My hope for the dynasty was to introduce the core mechanic of expiring dynastic rules and let the players create the bridges between the expiring set and the new set. When that didn’t happen organically, I felt compelled to do it myself to keep the dynasty going, trying to think of something fun and different each time.

Between the three “temporary core” mechanics, it seemed like the Glyphs were the most fun and engaging, and the Mana/Locations the least, but that was just my impression.

I was also surprised that there wasn’t much interest in finding a way to revive expired dynastic rules. I was on the fence about it myself, so perhaps everyone else was also on board with the theme of letting dead rules stay dead.

Overall, it was an interesting experiment in dynastic rule manipulation as a meta-game tool. I took a lot of inspiration for this from Josh XX where dynastic rules were applied in a different way than in typical dynasties.

I think one reason why the Locations and Horde phases didn’t work as well as the Glyphs is that the mechanics in them were a bit too slow paced for this kind of auto-repeal dynasty.  One couldn’t really get familiar with the flow of the game before the rules already were about to die.

Glyphs was a simple enough mechanic to avoid this, and made the endgame very fascinating in my opinion. Zack’s comeback from the Void to victory was also epic. (I’m almost relieved that I didn’t win after all - it was pretty close though - I don’t think I’m ready for emperorship yet)

Yeah the glyph mechanism was super fun, trying to guess what others were doing and planning moves accordingly.

Overall I think it was hard to build bridges between systems. Wasn’t really worth investing in a system knowing it would soon die off, but then if you did invest in it people didn’t want to reward that because it would just be giving the people who invested a bonus.

Yeah my main issue was that the mechanics were disjointed enough that it was hard to get invested in one knowing that it would just vanish and have no real impact in the long run. Once we had a tangible path to victory though I had a lot of fun with the level of strategy glyphs provided.

I was a big fan of the mutable rules landscape. I think the disjointed-ness might not have been so stark if either Deathrattles were implemented from the start (though it would have been hard to know that such a thing would be necessary) or having some immutable resource systems baked into Death. I was trying to do something like that with my Nomicnecron proposal; the idea was to add Mana, Prestige, and Legacy as rulestext outside of the Ruleset so that we had a foundation to build future rules and a possible VC on. Shame I can’t read and thought 1-0 was an auto-enact. -_- Not my proudest moment

I liked the decaying rules idea, which reminded me of the Hallucinations in the Castaway Dynasty (which also had similar “upon repeal, do X” clauses). The timing aspect did feel generally ominous, though, that there would probably be windows where an alert player would be able to cash out on something at the optimum time, and I idled when I felt that I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that.

I did feel the unresolved cross-dynastic favour issue coming back into focus again in the endgame - that a trailing or idle player could maybe have swung the game by casting an agreed sequence of Glyphs (or seeking a bribe from the leader to not do so). We should sort out one way or the other whether that’s meant to be part of the game, whether the idle players who left money on the table by not angling for future favours were being polite or naïve.

Does the virtual actions building block need more work, if this dynasty chose not to use it for Glyph casting?

I think the reason Virtual Actions never came into play was only because it wasn’t there from the start and it was hard to rewrite so much of the ruleset without accidentally breaking something, and no one really considered throwing it in for one mechanic at the very end. But I’m using it for the next dynasty and it makes it so much simpler to not have to use the language of private messaging the Grim reaper and making “requests” for every single action.

I think virtual actions still have a cost to integrate them into a ruleset

What makes atomic actions work so well is you can just say “as an atomic action”. Whereas with virtual actions… a proposal writer might find it easier to just write their own rules for handling it

They seem like the same kind of thing: atomics allow us to write “do these steps in order” rules without having to remember to correctly handle all the edge cases (what if a single step is impossible, what if a step is performed incorrectly, when does the action start and end, etc); virtual actions should be doing the same for “tell the Emperor you want to do something” (when does the action happen, what if the Emperor can’t tell what someone means, what if they correct or retract their instruction, etc).

Seems like the last dynasty could have said “as a virtual action, a Necromancer may set their Glyph”, with the processing action just referring to set Glyphs. It’s the setting action that’s the tricky part, and which benefits from having a boilerplate definition of how we’d expect it to work.