I think there was some interesting, and fairly subtle, core-rules-based gameplay this dynasty (prior to “Teamwork makes the Dream Work”). If the dynasty were simply allowed to drift, then a) the results would likely be dominated by random events and b) it would likely take a very long time and probably end up with a roll-off, either purely random, or merit-random (based on merit which was dominated by random events).

So what we saw was a concerted effort by a minority of players to try to make the dynasty a) faster and b) more skill-based. This was a sort of “benefit a minority” style of proposal, because it would substantially increase the victory chances of players who devoted a lot of thought to the dynasty (both by giving them more opportunity to exercise their skill and by increasing the chance that it actually finished at all). The reason that sort of proposal tended to pass, despite only benefiting a fraction of players, was that a) it objectively makes the game a better game, so it’s hard to vote against, and b) the players whose victory chances reduced as a result mostly weren’t voting.

In other words, we had multiple players deploying the “make the game better but increase your chances of victory while you’re at it” strategy, which I think is probably one of the best for winning BlogNomic. As usual, it didn’t involve anything that was bad for the game or anything other than pure improvements. Although I might be wrong, I don’t think any of the frequent proposers were explicitly cooperating, nor do I think they were trying to gain an advantage over each other – they were just trying to move the game more towards a style they liked, and that improved the victory chances for all of them. (I don’t know to what extent the motivation was “make BlogNomic a better game” and to what extent the motivation was “make the dynasty a more skilful game, because that improves my chance of winning”, but I’m not sure it matters.)

But my reflection here is – all this sort of thing is good for the game! I think it’s fine for players to value producing a better game, even if doing so doesn’t help them personally to win – it still gives them value by creating a better game, which is something that benefits everyone.

——

“Teamwork makes the Dream Work” was a turning point, because a) it contained at least three scams and b) even if you ignore the scams, it wasn’t obvious from the proposal that joining a team of multiple players had almost entirely negative effects (a big team had no advantages over a single-Meeple team in any of the dynastic mechanics, and if it did win, its members would have a much smaller victory share than if playing solo), so it in effect gave a huge advantage to players who were able to understand the effect of the rules well. As usual, it’s hard to tell how many of the scams were intentional – the “conditionally flavor text” scam seems to have been unintentional unless JonathanDark is very good at bluffing, but the “Do you ever get the feeling that things might happen while you sleep?” left me paranoid that he was planning to activate at least one of them (but then, if you are planning to scam, making other players paranoid tends to not be to your advantage, so I’m not quite sure what happened – maybe comments from other players will help clarify).

We saw one of the scams play out and lead to the victory, and the admin-advantage scam I mentioned on the proposal itself wasn’t attempted (and would have had only minor benefits). The third scam would have been uncontroversial wording-wise and dynasty-ending, but quite logistically problematic (which is why I didn’t attempt it): if you are the first person to set a Team, then there is only one Team, meaning that you can take as many Turns as you like in a row as long as nobody else sets their Team. Trying to take enough turns to reach the victory condition might have taken hours, though, significantly raising the risk of interruption. I think the only viable way to manage it would have been to write a computer program to take your turns for you (so as to be able to react to the random dice rolls faster), and I wasn’t feeling up to doing that myself (nor did I expect anyone else here to try it, although I would have been impressed if they did), so I tried the more wording-controversial scam instead.

Incidentally, the reason I mentioned the admin-advantage scam was to increase the chance that the proposal got adminned immediately upon timing out, a time at which I could be online (and thus set my Team to block any attempt to do the infinite-turns scam). I figured that even though the admins might be planning not to use the scam, it might give them an incentive to admin early in order to block the other admins from using it.

The dynasty being decided by a contentious game-ending vote swung by an Emperor who didn’t seem to understand what they were voting on was about what I was expecting. Was it an intentional trick that the if-the-other-enacted clause in the second endgame CfJ could be ignored by enacting them in reverse order?

From the sidelines, the thing that stood out to me from this dynasty was the slow oil tanker of the hard-to-read game board - snakes and ladders, but where the individual pieces and their attributes are instead listed in at least three separate tables that players have to cross-reference! I idly questioned it on the Discord on the 13th, Jonathan took an informal straw poll in the blog a week later, and with most in favour decided out of fairness to wait another week for the current round to end (during which time one player misread the board) - and a week after that the dynasty was over, with nothing changed.

