I really liked this dynasty. Taking photographs was a neat idea, even if it had been done before.

I think if NadNavillus had brought up Conjunction Junction sooner, he would have a had a serious chance to delay Kevan’s attempt at the 4/4 S/U criteria enough to take the victory first.

For my part, I messed up my own strategy one too many times to catch up.

Also, this is my favorite Snap of the dynasty. True commitment to both the upgrade benchmark and the holiday season:

Snap 018: Good Vintage

I… maybe 75% liked this dynasty.

The good: the photo framing was great. The mechanic of public and private criteria worked exactly how I wanted it to. Development intervals was a great way of splitting the difference between having concrete “turns” and daily actions, and I think it a new type of action system that isn’t captured in the comparison but could be used again. At least three players were actively engaged at all times in the dynasty, and the diversity of victory approaches available through the Awards system meant that it felt properly competitive, even though there was a clear frontrunner. It was lovely to see so many new and returning players in the dynasty - hopefully many of them will feel more equipped to take part in the new dynasty.

The bad: obviously, this dynasty featured a very hard-nosed player culture around pursuing absolute personal benefit. I don’t buy that that’s a consequence of No Cooperations, which ended up being a dog that barked - despite a lot of hand-wringing, it turned out that the rule functioned exactly as I expected it would, that everyone would recognise what cooperation was and avoid it and as such we would have no real challenge to face. I do think that it was an emergent property of decisions made throughout the game. I’d pinpoint the upgrade request for Snap 13 as being the starting point, for which I accept my portion of the blame; by the time we got to snap 16 we had opened the can fully into motivated reasoning. I hope we will course correct on that in future dynasties, as it is - in my view - extremely bad for game culture if we’re setting up an explicitly adversarial approach to play as the modus vivendi of the game.

All that said, I’m very grateful to everyone who played - the gallery of photos is a small delight.

That was a lot of fun, and a much better focus than the previous photography round. I enjoyed wandering around hunting for particular things in the environment, and then composing a shot to get exactly what I wanted and didn’t want from it. Silliest moment was going out of my way to visit a roadsign with the word “furlong” on it, chalk in hand so that the photo wouldn’t meet my “liftable manmade object” criterion (which carelessly included paper), only to find that the sign had fallen to the ground and was now freely liftable.

It was eerie how I kept second-guessing JonathanDark; unintentionally sniping them on the “pole” Trite, switching to writing on cardboard for no reason when they wanted paper, and later speculatively guessing “water”, as well as having strong hunches about blue objects and letter counts. My glass of water shot was initially an attempt to get a clear reflection of the sky, but when I couldn’t get it to work I took it as a shadow photo instead and left the glass there as a decoy.

My delayed call on the 4/4 criteria was that I thought that I’d messed it up (I misread it as the call having to be made while I still held the 4/4), then realised I hadn’t. I’d also anticipated that “angled down” might have gotten some subjective argument, so thought I’d try and go out on the safer “shadow/reflection”. Ironically Conjunction Junction actually helped by blanking most of my Criteria (if my DoV had failed for whatever reason, everyone could have grabbed a free Guess from the information revealed, but Conjunction Junction took it down to just one) so I waited for it to enact before declaring victory.

No Cooperations did feel like hard work to play under - that I wasn’t just avoiding doing anything I personally felt was cooperative, I was also having to second-guess a worst case of anything an unknown future 1/3 of players might consider to be. The rule definitely succeeded in removing a core of direct cooperative strategies from play, but it did cast a larger and blurry shadow over other parts of the game. (And I think the are-proposals-cooperative aspect of it might be fundamentally unsolvable, given Conjunction Junction.)

Development intervals felt a bit slow at the start, worked well in the midgame, but did hit a clear standoff in the endgame when nobody wanted to be next; I’m not sure how we’d have resolved that if the dynasty had continued. There were also a number of situations where you’d really want to jump in and post a photo before anyone else did - I was checking my phone more than usual with two possible photos at the ready, all this week, which started to feel like more of a chore than a game. Aside from some minor in-built incentives to delay taking a picture (eg. knowing that you’d be somewhere the next day that had the perfect subject) I think we could have safely gone turn-based on that one.

[JonathanDark] On Conjunction Junction being brought sooner: it wouldn’t have affected my “camera angled down” criteria, which didn’t use any conjunctions.

