There was a lot about this dynasty that I found wildly successful.

The randomised, resetting teams is a great mechanic that I think will get reused in future dynasties. The 48 hour timer clock with its attendant push-your-luck mechanic was really good.

I think the biggest weakness was the direct manipulation of the ruleset, which I found frustrating. Because most of what gets enacted is still players want to see in the ruleset, too much of it was immutable; on the flip side, that which was mutable got frustratingly broken too much of the time, meaning that part of the game was finding ways around bugs or just fixing them directly.

This was a fascinating dynasty to play, and I do feel the 48 hour system was one of the better actions mechanics. Sure it might favour some time zones a little more than others, but there was less pressure to act the moment you came off the cooldown, and you could always just push your luck by acting early. The harshest part of it, time-wise, was probably the need to coordinate multiple people to act at any one time quickly enough to not be interrupted.

For the behind the scenes gameplay, I ended up finding my cabal relatively early on, maybe around the time of the second triumph or so. Habanero came to me first to mention a decent scam in my archivist proposal, but we needed the possibility of performing another action or two on hand to make any plans actually viable. When Raven contacted me shortly after, I suggested becoming a three person cabal.

There was a stretch of time I had to step back from the cabal though, back when quorum dropped to 4 and it felt like having a team of 3 might make it too little of a contest, but luckily snisbo ended up joining the game so quorum went back to a healthier number.

As for the team’s scams that we’d been theorising:

Scam 1 was an Archivist privilege escalation exploit. By tweaking the word reset, we could make it so the archivist could either “set” or “readjust” a sentence, and with a full stop in the middle of the sentence, we’d be left with:  “As a Heist Action, an Archivist can set the text of a sentence in the ruleset.”
From there, we’d replace a sentence with “As part of the Heist Action that adds this line of text to the ruleset, that Heist Action also permits the Participant using it to create an Immutable rule called “Winning {I}” with text of their choosing”.
That line was specifically crafted so we wouldn’t need to take a second heist action (which, given that it’s a new sentence, would add a new 2 day cooldown to it), while also still counting as part of a heist action for the sake of The Vault’s ban on mutable rules affecting the ruleset. Winning {I} would have had the same text that it does right now.

We did actually attempt to perform Scam 1, but due to a forgotten focus usage, we ended up with too few actions to pull it off and had to wait for another chance. That was around the time I unset Rogue, as neither Raven nor Habanero would have enough triumphs to wait for the cooldown to finish before losing their targets.

Scam 2 was a multi-word Treasurer exploit. By tweaking Treasurer, we could make it so it could take multiple words from one rule rather than just a single word and all we’d need to pull it off was a single change, word->words. Since it didn’t specify the order we had to take them, we were planning to craft a new rule only out of words found in The Vault: “as a Heist action a Participant may amend the dynastic ruleset by adding a new Immutable rule with any ruletext to it”

If I hadn’t spotted the winning scam, and if ais had stalled long enough for Habanero to go off cooldown, that’s the one we’d have tried to use to win the game.

Finally we had a scam to buy us a few free actions. By using Brain, we could change mind control to care if its conditions were “authentic” rather than true. Given that they’re 100% genuine original restrictions, the requirement would be met and we’d be able to mind control. Since none of those conditions would restrict it anymore, we could just chain mind controls from player to player, using each player’s focus to do whatever action it is we’d planned. We never could make enough of a profit to make the action expenditure worth it though, and masterminds didn’t have any fun dynastic actions we could steal.

On scams.

Mind Control was actually more broken than most players gave it credit for – you could actually remove all the restrictions with a single TotT. (Just place a full stop after the first “consciousness” – then the rule reads, summarised, “You may steal consciousness. If all the following are true: (conditions), then you have to specify the victim.”.) Doing that after the 48-hour mark would have allowed you to in effect put everyone on cooldown by chaining consciousness thefts (getting one player to steal the next’s consciousness, then that player to steal the next’s, etc.), and also simultaneously allow you to use all their Focus points to perform separate actions. However, the scam is inherently very unlikely to ever be useful because the dynasty is inherently unlikely to leave a lot of spare actions around at the 48-hour mark; players want to act before then. That said, I did take steps to try to prevent it working (by trying to goad team “untracked” into spending their actions and Focus the one time it was potentially useful) – I was considering trying to use the loophole myself in order to block whatever SingularByte was doing, but feared it might destroy the dynasty, and contacted Josh to see if he could talk me out of it.

