Proposal: The Exotic Toolkit
Fails with 5 votes to 3 -SingularByte
Adminned at 17 Jan 2025 20:46:46 UTC
Add a new dynastic rule, called Lock and Key {I}:
Each Mastermind has a Passkey, which is a string of nine to sixteen characters (which may be English alphabet letters or spaces) that comprise a recognisable sequence of words. If a Mastermind does not have a Passkey then they may set their Passkey to any legal value.
As a Heist Action, if there are no open Lockpick posts, any Participant who is not a Mastermind may make a Lockpick post to the blog, which is an official post in the Story Posts category which has a title of ‘Lockpick attempt’ and a body that contains nothing except the author’s guesses as to the two Passkeys. Each Mastermind should respond to that post with a FOR or AGAINST mark, signifying whether the content of the post contains their Passkey. If both responses to a Passkey post are FOR then its author may once set one subrule to this rule to be Mutable, and both Masterminds should immediately change their Passkeys. Otherwise it ceases to be a Lockpick Post within 48 hours of having been posted.
All Immutable subrules to this rule are flavour text.
Add the following as a new subrule to Lock and Key {I}, called Dynomite {I}:
As a Heist Action a Participant may repeal one Mutable rule, then repeal this rule.
Add the following as a new subrule to Lock and Key {I}, called Electronic Identification Spoofer {I}:
Any Participant may change the first line of bulleted list in the rule Tools of the Trade {M} to read as followes, and then repeal this rule:
* Every word in the amended rule is a word in the English language or the name of a Participant.
I’m not sure I’m fond of this one. The guesses will be borderline impossible and, even if ways are added to make them easier, the reward doesn’t seem that worthwhile. They’re symmetrical in the sense that any team can use them so there’s no real benefit to unlocking them, and there would be nothing to stop people just proposing them as regular mutable rules if they wanted them.
Eh, I quite like it. They’re one time use so in practice the team that unlocks them will use them, and the reason you’d put things as a subrule of this rule instead of as a mutable rule is because this provides a cost for more powerful actions (you need to know the passkey)
I guess my position here is “mechanics where the Masterminds track information that’s kept secret from each other are a good idea, but I’m not a huge fan of this implementation”, partly because there’s no real incentive for the masterminds to ever disclose their keys (you need both keys to do anything useful, and disclosing your key without knowing the other one is just asking for it to be exploited by the other team), and because the reward for doing so is fairly small. (Although this proposal did make me realise that Josh and Habanero might potentially have an advantage when trying dynasty-ending scams under the current ruleset because their names are English words already, so they would effectively get the Electronic Identification Spoofer bonus automatically. That said, that bonus seems too small to me to be likely to have a significant effect on the dynasty – I imagine that players who could adjust the mutable rules to such an extent that putting their own name in them were at all useful would also be able to adjust the mutable rules to an extent that they could legally do that.)
ais523: Mastermind
Ugh, we submitted our proposals at almost exactly the same time. Is there any easy way to tell which one arrived at the blog first? If not, resolving them in the correct order might be difficult, if we can’t figure it out.
I copy-and-pasted my proposal from an editor into the edit box, but wrote the flavour text manually, so would have taken slightly longer between page load and submission than you did.