Friday, June 21, 2019

T minus . . .

The final drop post was closed by a comment made at 05:04:53 on 21/06/2019, which, unless I’m very much mistaken, means we will be able to make Declarations of Victory from 17:04:53 on 22/06/2019.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve enjoyed this dynasty!

The inspector’s shuttle was inbound, expected to arrive within the next day or so.

Comments

derrick: he/him

21-06-2019 18:19:46 UTC

I very much enjoyed this dynasty too. It was largely time insensitive, was packed with meaningful decisions, and balanced attention to your own gamestate with attention to opponents’ gamestates.

This is one of those dynasties I want to try playing as a traditional game with a group.

Kevan: he/him

21-06-2019 21:13:27 UTC

Did seem like a good set of mechanics once the corridors became meaningful. I’d be up for working it into a print-and-play version over Slack, if anyone else felt like polishing and playtesting it.

This didn’t look a lot like a Nomic, though. Looking back over the past few weeks, there were hardly any “gameplay” proposals (where a player tries to directly improve their own situation, or worsen another’s). Why was that?

Farsight:

21-06-2019 21:48:19 UTC

I think we were all too focused on fine-tuning our moon sites; the few gameplay proposals I remember were voted down as they would’ve disturbed things too much.

derrick: he/him

21-06-2019 22:12:01 UTC

I think we also became somewhat enamored by the emergent behavior, and kind of decided to play the game to its end. If we hadn’t picked a specific date early on, I think the victory condition would have seen a lot of action.

I think that for blognomic at least, exploring emergent behavior of new and unique rule sets is a core gameplay element.

I’d be willing to help with a print-and-play version of this dynasty.

Farsight:

22-06-2019 06:48:43 UTC

I must admit, as a newcomer not only to Blognomic but to Nomics in general, I was surprised that people were playing by the “spirit” of the rules, rather than exploiting loopholes in the “letter” of the rules like I was expecting. Just like what Kevan said, this didn’t look a lot like a Nomic!

Still enjoyed it very much though.

TyGuy6:

22-06-2019 07:01:19 UTC

Oh, so it was somewhat atypical, eh? I’m just getting up to speed at this point. Culture is a big part of any Nomic, and I like what I’ve been seeing. B Nomic was killed by rules lawyering, (one could reasonably say,) but role play type commentary in almost every post seems to keep this one more light-hearted.

Kevan: he/him

22-06-2019 07:21:50 UTC

I think we just didn’t have any major loopholes this dynasty, by chance or by design. TyGuy6’s observation that Quarters can’t maintain themselves was accepted and played by the letter, and I don’t know whether anyone else spotted it earlier and built accordingly. We’re also (by the looks of it) respecting the fact that Civil Title tie-breaks are resolving in a way that some players didn’t quite expect.

We added a Fair Play rule recently saying that players should never “use a core, special case or appendix rules scam to directly or indirectly achieve victory”, which I think is the tone BlogNomic takes. Dynastic scams are fun and have every active player on an even footing, but the more lawyerly core scams (whether that’s a passing logician destroying us with a whiteboard of reasoning we can barely understand, or somebody noticing a core typo from 2007 that no current player can be blamed for) less so.

Kevan: he/him

24-06-2019 08:34:48 UTC

I’ve started a Slack channel for game design discussion at https://blognomic.slack.com/messages/CKMLCNDB3/