BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

The following is the action plan I provided to Raven to pull of my scam:

Phase 0: Documentation
Every step you do, record your rolls, the results of those rolls, and the actions you take. This includes moves, purchases, rollbacks, etc.
For rollbacks, you will be able to roll back the action whenever you go below 0 health or exceed 5 provisions. Warning: If you hit 0 health exactly, the adventure succeeds but doesn’t give any drops. This is bad but not unmanagable, especially if you have many rings. If you’re already at 0 and all your damage is blocked, this escapes the “brought to 0” clause because you’re already there.

Phase 1: Early ring buying
Go to the apartments, and await me transferring 3 supplies to you, then adventure, earning 2000 or 3 provisions. If you earn the provisions, roll back the action as illegal due to exceeding your provision cap and try again. After 2 successful adventures, you will have 4000 maccas, so go to the open-air markets, get a ring, go back and adventure successfully twice more, rolling back where needed due to earning provisions (since you’ll be at 3 provisions, so can’t earn 3 more) or taking too much damage (remembering that you now take 3 less damage). Go to phase 2 once you have another 4000 Maccas.

Phase 2: The enactment
Inform me that you’re at this point, so I can un-enact the cfj due to illegal enactment. You can travel to the shops and buy a ring then come back, and vote FOR on the cfj and I’ll be ready to vote on it myself and enact it to reset your health. You now have 2 rings so block 6 damage. Go to phase 3.

Phase 3: Going infinite
Adventure repeatedly. Every time you earn 4000 total, travel to the shops and buy a ring then come back. Not all provisions earning will be rolled back, so you’ll need to keep a note of your current count. These will be needed to run back and forth for buying rings, but if you run out then I can get some more at the waterlogged shops and transfer them. As you take more damage, rollbacks will become more common, but 2 rings allows you to theoretically pass some rolls and 3 and 4 rings should make it plausible that you will pass a few. Once you get all 10 rings, you will be blocking 30 damage each roll so can move onto phase 4.

Phase 4: Saving for the big stuff
As with prior phases, adventure to farm money. Get a total of 160,000 Macca stockpiled in preperation for the last purchases (which takes 80 successful adventures). Then, once you have the money, buy 3 Aos gems to get your health to ~45 and use a beat to create a Wild, Nesting Phalanx which uses 44 health to get one with 24 health (22 from your health, 1 from wild, 1 from nesting).
Buy 10 blood bags, travel to its current location and use 5 of them immediately, bringing it to 55 health.
I will make a phalanx of 53, so you can use yours to Hunt it with another beat to bring your Phalanx’s health to 108, then you can use 5 more blood bags to bring it to 264. You can consume it yourself at that point for your third and final beat to go to ~528 health, letting you go to phase 5.

Phase 5: The win
Roll 1d2. If you roll a 1, declare an ideology of your choice, attack the three settlements with 175 health each, and declare victory.
If you roll a 2, create a new junk ideology saying anything (because you still need to be an ideology owner), attack the settlements and declare victory. Once enacted, you’ll pass the mantle to me.
You should probably include the documentation at this step too, since it will have been a long, chaotic series of actions.

I don’t have a problem with using the DoV to sidestep a mathematically certain but very lengthy and tedious process of rolling dice to get the exact right results.

However, while I think that using the DoV to sidestep the dice rolls is legit, I think that Raven not having set their Ideology is a step I’m a little uncomfortable about having been sidestepped.

Now we’re in hiatus that can’t be remedied.

I’m throwing that open to the floor for discussion about whether it is fatal or not.

There’s also a wee query to be had around the Fair Play restriction on sockpuppeting; if Raven was acting as a stalking horse for SB on a 100% victory share, then that may fall foul of “the controlled Demiurge’s game behavior being functionally indistinguishable from if the controlling Demiurge was logged into their account and playing through it”.

If it does fail, then that’s my bad. My apologies if that’s the case.

The sockpuppeting problem is an easy one. I’ve not been offering direct guidance until a little before the start of the dice rolling. Until then, it’s been discussions but no outright commands. The rule only cares about a day or more.

Okay, cool; happy to disregard that then.

So, for my actual opinion about the ideology not being set, I’m going to look at it the same as the dice rolls. It’s a mathematical certainty we would have reached that point and an ideology would need to be picked to continue.
While phase 5 could potentially have two different ideologies depending on the dice role, there’s no reason their text couldn’t be the same in both scenarios - that is, the junk ideology could be the same as the real one.

Also, to give one final statement before I step back and give others a chance to think things through, there’s 2 possible points of contention that I predict could be brought up about the process itself.

1 - Adventuring legality: Adventuring does appear to be broken at first glance since it doesn’t define drop rates or danger ratings as traits a location can have. Locations are, however, permitted to have rules text. These two traits are therefore being considered to just be rules text specific to the apartments rather than inherently something a location can normally have.

2 - 0 health: If health hits exactly 0, this blocks an adventure from working. However, it only cares if an adventure brings you to 0 - if you’re there already, leaving your health unchanged won’t trigger the relevant clause.

(For 2: that is, if you adventure to 0 health, you lose that drop since it’s skipped. If you adventure again and block all the damage, you’re not being brought to 0 so you still get a drop.)

Seems reasonable

i’m disappointed in myself

My two reservations about this are:

(1) Whether it can be copied. Is Raven’s key advantage that they got 100 free health from the CfJ, and under the dynastic rules it’s impossible for anyone else to get anything like that? Or is there more to it?