Was this partly a tactical decision from the group, where any players who had their eye in (either through sheer effort, or having automated some process to reformat the gamestate for them) preferred that their opponents should struggle with it and miss things? Or is BlogNomic just generally bad at turning these things around, where we tend to stick with whoever’s first draft for how to represent the gamestate?

Seems like we should encourage actual proposals to change the gamestate aesthetic, so that the players who don’t know how to reskin the gamestate are aware that they can still raise suggestions on it, and the players who can change it will know that they have a consensus for when and how to do so.

@Kevan: I’m not responsible for the way that the CFJs were arranged, although I did realise that it was incredibly beneficial for me – I don’t know whether or not JonathanDark was intentionally arranging matters to cause me to win or not, but I had nothing to do with it and no input into it.

I voted AGAINST on the straw poll but wasn’t being at all tactical – participating in the dynasty requires both a) being able to look at and understand the gamestate, and b) being able to update the gamestate appropriately. I was worried that although the change would make a) easier, it would make b) harder, possibly to the extent that less confident players would stop taking actions altogether.

I am not sure that the mistake in question was a board misread (rather than a rules forget) – I found the original board layout easy enough to read (just scan the table of token locations to see if it contains a given number or not). I normally (not always) play with the ruleset open, reading the relevant rules as I take actions, in an attempt to reduce the chance of ruleset forgets, but get the suspicion that many players don’t.

I think the problem with trying to encourage proposals to change the aesthetic is that it is very hard to write proposals correctly at BlogNomic, and writing a proposal to do something “soft”/non-rules-related like that is even harder.

(I do think that Raven’s new building block failing is an interesting data point for this sort of reasoning – in effect, Raven the Monarchple proposed a weekly action to let him do something he could do anyway, and it got voted down, with some of the AGAINST voters not wanting him to do it! I’m not sure what conclusions to draw, though.)

I think the tepid shrug-through an extremely tenuous victory received belies the idea that there was some subtle battle of wills going on under the surface; my suspicion is that even the slightly more engaged players were essentially just snoozing through and waiting for the next dynasty.

(I’ll plead to not having been one of them; I probably should have idled out but I made sure that I wasn’t holding up quorum or the action queue so I don’t regret having stayed in on the hopes of a chop.)

I was expecting the second CFJ to be the contested one, rather than the first, but a) it was almost unanimous, and b) several players expressed the sentiment that it was desirable for that sort of scam to work (with the proposal to change the core rules to prevent it being voted down). And I think I can see the argument – now that core rules scams are banned, scams have to be on the dynastic rules, so if the possibility of scams is seen as a good thing (which I think it is by most players) it is possibly important for the core rules to not fix too many dynastic loopholes.

I do worry that it may increase the barrier to proposal-writing somewhat, though (and it’s already fairly high).

Oddly, I needed more convincing that the scam worked than many of the other players did, even though the scam working was clearly entirely to my benefit. (I performed the scam not knowing whether it would work, but expected someone else to try it if I didn’t – the idea was to get a debate on whether or not it worked (which I find to be a fun sort of gameplay) whilst simultaneously blocking anyone else from performing it, and maybe even getting a win in the process.)

I think part of the reason why it worked is that BlogNomic is very bad at recovering from a Hiatus or pseudo-Hiatus in the case where a win didn’t actually happen. (It would have been possible for players who believed the scam didn’t work to attempt to continue gameplay, because there would be no pseudo-Hiatus in that situation. But nobody tried, and that meant that the possible pseudo-Hiatus had the effect of killing any remaining momentum that the dynasty may have had. I expect that if the scam was found to not have worked, the dynasty would have collapsed shortly afterwards, and that knowledge incentivised some of the experienced players to vote that it did. This isn’t a recent phenomenon, with this sort of thing having happened semi-frequently even back when I first joined BlogNomic.)

I think you may be glossing over the occams-razor answer that players were mostly ambivalent about the scam but wanted the dynasty to end.

I was not very engaged in this dynasty, and hence do not have a lot to say on it. I think a few issues, which we have already mentioned at length:

- The game took way too long to play, and a single inactive player could hold everything up.