I enjoyed joining the game midway through. The picture taking focus was a nice introduction and worked well. I looked forward to crafting shots around the scoring criteria. I can’t really compare it to any other dynasty at this point.

The secret criteria and scoring certainly worked. Many of my proposals were around tweaking this aspect of the game: Into the light!, It’s not about your feelings and Conjunction Junction. I did like how “In to the light” sparked up a lot of play.

Guessing didn’t work well. Although Kevan managed to pull off the only real guess (although clucky’s snipe was interesting) giving him a path to four awards.

The additional upgrades were probably needed a little earlier in the game. At least for me. They did give me a path to victory. However we never really scored a development bonus in the game.

Conjunction Junction was aimed at guessing but also a not too veiled attempt to keep the game going for another week. I too was loaded up with two pictures to see if I could win the timing battle. With another week …. Just maybe.

Overall, a great first experience. Thanks to you all.

Favorite Nomic Moment: clucky claiming the upgrade or award for taking a snap in the same place, the same time in the nadnavillus track. It was probably worth a just on creativity!

Yeah I think especially Kevan’s gameplay took “no collaborations” in a very adversarial approach, under the worry that anything less would count as a collaboration. So I do think the adversarial nature of the dynasty was driven a lot by no collabs being on and being unclear exactly what it meant

Snap 16’s upgrade request is certainly an interesting inflection point, though I think you need to throw Snap 17 in there as well as they were posted at the same time.

Josh took a hard lined “I’m going to be a stickler about minor things” approach when voting down my upgrade request. Which certainly motivated me to take a hard lined, stickler approach to vote down his upgrade request

Much of blognomic is built around following precedent. But I do think this shows a need to find a balance between following precedent and avoiding tit for tat gameplay that just makes everyone unhappy

As far as the dynastic content goes… I think it was pretty good. Getting out and taking pictures was fun and the private criteria gave a lot of personal flare and control.

It did turn into a very unforgiving ruleset that didn’t leave much room to make mistakes. Which I think is probably something to keep in mind for future rules, is that while its good to button down scams before they even happen you also wanna make sure people don’t tank their chances with a single mistake

Nah, I’m not taking any responsibility re Snap 17 - you were trying something and I respect the effort but didn’t feel obliged to wave it through - and if that motivated you to throw a revenge vote then, well, I don’t respect retaliatory voting at the best of times but that’s your call.

I don’t think there’s massive value in calling individuals out for previeved behaviour infractions - we can all see where the dynasty went and reflect for ourselves on what we could have done better. I’ll happily call myself out for my own errors (Snap 13 above, Aesthetically Out Of Order) but would gently suggest that trying to settle scores at this stage is more likely to inflame than illuminate.

*perceived

I agree that the ruleset was unforgiving to an extent, but was pleased to see an attempt to amend the playing field by proposal at the end with Conjunction Junction. I do think that Nadnavillus being competitive despite joining the game late suggested that there was some wiggle room.

It makes me wonder if it would be helpful to have a “player styles” similar to Imperial Styles. At the start of a dynasty it’s blank, and then players post proposals to set it. Much like Imperial Styles, it’s merely advisory, but at least everyone would know what type of dynastic gameplay you could expect from everyone else.

I know that ideally this should happen organically, but the previous comments show that people were taken by surprise and adjusted accordingly. The question is this: is that “discovery” process of figuring out what the dynastic playstyle mood something that people want to keep as part of how BlogNomic is played? Is the surprise and perhaps disappointment along the way “fun” or “worth it” to keep things flexibile? Or would there be benefit to getting some insight into other players’ thoughts, and possibly head off what might be considered unexpected and undesired behavior?

I’m genuinely asking the question because, while I personally don’t mind adjusting to what everyone else seems to be doing, I see some people get frustrated with the change in expectation and wind up idling. I wonder if we could address that, or even if we should.

“its not the same place simply because its a different app” is just as flimsy as “its not the name of another seeker because there is a space”

acting like your vote is perfectly fine gameplay but mine is somehow “retaliatory voting” to apply the exact same standard you were applying is ridiculous

To be clear: I’m not against emergent player styles. I just have some empathy for players who have a hard time adjusting to the unexpected turn when those styles become more obvious in the middle of a dynasty in which the surprised player has invested a lot of effort in playing a certain way and is frustrated at either a change in direction or the fact that they didn’t see it coming all along.

