Proposal: The Interdynastic Scoreboard
In the “Building Blocks” section of the ruleset, create a new rule, “Interdynastic Scoreboard”:
Each Agent and idle Agent has an Interdynastic Score, tracked on the [[Interdynastic Scoreboard]] wiki page (only nonzero scores are listed individually – zero scores are combined into a single “everyone else” entry). Interdynastic Score is a number defaulting to 0. When this rule is added to the ruleset, if it was in the ruleset previously, each Agent and idle Agent regains the Interdynastic Score they had at the time that this rule was repealed (if any).
Rules other than this one can only change an Agent’s Interdynastic Score as a consequence of a Declaration of Victory, and only by increasing it. An Agent’s Interdynastic Score cannot be increased by more than 100 over the course of a single dynasty. When writing proposals that add victory conditions, Agents are encouraged to make that proposal also amend the dynastic ruleset such that upon the enactment of a Declaration of Victory, it increases each Agent’s Interdynastic Score by a number from 0 to 100 based on how close that Agent was to winning.
At the end of the last paragraph of “Guards and Burglars”, add
When a Declaration of Victory is enacted, each Agent gains Interdynastic Score equal to that Agent’s Successes, times 100, divided by the maximum number of Successes across all Agents, rounded to the nearest integer.
One common problem that BlogNomic has is that it’s single-winner, and that means that a) players who don’t have a chance to win don’t have much of a reason to do anything, and b) in dynasties where pooling of resources is possible, that encourages players to randomly select who to pool resources onto, giving players who are behind a nonzero chance to win, but often making most of the dynasty’s conventional gameplay pointless in the process.
I’ve thought for a while that it would make sense to give players a reason to try to improve their own position in the dynasty even if they are too far behind to win – that way, players who were too far behind would have something to do, and players would have an incentive not to pool (or at least, not to spend too much on pooling) because they would be hurting their own score. But because the position has to be measured at the end of the dynasty, it has to be something that persists into future dynasties. Making it a simple scoreboard, where each player is scored from 0 to 100 based on how well they did in the dynasty, seems to have the desired properties.
At present, Interdynastic Score doesn’t do anything, but it might in the future – I have been considering that maybe it would be safe to reintroduce mantle-passing rules as long as players were restricted to only passing the mantle to players who had had few dynasties compared to their Interdynastic Score counts (so that players couldn’t intentionally hurt their own position in the dynasty in return for a mantle pass, which is the reason why we repealed mantle-passing). But I’ll leave that for future proposals, and just stick to the simplest possible implementation for now.
this (as I would typically be for any new mechanic that doesn’t appear to break anything or create any perverse incentives and presents opportunities to build upon it).
Clucky: he/him
the ephemeral nature of dynastic is part of the selling point of the game