- The burden to taking actions was very high (hard to cross-reference all the tables), which made the above way worse I imagine. I don’t think there were any tactical reasons for this remaining an issue after JD’s straw poll about it, it was probably just a matter of everyone already being checked out of things. It’s a vicious cycle, where the game is not fun, which causes people to check out more, which causes the game to become more unfun because people aren’t engaging with the proposal side of things. Personally I do not care about winning a game which is unfun so I will never intentionally use making the game unplayable as a tactic.

- There was too much randomness involved, even after the Turn Actions rework passed. The largest factor in how well you did was how the dice rolled for you.

As for the final dynasty-ending scam, I think it only worked because no one was paying any attention in the first place and people wanted the dynasty to end. I’d be lying if I said that that didn’t influence my lack of vote on the CfJ.

To clarify my side of things:

I had a scam in mind, which is the one ais mentioned and spotted: be the first to create a Team and then take a lot of Turns. The goal wasn’t to necessarily get all the way to the Winning conditions, but to get far enough ahead that it would be very unlikely for any other Team to catch up.

My comment was based on a discussion with Habanero, whom I was going to loop into the scam as a co-conspirator to help perform Turns. We both felt like Josh would spot the scam, admin the Proposal while we were asleep, and take advantage of it himself. I commented publicly just to test those waters, which apparently were not the depths I should have been afraid of.

Ais did a good job of not only spotting that scam but being ready with a different one that I didn’t see.

As for the the CfJs, they were truly meant in the order presented. I only meant to do the first one, but then Josh mentioned the “a” Winning Team vs “the” Winning Team. I posted the second CfJ in the opposite direction of the first (in ais’ favor) because I felt that, if the first was enacted, it naturally led to the second being the positive step. There was no hidden agenda or plan to enact out of order in my mind.

@Kevan: regarding the gamestate presentation, I was ready to change the gamestate, but once I had my scam in mind, I felt like it wasn’t going to matter for long enough to make the effort. I was right, just not in the way I expected. It was not a way to keep the less engaged in the dark, more that it became less important to me personally. Anyone else was still free to do it of course.

I know that I often volunteer for doing such things because I have just enough knowledge to make it work, but others have that knowledge as well, so I didn’t think it had to be on me to carry it out, even if it was my straw poll. I apologize if the implication was that since I made the poll, I was going to do the work and everyone else should wait on me.

I didn’t follow this dynasty closely myself, in part because I’m disinclined toward 2D board game representations in this medium. But I usually try to read the post-dynastic threads, and this question of Kevan’s stuck out to me:

Or is BlogNomic just generally bad at turning these things around, where we tend to stick with whoever’s first draft for how to represent the gamestate?

The last grid-board dynasty I did play was Josh XV, which I still think about from time to time, because of how clear it became to me then that early-proposal rules resist significant change even when a majority of players are frustrated by the situations they create. (Also because of how it clarified to me just how much Josh’s dark spreadsheet sorcery guides his approach to the game, but that’s a different topic.)

I think people tend to view big refactor proposals skeptically, in part because they’re considered a vehicle for burying scams, in part because keeping the aggregate ruleset in mind is challenging enough without going back to revise your base assumptions. And anyway, there’s probably a new dynasty coming in a couple weeks by the time it gets to the point of needing deep revision, so is it worth the effort of running that gantlet?

So in answer to Kevan’s question, I think BlogNomic is generally bad at turning things around outside of the dynastic reset mechanism, period. I don’t know if that’s a problem or not. I do wonder if there’s potentially an opportunity for rules revisions offered by people who are not in the victory race, and whose proposals might therefore be viewed with less suspicion. But I know that ideas along those lines have been considered and disregarded before, too.

@Brendan It has been months since the last time I made a BlogNomic spreadsheet

Josh XV is actually a great example of a dynasty where we did manage to iterate the gamestate grid and keep it legible, adding borders and icons and so on to support all the game additions, rather than just adding additional boring row-column tables to track them. Perhaps that was helped by having a powerhouse Emperor as the map’s primary user, who had no incentive to keep the other players in the dark.