I’ve had this experience one or two times myself, most notably in Kevan XXXI when I thought the intention of the other players would be to see the dynastic rules played out to the very end of victory criteria, but I got caught off guard by Josh’s short-cutting of dynastic play with his CfJ. There was nothing wrong with his play, but I was so surprised that I irrationally lost my temper for a bit, which was definitely unwarranted in hindsight. I should have been more hard-nosed about it in that case and appreciated the statement of the obvious.

On playing styles and rule-sticklering, perhaps it just needs more table conversation, so that people can read the room. It seemed like there was maybe a bit of a misunderstanding at the core of Skipping Stones, with Josh not noticing that Jonathan and I had already made even further exciting mistakes in the day or two before it, probably because we hadn’t drawn much attention to that.

If we’d both said “oh no, I got that wrong, bang goes four days of progress!” more noticeably before playing on, that would have helped to set the tone by prompting others to socially react to it - whether by nodding and accepting this as the correct way to handle an oversight, or generously insisting that the group vote on a do-over.

I do think general player guidelines could help

But I guess the first question is, do we want a general standard that applies to all dynasties? Or do we want the ability to toggle stuff so some dynasties are “this is a nice friendly dynasty people shouldn’t be cutthroat about anything just have fun” and others are “pvp is on, do what it takes to win even if you’ve got to step on others to get there”?

@Clucky Agree to disagree, but my objection on Snap 16 wasn’t just aimed at you.

I called your vote retaliatory based on your own statement - or am I misinterpreting “which certainly motivated me to take a hard lined, stickler approach to vote down his upgrade request”?

The problem is that in an environment where secretly pushing against the edges is an acceptable norm, it’s easy to see that one player might try a move that is not clearly illegal in hopes of getting away with it, but the other players would see it as illegal and would have declared it as such if it were visible up front.

@Clucky: I was proposing “player styles” as an optional advisory per dynasty idea.

That said, that’s three comments in a row, from JonathanDark, Kevan and Clucky, all naming me as a factor in an issue in this or previous dynasties - so maybe I am the problem.

I’ll let you all get on with it, then. Maybe you all have the right idea.

But weren’t Josh and Kevan’s votes more aligned with “the rules changed so actually this is no longer valid”? I don’t really see that as “Motivated reasoning” and probably would’ve played out the same way regardless of what happened on snap 13 unless we were playing a very friendly dynasty.

I guess it depends on how you define “retaliatory voting”. I don’t consider “follow the same standards used elsewhere” to be “retaliatory voting” (at least not the bad kind that people shouldn’t respect)—to be that is reserved for “you voted against my proposal so I’m just going to vote against yours regardless of your proposals merits”

@Josh: I didn’t intend to single you out. No one person is “the problem”. We all bear responsibility in determining how these dynasties have played out and how they should play out in the future. This is just a discussion, not an attempt (at least not by me) to name and blame.

@JD When your name appears so often and no-one else’s does it’s wise to take a moment to consider why… The intent of the individuals is not relevant, but one doesn’t become the common factor so often by coincidence.

If I missed the step, and retaliatory voting and outcome maximisation are now the default then I need to recognise that - there may not be a real issue here at all, beyond my resistance of the inevitable.

@Josh I don’t think its really that you’re the problem. We all (well, mostly you, me and Kevan) played a role in how the hostilities played out. I know I can get overly combative at times and I understand how my vote on Snap 16 contributed to the overall hostile feelings

It’s a good reminder that this is just a game. Most important thing is that everyone is also just another person trying to have fun.

If you feel others are playing adversarialy, I think its probably good to first take an hour or two to make sure you’re viewing things with a fresh perspective. And then just try to have a chat about it. Because it could easily be that your view is distorted and what you feel is one thing could easily be something else. I do think this means that we need a certain level of honestly from players. In order to be able to go “hey why did you do this, it felt to me like it was because of ___” you need to be able to trust the other person when they respond “no actually it was because of something else”

^^^ This ^^^

I think this dynasty was overall good, and the rules were quite simple. At some points I was unable to take a photograph - I wasn’t in the dynasty long enough for me to find the time - and this could possibly be a point in future dynasties where no matter personal circumstances a player may participate. The idea was cool, even if it was taken from an earlier dynasty.