tonight

tonight

I think the basic lack of reveal makes sense narratively: why would everyone always be able to tell exactly who had stolen what? If it can’t be worked out from public information and Infamy gains, it’s up to the Burglars whether they want to reveal what they did.

Guards being under orders not to search the Burglars isn’t implausible, they could be passing them on to another team. I think the only fundamentally odd logical gap is that a Burglar won’t always personally know for sure which thing they actually stole.

CoV. Betrayal is funny, and should be encouraged.

Kevan has a good point. CoV

@Kevan: I basically think that this sort of dynasty is less fun if you don’t know what happened in it.

It doesn’t do much to encourage betrayal, because it is very likely that someone who betrays will be found out – too many people will know what happened (including you). After the dynasty I will be asking people to post all the information they know about what happened, in order to update the historical record: people who didn’t betray will have no reason not to reveal the information, and so we will be able to determine who was betraying by seeing who is unwilling to post their information.

Note also that if there is a betrayal that somehow remains hidden, it gives Kevan an unfair advantage in future dynasties (because at least he will know who was betraying). It may be important for other players to vote to prevent Kevan keeping information secret in order to avoid him getting an advantage in future.

I think there’s definitely some puzzle-solving enjoyment (and social deduction gameplay) in players trying to work out what just happened based on partial information, rather than being given a more direct reveal.

I really doubt that I’m getting much insight into betrayals from here. I’m processing all of the actions, but with no context on any private agreements - I don’t know what individual players were expecting or not expecting to happen.

@Kevan: But I’ll post all that information (that I know) post-dynasty so you’ll find out about it from there, and expect that enough other players will do the same that it all becomes public.

Wasn’t there a previous Dynasty that Kevan ran where the players voted to ensure he could never reveal what happened, to ensure nobody would be punished in later Dynasties for their betrayals? If there’s a set precedent of “not all information needs to be revealed”, should we follow it?

IIRC that was Josh, not Kevan.

FWIW I think that the voting on such things should generally depend on whether you’re planning to betray people or not. If you aren’t, it’s in your interest to get the rules changed so that other people can’t either – such a rules change would benefit you by giving certainty, and by removing options that you aren’t planning to take advantage of but that other players might. (Note that this mostly only applies in dynasties where the intended conventional play involves players needing to trust each other – although I wasn’t there and don’t have the details fully memorised, I think the context for the “we’ll agree never to reveal” involved a player trying to take extreme steps to protect a pooling agreement in a dynasty where the conventional play didn’t involve pooling, so the proposal was intended to weaken pooling rather than strengthen betrayal. But in this dynasty, a betrayal is more likely to be intended to undermine the Burglar/Guard team you’re on than to intended to undermine a pooling agreement.)

In general, if you suspect other players are up to something, a very good strategy is to write a proposal that would prevent it, to see how the votes go (e.g. in Desertfrog I I suspect that there was a pooling agreement between other players that I didn’t know about, and submitted a proposal to ban pooling to see who would vote against it, because I wasn’t planning to pool myself). Anyone who votes AGAINST it should be considered as potentially being untrustworthy and not a good person to make deals with.

The standard counterstrategy to this is to vote AGAINST but to give an unrelated reason, but it’s generally fairly easy to see through. For example, in Desertfrog I my proposal lead to this thread in which Josh criticised my attempts to determine, via the proposal system, whether he was trying to pool or not (and argued in favour of allowing pooling in general in much the same way that Kevan is arguing in favour of allowing betrayal in general). But (as was revealed after the dynasty) Josh was in fact trying to pool at the time.

So I guess this is just a case of how you view the proposal system. Some players view it as “trying to make a good game, and then we play it without using proposals”, in which case you vote on whether you think proposals improve the game or not (although I think that the possibility of betrayal doesn’t improve the game much in this case – trying to cover everything as Guards, or to find gaps in the plans as Burglars, is interesting in its own right, but betrayals mostly make that part of the game irrelevant). Other players, however, prefer a more nomic-style view in which proposals are used to try to gain an advantage in a dynasty (e.g. although my proposals are generally intended to improve the game, usually by fixing loopholes, I fix loopholes selectively in order to leave in the ones that benefit me). In the latter case, it’s generally very powerful to use proposals to try to flush out subterfuge because players can’t vote against them without implying that they’re up to something.

(Kevan’s something of a special case here because, as far as I can tell, he seems to be fascinated in general by the prospect of betrayal, even though in practice it almost always seems to be a bad idea – it is too easy to determine that it’s happened and isn’t worth people never fully trusting you again. In at least one dynasty, he got surprised by the ending because he didn’t expect a couple of players to trust each other to the extent that they did. I suspect that this puts Kevan in a bad situation for trying to win dynasties in general, because it discourages people from trying to make agreements with him in dynasties where doing so is beneficial.)

It was Josh’s Censorship dynasty where players voted for him to keep secrets secret after the dynasty was over. It shouldn’t be read as setting a precedent on anything, though, especially as it was a one-off dynastic rule.

The same argument came up at the time about it giving the Emperor informational advantage. I’d still say that it’s less advantage than other players get from private conversations and semi-private Discord chat, every dynasty. But I wouldn’t object to a variant of the Censorship rule with a “the Emperor cannot look back over their log of private actions after a DoV has passed” clause, if people were bothered about this.

I don’t know what surprise trust Ais refers to - being able to trust that an accomplice will 100% keep their word is one of most reliable (and least interesting) aspects of BlogNomic. I’m interested in exploring mechanics that use the threat of betrayal to discourage overreliance on that (e.g. the 2019-2021 Traitor rule), even if no betrayal ever happens. I’ve been wrong-footed by players throwing the game to someone else a couple of times, but that’s been a misread of whether they were playing to win, not whether they were trustworthy.

For what it’s worth, given that we now have rules against deals that last more than one dynasty, I think it might well be beneficial to have a rule that all private conspiring during a dynasty gets revealed after the dynasty – this is standard in a lot of social deduction games, because it lets people discover what actually happened, and the reveal of all the secret plans is often the most fun part of the game. For example, players often want to know what would have happened if they had played differently, which is hard to calculate without a reveal.

It might be unworkable here, though, because we don’t have rules about what channels are acceptable for private communication and deal-making (e.g. some players use the Discord interchangeably for private scheming and for things unrelated for the dynasty). It would be fairly easy for me at least to comply with, because I use BlogNomic private messages almost exclusively for trying to coordinate with teams (this dynasty) and pools (in previous dynasties where pooling was a major part of the gameplay – I haven’t pooled yet this dynasty and don’t currently have plans to, because I think conventional wins are more interesting), and don’t coordinate via other means.

I am planning to release a summary of my actions and discussions once the dynasty is over (it seems unfair to release a full copy-and-paste of messages that quote other people without their permission).

(Re: surprise endings, I was thinking of Thrawn throwing the game to me in Kevan XVI in exchange for a mantle pass. You might or might not be surprised to learn that I wouldn’t have betrayed a freely made agreement even as the Traitor – I don’t see a refusal to betray a freely made agreement as a social construct, but rather as a sound general strategy that increases your victory chance in the future because it allows you to make better deals, so removing the social construct wouldn’t change my actions at all. This dynasty is a little different because the teams are random, so the agreements aren’t entirely freely made – betraying a Guard/Burglar team is thus more akin to pooling (i.e. hurting your own success chance to benefit another player) than it is to breaking an agreement. But I hate how often a dynasty’s conventional gameplay ends up being obviated by pooling agreements, so nowadays I try to avoid them unless they seem like the dynastic gameplay requires them or unless I feel I can’t compete with existing pools without them.)

tonight for the EVC