I won’t actually be able to vote on this one since I’m idle, but I am wondering how you’d actually escape from Dormancy. Dynastic actions can’t be performed during Hiatus so it would be hard to make a valid edit to the gamestate tracking page, and as far as I can tell, the only Official Post that could be made is a call for judgement?

(Actually you could break out of this version of Dormancy with invalid edits to the gamestate page, which was unintentional: I was going with edits to make it easy to read at a glance whether anything had happened in the past seven days. I’ve edited this proposal to add “as part of a defined dynastic action”.)

Allowing actions to break Dormancy wouldn’t work, I think: I’d expect a fourth player to apologetically take the smallest possible action and go back to passive voting, which wouldn’t resolve the situation that had gotten the dynasty into Dormancy.

I think it’s probably fair enough for Dormancy to become a clear fail state that requires a CfJ to recover from, to make it clear that it’s not a desirable or normal direction for the game to have taken. “The game should have four non-Emperor players” did the job for keeping dynasties going for many years, but it seems like this year we may actually have to clarify out loud that BlogNomic should, to be a meaningful and enjoyable game, also have at least three non-Emperor players who are submitting proposals and/or actions.

I have some reluctance around the stipulation of three players other than the Emperor. For a start, that would have had the game in Dormancy for most of this year; for a second, it seems harsh for situations where two players are genuinely duking it out, and while it’s true that you can always just turn Dormancy off it still feels very pejorative.

Tepid but with the hope of some additional tweaking to come.

Fair comment, I’m not entirely sure about the lower bound. I’d maybe say that a two-player duke-out that lasted longer than a week was overstaying its welcome, and that it would be fair enough for a clock to start ticking when the third player stepped back from it.

But I’d be happy to try it out it set to two players instead, and see how things feel the next time that we again notice that we’re at three effectively-active players.

I think the higher bar might do some good for being prescriptive, though: if it encourages us to build dynasties where it’s easy for players to take game actions, and where a tentative proposal or action is appreciated for keeping the game in the air, we’ll be playing better Nomic.