness of it to begin with.

The Tree was created as a first-draft data-only response to Josh’s recruitment-based powerup. The intention was that it could and should be used as a game mechanic, if we ever wanted to encourage recruitment during a dynasty; Josh’s dynasty-agnostic voting chips were seen as too powerful, but it’d be possible to plug a dynastic “whenever a player becomes the Recruiter of a player who joined the game during this dynasty, they gain 1 Gold” rule into the Tree whenever we wanted a recruitment drive.

I still don’t think the rule has any business being there.

It’d save us from having to define “recruiter” from scratch every time we wanted to reward recruitment, and support the idea that this might be a thing we’d want to do when things got quiet. This could just be in the appendix, though.

I don’t know if recruitment is actually something I want to reward. It’s a nebulous concept that might as well read, “Send in the meatpuppets who won’t stick around and therefore leave us exactly where we were before.”

All the more reason to try to develop a definition of what meaningful recruitment is! Past dynasties have nailed it down more precisely, only having recruitments counted once the new player has made X votes and Y proposals, or something, but the mechanics never stuck around.

Then let’s look into it, and see what those mechanics were like. Defining the value and benefits of recruiting could work as a Special Case rule, and in that case, the workings of the Player Tree page would have to be covered by the Ruleset (though in the Appendix). Until then… I suppose the Special Case section has served as a nursery in the past; a proposal expanding on this theme could come about with or without “The Tree”, so I’m split.

I’m OK with removing it, because it feels a lot more appropriate as an off-Ruleset thing. The Ruleset should cover gameplay, not too many of these (interesting, but) meta things.

Maybe it’s worth coming back to this from the angle of finding a straight definition of “Recruited”. (It’s not even important to track the data beyond the current dynasty.)

[Duke] I’ve coincidentally just found one while writing up the The Third Dynasty of Brendan. Which was Emperor’d by an “Attendant”. Hmm…

[Kevan] That’s interesting. However, it also indicates that a good way to determine new players in good standing (who can therefore benefit their recruiters and themselves) could be very dynasty-specific and thus difficult to codify in a Special Case rule.

cov

[Duke] The conditions can and probably should include some dynastic actions, but the rest of the framework seems like the kind of thing that Special Case and Appendix rules are for: defining something that we’ll likely reuse, so that we don’t have to rewrite it from scratch every time.

That Kaiju Patron rule could work as a Special Case or Appendix with just “seven days, three proposals, other conditions if specified, tribute is unspecified”, and a dynastic rule (when we needed it) that said “patrons only count if they also take these other dynastic actions; tribute equals 25 Prestige”.