BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

In my eyes, tying it to the production of resources for timing would make sense since that’s also on a 36 hour timer. It could either be done as part of its action, or just a clause like “if the The Onlooker has not done so since the last production of resources”.

Also, it looks like you’ve used the term Narrator here accidentally.

If the narrator stays for multiple turns in a row then it never changes from merchant to something else then back to merchant again. This means that the merchant doesn’t actually refresh until it leaves and then comes back again. I’m not sure if that was intended or not.

@SB: Oops on the use of “Narrator”. That’s my own copy-paste issue. Fixed, and thanks for pointing it out.

@TDS: It was absolutely intentional that resource trading with the Merchant can only happen once until the Merchant leaves and comes back again, even if the Merchant comes up again in another Visitor Arrival roll. If you feel that this limits the trading ability too much, I can simply change it to “once after each time the Onlooker performs Visitor Arrival”.

@SB: I also removed the explicit 36-hour timer and changed the clause to coincide with the Production of Resources, as you suggested.

I don’t mind at all, I just wanted to make sure it was intentional

Narratively it makes sense to wait for the Merchant to leave and come back, but doesn’t seem ideal that we’d have to look through the wiki history to double-check whether the Merchant standing around on turn 7 is a different Merchant to the one we remember selling some Bricks to on turn 4.

Nothing would stop us tracking a “Merchant used” column (either formally or informally) which gets reset every time we get a new merchant arrival. Could even be a Visitor Used column if several of them have usage limits.

Great idea, SB. I’ve edited this Proposal to formalized the Visitors Used idea. Please re-review, as I also made the use of the Merchant by each Explorer an atomic action to make clear that the steps must go together.

I’d have personally just done it as a yes/no type field if you can only do stuff before people leave, but I suppose it depends on how complex other visitors get.

Yeah, I wanted to make it flexible in case things change that allow multiple Visitors to be around at the same time. Maybe that’s looking too far forward, so if it is preferred to reduce it to a simpler checkbox-like field, let me know. I still have an hour to edit it as of this comment.