That did a good job as a shortish vote on what dynasty to play next, but it felt like we missed the mark on “somewhat eclectic gameplay preferences which somehow all had to be satisfied simultaneously”, which would have been interesting to actually try. I guess it was down to people writing detailed dynasty descriptions from the off, and getting attached to them in the process, meaning that any proposed constraint would tend to either reinforce the existing majority view as expressed in Drafts, or fail. (Venba was struggling to get any traction for a “no random outcomes” restriction, I assume in large part because every other dynasty idea included random outcomes at that point.)

Once again I didn’t enjoy having one player at the table — Darknight — who showed no interest in taking part in the dynastic game (they performed no dynastic actions at all) but was still pushing major endgame votes through to decide how that game would end. I don’t know if they still think that they’re “helping things along” by doing that, but I think it’s neutral at best, and at worst undermines the basic concept of Nomic, that the rule amendments are negotiated among the players of the game.

(Darknight DEFed on the second link, there, Kevan - although I do broadly agree with the point.)

All I’ll say is that I hope that several of the Drafts posed do eventually get made, and that if we do this again we should have some constraining structure from the outset.

(Their vote resolved as a null DEF, but was a DEF-FOR when cast. Neither vote changed the outcomes of the proposals, but at the points where they were cast they were nudging both proposals towards passing, cancelling out one active player’s worth of opposition.)

I think this was an interesting exercise in creating a dynasty that could go in two possible directions and seeing where the players took it.

Based on the discussion before the dynasty, I wanted the possibility of a quick vote, but I also wanted the theme to be able to potentially last for the length of a full dynasty if the players chose to go down that path – thus a) the Mandates and b) the lack of initial victory condition. I think b) turned out to be pretty important in this case; normally there are good reasons to want a victory condition in place early, but I think this dynasty was an exception.

The Mandates turning out to be irrelevant (both in a gameplay sense and, by the end, in a rules sense) is something that I realised was a possibility. (“Suggestion Box” is an interesting case study – it passed unanimously and then was never used.) I’m wondering whether the Citations mechanism was intentionally designed to reduce their power, via causing one of the main mechanisms for producing new Mandates to generally produce Mandates that were fairly harmless. A pattern that I’ve frequently noticed at BlogNomic is that if you dislike a mechanic that other players like, you can mostly neuter it via giving it a low-impact purpose (I did that intentionally with Fame/Infamy last dynasty in order to make the dynasty less about pooling), discouraging other players from making it more relevant. This isn’t quite the same thing, but I think it might be similar?

In any case, I consider this to basically have been an improved version of ais523 III, which is what I was aiming for. There were relevant proposals all the way through the dynasty, which doesn’t often happen (although they were generally cooperative proposals with the players collectively aiming for a shared end vision, which means that the core gameplay likely didn’t determine the result; I don’t see this as a problem but it’s something worth noting).

With any luck, it’ll have improved several future dynasties too, due to Emperors getting useful feedback on them before they even start to run them. It might not be bad for BlogNomic to have a dynasty like this one every 1-2 years or so.

@Kevan: Nulling out that deferential vote seemed like an important thing to do, based on the surrounding context. One of the main strengths of BlogNomic’s voting system is that the Emperor gets power to steer a dynasty in cases where the playerbase collectively doesn’t really care, but has significantly less power when the playerbase does have strong views. However, more recently, Emperors have often been making proposals intended to suggest directions that the playerbase hasn’t thought of or to raise points for discussion, rather than as an attempt to steer – Provocateur is an established imperial style – and that interacts badly with deferential votes. Maybe we should have a building block which treats them as abstentions rather than deferentials, and turn it on in Provocateur-style dynasties.

By the way, does anyone have opinions on how to characterise this victory for the purposes of the “History of victories” page? It seems to be somewhere between “Conventional” and “Other” in nature. (Normally, the dynasty ending in a vote that ignored almost all the dynastic mechanics would count as “Other”, regardless of whether it was done via the Ranked Choice rule or in a proposal. But the dynastic gameplay was mostly aimed at informing the vote in question, and Selfish players were excluded from the vote, so the dynastic gameplay was relevant even in a rules sense.)

On another subject, there was a second bug in the ranked choice voting which I noticed when I tried to resolve it, and which ended up not mattering but was very close to being relevant: in order for ranked choice to work properly it should give a win to someone who has more than half the votes, but it was written to require votes from more than half the Drafters. There were four Drafters who didn’t submit ballots that could be counted as voting for Josh’s Plan, even after reallocations (me as the Emperor, Darknight who was Excluded, Clucky who was Selfish, and Josh who couldn’t vote for himself), meaning that if even one more player had been Excluded or Selfish, Josh would not have been able to gather enough votes even if the vote were unanimous. But fortunately, 6 out of 10 was still more than half.

I really enjoyed this Dynasty! I think it taught me a lot about how an Emperor starts a Dynasty, along with what the playerbase generally prefers in the Dynasties they play. The wait for “Redrafting the Drafts” to pass was amusing- I’d had my Draft ready to go for quite a bit, and seeing it get removed, replaced, enacted, unadminned, enacted again, unadminned again- it was a little bit silly. I really enjoyed leaving Reviews and reading the Reviews people had left for me. Overall, I had a great experience with this Dynasty!

@Doomed I’m glad! We don’t often do dynasties like this but maybe we should more often - I think in this post-mantle-pass era it’s good to have a low-energy way of handing off Imperial duties.

@ais I’d call this conventional but then, as discussed, I don’t in my heart of hearts believe that the issue with the Winning Plan process really existed.

I’d say the victory was conventional; without the shortcut I assume a CfJ to uphold the slower victory would also have passed. The dynasty had a mood of honesty to it, with the explicit ruleset nudges of “genuine feedback” and “be consistent”, so I think we got what people wanted.

[ais] You nulling that vote was appreciated. The first draft of Imperial Styles did actually allow DEFs to resolve in different ways, but for the sake of vote counting (both human and automated) it’s probably easier if the Emperor just remembers to vote DEF when proposing anything provocative.

@ais “I’m wondering whether the Citations mechanism was intentionally designed to reduce their power” - yes, well spotted. I don’t think anyone noticed that you could just put mandates into a proposal, and the citations mechanic added nothing to the game except putting an arbitrary restriction in place. I figured I’d either get mandates that drew largely from my own or Kevan’s work, stacking the deck in my favour, or in the worst case a few new essays to read, which would also have been interesting.

@Josh: I noticed it, at least. (I also noticed the “write more essays” counterstrategy.)

That said, I’m not convinced that it added nothing to the game – it suggested a direction. (The ruleset contains “A proposal which would (if enacted) change the list of Mandates, and whose text would make no other changes to the ruleset or gamestate, is known as a Mandate Proposal.”, which also adds nothing to the game and was intended as a clue that Mandates can be added by proposal.)

I was aware that regular Mandates remained open, it just didn’t seem advantageous, or very polite, to propose any, when the active players had already spent time writing particular Drafts and might not want to retool them to some “eclectic gameplay preferences” theme or mechanic. The three Mandates that enacted (have public gameplay, include a simple action, pick an Imperial Style) seemed quite anodyne and were either already met by most Drafts, or easy to add a sentence for.

While doing the dynastic cleanup I noticed that Everybody’s Playing was on in the last dynasty; that means that ais should have had a Ballot.

I was aware of that, but chose to not fill it in. (It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.)