BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Ok, the reason for making Galtori essentially a co-emperor is because this whole dynasty idea is her brainchild, but she wanted me to help her since she’s not very good (yet) at the legal part of it.

Falls foul of 3.2.5: Names, though.

and we’ll fix it later.

I dislike the de-facto power of the Landlord/Wife to just change the gamestate arbitrarily, especially as I fear it’ll be used to just defeat valid scams.

I put that in there for specific story-related incidents later on, if you must know.  You will just have to trust us that we will not mess with the gardens just for the hell of it.  Besides, if neither of us can win, what do we have to gain by doing so?

ais is right, though - it does mean that you can meddle with gameplay that you consider illegitimate. I’d prefer it if you put some limit on the extent to which the Emperors can make changes by fiat.

If there are specific story-related incidents later on, it sounds like this is a game of your imposing rather than a nomic.

And what you have to gain is prolonging the dynasty beyond its natural length.

@Yoda: Possibly a more sensible way is, to later on, enact rules that let you make certain sorts of symmetrical changes at whim, e.g. allowing you to create Weather events that change shade levels or destroy crops, something like that. Then everyone has some idea of what sort of things the power can do, and it can only be used for an intended purpose; and they can also vote the proposal down if they don’t like the idea.

Both of my dynasties have been story-based dynasties while still holding onto the nomic framework, and I think especially my first one was a huge success (even though it had to end early).

I understand your concern regarding the power of an emperor, but the problem is that I can’t get any more specific without ruining part of the plot line.  Would making it to where we can only do it once per week help?

Perhaps make it a stream of dates fixed in advance, so people know that something will happen and when, but not what. That’s more interesting than complete information denial, which just makes a nomic very hard to win as you have no ideas what the rules are. (I was just looking up the Jason Smith dynasty as a particularly bad example of that sort of thing, and just noticed that you ran it; I fear you’re going to end up making the same mistake twice. It might have had an interesting story, but inverting the win condition basically just makes it impossible for people to try to win the dynasty.)

Yes, I did learn my lesson from that dynasty.  I do admit that I did make a mistake in how I handled that.

Also, I think I like the idea of having set dates where certain things can happen.  I’ll have to talk to Galtori about when those dates will be, but I think we can work with that.

per much of the above.
And so let’s play Agricola.

Per Lesser Divinities

I know the clause is being fixed by another proposal, but I may as well comment here rather than anywhere else:

I’m a little wary of a dynasty where the Landlord can make gamestate changes at whim, even if only on certain dates - I might just be blanking on counterexamples, but I don’t think game-changing plot twists really work in competitive multiplayer games, in any medium. If a surprise EMP blast kills all the electronic equipment in the city halfway through a single-player game, then that’s good narrative; if a Fog card forces us to up our game on the board to achieve our shared goal, then it’s an interesting extra challenge; but in a competitive multiplayer, people will have been playing by different strategies, and some of them are going to feel unfairly punished when their long-term plan is suddenly wrecked by something they didn’t even think could happen.

Ais523 is right that it’s really important for players to know what might happen - if the rule just says “hey, anything can happen”, then it’s a bit paralysing. Is it really worth me planting and growing a whole field, if a hurricane might destroy it all? Or maybe I should grow as much as possible in case locusts are going to start eating five squares a day?

If you have some specific events in mind, can you break them down into multiple components and have a rule that lists all the things the Landlord can do, without giving away whatever plot twist you wanted to convey? You can give us as many red herrings as you like - and really, there’s not much you can actually say beyond “add some things to squares” and “remove some”. It just needs limits, or reassurances that any event will affect all players equally, so that we know roughly what we’re going to be up against.

Yes I agree with Kevan. Or a deck of event cards would be nice.

Ok, I’ll see what we can work on as far as a potential list of events.

I dislike the ability of someone to change the gamestate just as e wants, so If someone is able to scam, that‘s perfect.

so that the other mechanics are not shot down, but I strongly agree with Kevan and ais523.

... Wow. I already had voted and didn’t remember. Admins, please take note: The preceding vote is the same as I cast earlier, so it shouldn’t be counted again. =P

@Keba: There’s already a proposal to remove that.

CoV as Lesser Divinities is passing.