Team “chapped” was making an intentional play to try to win the game rather than the triumph, which required six actions to pull off at the time we were going for (19:30 UTC). Unfortunately for us, we thought that “defog” would be unable to score in just three actions – when I saw the “clear” into “defog” line I had to spend one of our six actions to stop it, and although the victory plan would still work with five, we would have to wait longer (01:33 UTC) for my Training counter to expire. The basic idea was to first break ToTT’s real-word restriction, then convert a significant portion of Double Agent into Gibberish, causing it to effectively read “As a action which is a action, the Double Agent may perform a Heist Action (...) they skip the required DICE48 roll for that Heist Action”. At that point you get infinite Heist Actions and can change the ruleset as you like. (The one action I used blocking Team “defog”‘s score meant that we couldn’t afford to immediately break the weekly restriction on Double Agent.) That said, Raven was part of that scam and had a 50% mantle share from it (as, being the Mastermind, I didn’t want to run two dynasties in a row even though the scam was powerful enough to change the rules to allow for a Mastermind to win), so it is possible that Raven would have intentionally blocked us in favour of a scam with a higher mantle share.

I was aware of the following possibilities to break the Vault:
- Changing a Mutable rule to directly permit the creation of an Immutable rule, like SingularByte tried. I would have blocked this one earlier if I spotted it earlier, but embarrassingly I only noticed it late on Tuesday and by then there wouldn’t have been time to get a fix proposal through before it was deployed. (In other words – I knew the loophole before it was deployed, but not early enough to actually close it.) This was probably the simplest method.
- Break Mutable rules or core rules by redefining words in them (most simply by declaring them flavour text, redefining all the words in them to mean nothing). This is the first break I noticed, and the “is flavour text” in The Vault would have made it quite easy to get there in comparably few edits. I wanted to close this one in the Vault, based partly on Josh’s desire to “lock up the win as tight as possible”, but it is really difficult to word it in a way that doesn’t completely break the game. (Another nomic does actually have what is, effectively, a restriction aimed specifically against that scam. Its rule preventing it would be 65 words long if written with BlogNomic-specific terminology.)
- Somehow make use of the Dynastic Reset action in order to selectively repeal dynastic rules. The easier-to-understand version of this would have been to become the Mastermind and place BlogNomic into Interregnum directly, without a DoV – at that point, you could do a Dynastic Reset and repeal as many Building Blocks and dynastic rules as you liked. However, there are some problems with becoming the Mastermind (especially as I was actively throwing up obstacles to that), but there’s a version that’s more obscure but less edit-intensive: The Vault doesn’t prevent you editing the history of game actions, so you can change the timestamp of the Dynastic Reset to cause it to be considered to be before that of the Ascension Address (without actually changing the gamestate or ruleset). If you do that, the Dynastic Reset action becomes legal (as “it has not been done since the most recent posting of an Ascension Address,”), so you can re-process the existing Ascension Address in order to repeal almost all the dynastic rules (and also repeal the Dynastic Safeguard in the process!) Call your scam rule “Race 5” and give it instructions for changing itself upon ascension, and you’ve got arbitrary text into the ruleset and repealed all the protections at the same time.

There are probably other possibilities that I’m unaware of, but those were the three I knew about.

On the themes behind the dynasty: the Heist Action system, the randomized team system, the ruletext injection and The Vault.