(2) Whether there are other routes to victory, or ways to disrupt this one. If you’ve found a victory sequence that would take many hours (or days? weeks?) to complete, could anybody else have plausibly won in that time if the game hadn’t been locked down with a DoV? Could another player with lightning reactions have sniped a Phalanx away to break the cycle?

The drawback to a long and complex game action is that other people can see you doing it, and react accordingly - and to a lesser extent, the more complex the action, the greater the risk you run of making a mistake along the way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to shortcut that and assume that no counter-moves or mistakes would have been made.

@Kevan - Mm, this DoV was partially prompted by my nudging SB to tell them that I’d spotted what they were doing.

They did have an hour or so lead on me, but there were counter-plays available - for example, in step 4, there would be a window where they would have had a Phalanx that was small enough to be eaten by another player, had they been online at the right time.

There was also a very clear alternative route to victory that would have been much quicker to enact - myself and Trap had an agreement in principle with Jumble and wdtefv to boost a single player to the necessary Health. A fifth player may have been needed but would presumably have been easy found if it were that or not winning at all.

All of that said, I’ll put my hands up and admit that I encouraged them to post a DoV rather than go through the hours-long process of a mathematically certain outcome. I didn’t see much value in either attempting to do the same 200 dice rolls but quicker, nor in staying up for eight hours to watch the dice rolls come in waiting for my window of opportunity. For me, I can’t in good conscience vote against on the basis that other victories were available; at a certain level I think I concede that theoretically-possible combo breakers were unlikely to pay out, and that therefore forcing the game to play out was a waste of everyone’s time.

I do still have big reservations about the issue of Raven’s Ideology. Skipping over mechanical steps is fine, skipping over steps that have concrete and variable decisions held within them feels not fine, especially when those steps do comprise a restriction on the winner that skipping over them effectively sidesteps.

I’m not going to vote against this because I don’t think Raven deserves the 5-day lockout, but I am going to withhold my vote on the basis that I don’t think that victory has been achieved and in the hopes that it denies the victory the super-quorum needed to be enacted.

It is theoretically possible to do it without the 100 health boost, but it becomes much more difficult. Essentially the first 2 rings will almost completely deplete your health so the rolls need to be extremely low. You need to roll less than a 1% chance multiple times (going as low as maybe 0.36%) to get over that initial hump.

Raven on the other hand can pick up the next several rings at something like a 60% chance of success per roll, and the probabilities don’t drastically go down since successive rings slow the health depletion even further.

Once all rings are earned, it becomes fairly simple to batch the rolls up since no decision making is needed - you just need to roll 3DICE15 DICE5 one hundred times over, count up the wins, ignore the failures, and then just declare your money. There’s no decision making once you reach that point since you don’t need to buy anything else until after all money is earned.

As for phalanx sniping, the phalanx parts could basically all be done in one wiki update if the use of my own phalanx is disregarded, and that could be done as a response to the first one being sniped since that would still leave a second beat to play with.

As said in the server, didn’t Ais win the box because they figured out that if they did 4000+ actions in a specific order that they would achieve victory?

Yes but they did actually perform those actions, in a legal sense, rather than just saying that they could.

The distinction here is that this DoV skips over performing the actions, just saying that they are certain to dispense an outcome. My objection is that one of the skipped actions has some necessary knock-on effects that shouldn’t be skipped over. Kevan’s objection is that actually performing the actions would create timing windows that could have been exploited to derail or hijack the victory. Neither of those factor were present in ais’s victory in Jumble I.

[Singular] I believe the “boost a single player to the necessary Health” trick that Josh alludes to could also grant that 100 Health. And as Josh says, it would also allow victory outright, possibly in just a few minutes if the cabal were awake and organised.

What are the potential distributions of duration for all the dice rolling? If the question being asked here is whether we should cut to the chase and condense a long period of calculable game actions into “Raven wins”, it should factor in whether a cabal could have scrabbled together an instant counter-victory in response, during that period.

This does get a plain AGAINST vote from me, either way, because that isn’t the question: the question is “whether or not {I} agree with the proposition that the poster has achieved victory”, past tense, and no Ideology has yet Rallied the People. If we want DoV voting to be “poster could now mathematically achieve victory given sufficient time”, or for there to be a broader change about any chain of complex/laborious actions being performable in an instant by posting a simple text summary to the blog, we’d need to amend the core rules first.

I’d be happy to consider a proposal to assign victory to someone who spotted a good dice rolling scam without going through the motions of it, but not, under the current core, a DoV.

Now that an against vote has been cast I suppose there’s no point of principle involved in not joining it

CoV

would like to get the CfJ passed before failing/enacting this

semantics aside, this DoV is objectively invalid because it relies on stacking rings of protection

rings of protection currently do nothing because they “reduce damage taken”. the adventuring action currently only “reduces health”. we also have not specified what “taking damage” is, so therefore rings of protection do nothing

I’d still like to get the CfJ passed, but once it does, this gets an against vote from me

my bad, adventuring subtracts health, not reduces

DoV is still invalid

@lendun Hm, not sure I’d buy that personally - I think that the intent of the language is clear and it passes the “is it obvious what this means based on a plain-English read of the text” sniff-test.

There is an interesting question around *which kinds* of health reduction/subtraction would count as “damage” - presumably not making a phalanx, although that is a fun scam.

@Josh I disagree, the direct meaning of “taking damage” isn’t “reducing health” and “damage” could always refer to a different variable

CoV   since this has basically already failed, so this just gets it out of the queue faster.

This has been re-opened after an illegal failure (due to a misreading of imperial deferentials).