It’s definitely been observed before that a Nomic group will generally (and not always consciously) prefer an untidy and impenetrable ruleset, and find it easy to oppose big reforms on some pretext or other. Untidiness is where scams and surprises lie, and where opponents might miss something and make a game-losing mistake.

Gamestate layout is definitely in the same zone as that - there’s a big advantage to be had if you can read the game easily and your opponents can’t. But it should be much easier to dispel gamestate fog even just conversationally (“these weapon ratings are a bit subtle as numbers, maybe we should have rows of star icons?”), with less room for plausible pushback. These are not big reforms. I don’t know if we’re locked in to too much of a mindset of “the Emperor and/or enacting admin chooses how the gamestate looks”.

We definitely are. I would be supportive of a broad liberalisation of the powers to modify look and feel / presentation of information.

“A [Player] may change the layout or design of a gamestate wiki page if doing so would not change how any rules interpreted its content.” has been on the books for almost a year. I don’t know if that needs an encouraging “why not suggest a change informally, and if anyone objects, make a simple proposal to take a vote on it” coda for players who are nervous about making unilateral changes, or if most people just hadn’t noticed that it was an option.

While we’re on the topic of powers, another problem I have is inherent admin advantage. In this dynasty, I had planned on a scam, and the only reason I didn’t get to take advantage of it is that ais beat me to it. I don’t know that it’s good to have to have a timing race with an admin that’s also a player, but when a dynasty only has 1 or 2 admins playing, and idle admins aren’t trying to process the queue, it seems that there’s little choice but to admin a proposal, and then as a player take advantage of it.

It’s a bit of a moral dilemma that skirts Fair Play, and I’d feel better about it if there was stronger support for avoiding it. On the other hand, something like “an Admin cannot resolve their own Proposals” feels like it would significantly hamstring the processing of the queue.

@Kevan: I think we also have technical barriers to making changes. We have a decent supply of templates, but maybe not enough and maybe not enough people aware of how to use them. I hesitate to say that they should be mentioned in the ruleset, because then they would be governed by it, but somehow awareness and explicit easy-to-follow examples would help, I think, rather than A) knowing the templates exist and B) having to go search for them.

My instinct is that this is a cultural issue rather than a ruleset one, and that people should get into the habit of asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

Amending gamestate presentation is never going to be the province of newer players, and older players are already in the habit of eg changing the look and feel of the main blog when there’s a changeover of dynasty, so it really doesn’t feel like a big leap to make.

New players should definitely feel comfortable giving feedback for others to act on, even if they can’t write the wiki markup for it. I guess that’s a wider problem: the quieter player who only brings up “the core game loop is too complex” or “the wiki map is too confusing” in their request to be idled.

[Jonathan] A page of examples on the wiki might be good, suggesting some ways to display different types of data, and linking to past gamestates that have done it well.

I’d rather see each dynasty do its own original thing than follow some implied BlogNomic style guide every time, but, well, in practice we do mostly go for the same default black text in grey row-and-column wikitables, so maybe a catalogue of options would help that.

@Kevan “A [Player] may change the layout or design of a gamestate wiki page if doing so would not change how any rules interpreted its content.”:

I’ve made unilateral changes to make the gamestate more readable fairly recently (normally things like abbreviating column titles to fit the tracker into the sidebar more easily). So not everyone is averse to that sort of change – I think the issue is more a case of it being non-obvious what would and wouldn’t be more readable.

It’s also worth noting that players seem to be in the habit of writing rules specifying how to track something in cases where they want the tracking to be something other than the default “a row per player, a column per variable” table. In theory, that’s unnecessary, but in practice, players seem to be unwilling to track things “creatively” without it.

Perhaps we should encourage Mentors to discuss the possibility of making tracker layout improvements with the new players they’re mentoring? Some people really enjoy doing that sort of thing, and maybe some of them will happen to end up joining BlogNomic.

@JonathanDark: “While we’re on the topic of powers, another problem I have is inherent admin advantage.”

That particular admin-advantage issue is well known. In a way, I don’t really want to fix it because it’s fun for me to try to play around it as a non-admin; I’ve used a variety of solutions over the years, such as pooling with admins, and attempted timing snipes. I vaguely remember a previous discussion on the matter concluding that it was OK for admins to have a timing advantage, in order to compensate them in a way for their work as admins.