The Heist Action system and random-team system were my ideas for a basis behind a dynasty – when discussing the theme for this one, my position was “so I want to try out randomized action cooldowns, and I want to try a dynasty where the players are split into random teams and periodically rerandomize, but those ideas aren’t enough to make a dynasty on their own”. In other words, I had half a theme, and knew it was half a theme, and was hoping that Josh would provide the other half in order to make a complete dynasty. The Vault was Josh’s idea as a main idea behind a dynasty, but that was likewise only half a theme – it inspired me to tie the two together as “OK, so the teams need to be racing to do something or other, and we need direct ruleset manipulation or The Vault is pointless; so what if the teams are racing to get a word into the ruleset?” There’s actually some discussion of the whole “lock-box” theme in a thread from 3½ years ago; it was fun making that work.

I did notice the same thing that Josh did – that ruleset manipulation meant that many rules had to stay protected and the rest tended to break repeatedly – but I didn’t see it as so much of a problem. We needed repeated repair proposals, but that’s OK (it is a good way to “make noise” and keep the dynasty active). Additionally, it meant that protections were likely to gradually break over time (e.g. over the course of the dynasty, The Bank went from being effectively useless, to incredibly powerful, due to its protections being broken in scoring attempts and never restored), which is something that helped to move the dynasty towards an end state.

It’s interesting that the most powerful proposal in terms of creating a victory condition was “Moving the target further away”. As SingularByte noted, the main obstacle to winning is that the mechanics were “whichever team does the thing first resets all the timers”, and because conventional scoring was likely to require fewer edits than a scam win, you could do it earlier. (For example, compare the 5/6 actions we needed to win to the 3 actions we needed to score: “classed” is in the mutable ruletext and can be changed to “clasped” to “clapped” to “chapped”.) Making the Targets harder made conventional scoring harder, but didn’t make scamming harder, so the balance between the two strategies shifted in a way that made scamming more viable.

I feel like the basic principles behind my half of the dynasty worked really well: randomized teams gave me a lot of fun conspiring with all of you, and the gradually increasing chance-for-an-action-to-work inherently made what would otherwise have been very boring situations much more interesting. The “praying” versus “folk” round would have been completely uninteresting in almost any other action system, because both words were so easy, so it would just be “score as soon as you come off cooldown” – but in this system it inspired both teams to go early, as they wanted to get in first, and neither ended up scoring in the first batch of actions. Although I’m not sure, I think that if both teams follow their optimal strategy in a Heist Action system, this may cause them to both attempt to act at the same time; and there were multiple of instances this dynasty where I sniped a score because I was trying to coodinate with my own team and saw the opposing team doing something (e.g. the times that teams “defog” and “chapped” were planning to act were within 1 hour of each other, so I noticed “chapped” acting while I was refreshing the page to see if my own team had PMed me, and was able to slip in for the snipe then). The chance of action failure also made things much more interesting because it forced teams to react on the fly rather than just plot everything out in advance.

After last dynasty, I was desiring this one to be free of timing scams. I mostly managed that in terms of “timing breakpoint” timing scams, but there were two exceptions that tarnished that slightly: Training had a cooldown that was known in advance, creating a hard timing breakpoint (which was at a slightly awkward time for me and would have disrupted my life slightly); and the 24-hour lockout for failing a Heist Action was also a hard timing breakpoint. For the latter, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem because you could effectively choose the time at which the lockout occurred (it’s generally easy to pick a time of day when you can be online every day, sort-of like the Waking Hour mechanic from last dynasty), and indeed getting into lockout wasn’t a timing-breakpoint problem for the player that was locked out; but I missed that a 24-hour lockout for one player creates a hard timing breakpoint for other players, who may want to act before the other player comes off lockout, but want to wait as long as possible before then so that their actions have the greatest chance of working. That said, despite there not being timing breakpoints, team synchronization still provided a good advantage despite the anti-snipe rules (which did help – they just didn’t help enough). That isn’t the same thing as a timing-breakpoint timing scam, but it still causes some similar pressure on the way that players interact with BlogNomic.

