BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Ugh, not hashes

I know it’s annoying, but without the help of a Past Memory, or some sort of escrow service, I don’t think there’s any other way to prevent people adjusting their Reports based on things that they see in other people’s Reports.

Since I’ve not been here for the Dynasty, I don’t really know what’s going on, but I’d be happy to fill the role of an escrow service. I also understand that many may not be comfortable with that, so I would also be pleased to vote for this.

So on a more minor note, this doesn’t work because the Amensiac who achieves victory still won’t be remembered.

More importantly, I feel like this also puts untoward pressure on players to share what information they’ve been told, on a tight time frame too. And could lead to a messy victory resolution process as people squabble over the content of posts and if they are really “logically consistent” or not.

I’m okay having some sort of “vote on the validity of people’s posts” mechanic instead of just going with a random winner, but however we determine a winner it should really be clear who that winning is not left up to the interpretation of the validity of someone else’s logic.

Good work in writing this up, and I’d normally agree with this, but the reason I demurred was the realisation that this is really just another form of randomness - the information players now have has all been originated from a few “be told a random piece of information” weekly actions. Some players will have lucked out and been given information which combines well, others won’t. It doesn’t feel like we really progressed into any informed risk-taking, in the two weeks before Naught disappeared.

My deduction pinboard is looking alright at this point, but it’s not amazing. I’m also having to factor in whether any complex hash resolution process (even if I wrote it myself) has a loophole. Or whether one player noticed an early ruleset bug that means we have no set Roles or all defaulted to Arsonists.

Actually looking at this proposal for what it does, I’m not sure there’s a clear point at which it gives a mechanism for consensus reality on Accuracy to be recognised as true. What happens if we hit a contradiction, where someone (possibly even the Past Memory) has made a genuine error in their original notes, and two players are able to “prove” opposite statements?

Is there really not a web service out there that lets you post messages to be revealed at a later date? Like pastebin, but with a “visible from” field as well as an “expires after”. I had a look around yesterday but could only find “email your future self” type services.

[@Clucky] So on a more minor note, this doesn’t work because the Amensiac who achieves victory still won’t be remembered. — it repeals the sentence in question as Stage 2 starts, so the victory does work.

[@Kevan] Isn’t that what would have decided the dynasty anyway, though, had the Past Memory not idled? Arguably the dynasty’s original goal condition was excessively random (some Roles have a huge advantage of others), but at least it was random in a way that could be manipulated (“learn your own role while keeping it secret from other players”), and which could be influenced via the nomic gameplay of creating and voting on proposals.

I understand that there might be some issues in determining who’s won, but that’s why DoVs are voted on rather than just being platonic. I think that even if there is a dispute, there’s a significant chance that it won’t have any effect on the final winner; and if it does, we’ll be in a more informed place to decide once we’re aware of which (if any) specific controversial issues have an impact on who wins. So even if the proposal doesn’t sort things out by itself, one CfJ will likely be enough to figure out who won from that point.

Our deductions would ultimately decide the dynasty, but we only had a few of them (two weeks with the game running at a slow weekly action speed) before Naught went silent. Evidence and Reputation would likely also have factored in, but aren’t being considered here.

Picking the winner according to deductions made so far gives undue reward to players who got the luckiest draws from the Past Memory during the time that they were responding, with an extra edge to anyone lucky enough to get a response early in the third week before Naught stopped replying to messages. And I think “multiplied by 5 if the report contains a Confrontation” is strong enough to knock out the unlucky players entirely, however much they deduced about everyone else.

And actually, that was a throwaway comment earlier but maybe we are all Arsonists: “Each Amnesiac has a Role, tracked privately by the Past Memory, which they are trying to remember.” means that everyone’s Role has a starting value of “Arsonist”, which possibly means that “The Past Memory may assign a Role to an Amnesiac, if such has not already been done for that Amnesiac this Dynasty” was never legally performed (if we read the defaulting as assigning a Role to an Amnesiac).

I know of no information contradicting kevan’s “all arsonists” theory.

I read “if such has not already been done for that Amnesiac this Dynasty” as only preventing the action from taking place if that action hasn’t taken place so far in the dynasty, regardless of what the default value is.

I can see some argument of “the action is illegal because it depends on an untracked value”, but presumably the Past Memory would have been tracking it privately? The Orphan Variables rule seems problematic, anyway (it identifies a real problem, and yet the fix it prescribes for that problem appears to make the problem worse rather than fixing it).

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