BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

So “turns” but not a turn order, essentially? Once you start moving, it’s your turn until you reach the finish line somehow.

It still suffers from delays caused by someone who starts moving but doesn’t come back to get to the finish line. I’m fine with leaning in to the “do all your moves at once” but that relies on people actually doing that.

Would it be unreasonable to introduce a short time limit to accompany this, even knowing that it makes taking the max time ok? I feel like if you have time to start your “turn” you should have or make the time to finish it, barring emergencies. So a time limit of 1 hour after your first comment in a race seems like it might be a good start.

Thoughts?

Sure, would make sense to have attempts time out if abandoned half-way through, whether tactically or thoughtlessly.

Ok, I think we have something here then. I’ll make a follow up Proposal for the timer unless someone beats me to it.

I also think that if each Snail is allowed to spam their actions until they reach the finish line, there’s no need to put them in one Comment at a time. That just becomes an unnecessary restriction once there’s no purpose in allowing someone else’s comment to come in between.

As right now you could move halfway down the track, wait three days for the slug of death to move far enough to kill everyone else, then finish your turn.

I’m also not convinced forcing everyone to move all at once is the best option either. I’m fine with it being a strategy, but maybe give it some benefits and some drawbacks so players can decide if its the right strategy to use or not.

I think we could incorporate the Slug of Death’s moves in with this so that the above strategy wouldn’t be viable.

If we added in my timer idea, then it doesn’t actually force everyone to move all at once. If you only want to make one or a few moves, then just let the timer run out, and you end up wherever you are. We could even add in a voluntary “I give up my turn” special word you could add in your comment.

Oh wait, I guess that wouldn’t work. We couldn’t leave someone in between 0 and 99 cm because that would prevent anyone else from moving per this Proposal.

Drat, I feel like we’re dancing around the optimal game loop here.

We need a better blend of the ideas floated so far. We keep toggling back and forth and I’m not sure we’re making any progress. It might just be a misperception on my part of where everyone is at on how Moves should play out.

I’d like to just list out some core parts of what I think would be worth doing in this dynasty, without trying to work out the exact mechanics of it, and compare that to what others want to try to do. Maybe if we select the common areas, we can come to a better agreement?

* No specified turn order
* The ability to make as many or as few moves as you’d like on your turn
* A way to prevent any one Snail from holding up the turns of other Snails by failing to complete their turn
* A way to prevent advantages due to online timing or favourable time zones

I think we just need some basic race structure or other in place, enough that if a Race were called, players would clearly understand what kind of moves they were meant to be making, and some stuff would happen. And that after one Race, we’d all see what sort of game it was and what could be added to it.

With proposals like Busting Out Some Moves it feels like we’re trying to game-balance our way to an implicit race structure (of when to move and whether Snails would ever stop mid-track), when we could just be defining that.

[Clucky] Three days is plenty of time for an “everyone else” to fend off a slow-moving rules slug!

We have that right now, don’t we? It’s certainly not complete, and might not be all that interesting, but there’s enough defined to actually conduct a Race with the existing rules if no other Proposals were enacted. The only thing missing is the Award Ceremony, but that doesn’t stop the Race itself from being conducted.

If we started a Race right now, the game would be “roll DICE10 a bunch of times, and you may as well do this all in one go because there are no decisions to be made”. So this is a suggested codification of that. Is that the game?

If that’s not the game, what is the game?

It’s the game we would have at the moment. Once we’ve played it and determined our satisfactions and dissatisfactions, we could probably figure out the game we actually wanted.

This is probably moot anyway since it looks like both Speed Limit and Busting Out Some Moves are likely to pass, so there will be Move limitations and some different Move choices. Whether they’re enough to make it the game remains to be seen, but we can experiment and find out.

@Kevan is it? could easily take a while for the proposal queue to clear once you realize something is happening

if this is the route to go, I’d rather fix the death snail first and then add this than allow in begging someone to exploit it

With this, there is almost no interaction between Snails, and having to do all your planning and moving in one go encourages overthinking to find the optimal play.

I agree with JonathanDark that we should first play with little or no restrictions and then see what people actually do in practice. And if it turns out we need a controlled structure then I think turns are better than this.

to give Clucky’s new idea a try

Yeah, there’s maybe room for a Blackjack/Yahtzee type game here where players try to push their luck to beat what someone else just did, but I don’t think it’s the best way to go, certainly not for the theme of “a track race”.

Was just trying to work out which direction people felt this was going in.