All that said, I think that although the principles (randomized teams, failure chance that gradually decreases) were really good, this dynasty’s specific implementation was not perfect, and the details could do with tweaking the next time we do something like this. The 24-hour lockout for failing a Heist Action was strategically interesting, but mathematically somewhat janky. The problem is that a mathematically ideal solution involves failed Heist Action attempts resetting the timer, but it has to be combined with a reduction in the chance of early attempts succeeding (otherwise it becomes mathematically optimal to roll the dice every hour in the hope of rolling a 1, and I wanted to guarantee that that wasn’t the theoretically optimal strategy). But that would have been much harder to understand and apply than a mathematically straightforward 24/48 system – perhaps it would be possible to get away with “roll DICE48 three times and choose the median value”, or something like that, which would still be fairly easy to understand and would prevent the “roll every hour” strategy working.

As for the randomized teams, randomness averages out in the long term but it usually doesn’t average out in the short term, and given the typical length of dynasties, that means that there’s unlikely to be an even spread of team assignments before the dynasty ends. I think it would have been a good idea (and will be a good idea for the next dynasty that uses it) to tweak the team assignment system to mix the teams up more than a purely random team assignment would (e.g. by, for each old team, placing half its members onto one new team and the other half onto another new team). Part of the fun of a system like this is trying out different combinations of players in your team, and ending up with the same team assignment three rounds in a row, whilst a statistical fluke, somewhat reduced the extent to which that fun was available.

On regrets.

I think that by far my largest mistake this dynasty was not vetoing “Low Status”. As far as I can tell, it had two major negative effects on the dynasty, and no positive effects.

One of the issues was that it provided an ostensible use for Triumphs, but one that didn’t matter at all. It was clear to me (and apparently to most other players) that it would be easier to inject arbitrary text into the mutable rules than it would be to achieve victory without a text injection strategy. As such, any Triumph-based protection in a Mutable rule would be completely pointless – basically any viable strategy for achieving it would be able to either disable the rule along the way, or just set the Reputation directly, at no real cost. As such, the proposal had the effect of making Triumphs into fool’s gold – in that it gave an apparent use for Triumphs, discouraging players from adding others, but one that didn’t matter at all – and I recognised that at the time. This should have been enough for the veto in its own right, and I’m disappointed that I let you talk me out of it.

The other problem was that it prevented victory declarations based on dynastic gamestate, which is almost as broken as preventing CFJs based on dynastic gamestate would be (and possibly more of an issue in general because the CFJ system has some protections against being accidentally broken but the DoV system doesn’t). This causes a number of knock-on problems, such as “we can’t necessarily tell whether or not a DoV was legally made” and thus “we can’t necessarily tell whether BlogNomic is in Hiatus or not”. Generally speaking, when there is such a legally unclear situation as “we might or might not be in Hiatus”, it’s important to try to ensure that the two gamestates don’t deviate too much, and especially important to do that if one of them may contain an arbitrary ruleset manipulation scam that’s more powerful than a CFJ (and thus can’t be fixed by CFJ unless it gets quorumed incredibly quickly – this one did get fixed very quickly, but not quickly enough that there wouldn’t have been time to do the scam). Fortunately, we probably don’t currently have any players that would abuse that to damage the game, but BlogNomic has historically had such players (e.g. Madrid), and if any current players had that attitude – or if any of the past such players unidled (possible due to the lack of Hiatus) – then it could possibly have destroyed the whole nomic. The problem is, that the way to fix it in one possible gamestate (i.e. to use the loophole to block itself in the gamestate where the DoV is illegal) looks, from the point of view of the other possible gamestate, like you’re acting in Hiatus. I knew at the time that “cannot declare victory” was asking for huge amounts of trouble, but didn’t realise just quite how much trouble it would cause. The reason I didn’t veto was that I was planning to pass-and-fix, but then players voted down the fix proposal and left us in a situation where the DoV system wasn’t enough, and the CFJ system might potentially not have been enough, to fix serious breakage at the end of the dynasty. In retrospect, the lesson I’ve learned here is that rules that prevent victory declaration should always prompt a veto before the 12-hour minimum enactment timer is up, even if it looks like passing-and-fixing is an obvious solution, as you can’t necessarily rely on players to vote through the fix. BlogNomic relies on DoVs as a dispute resolution mechanism, and if there’s doubt about whether a DoV has happened or not, it fails to be useful for that purpose because it doens’t pause gameplay if the victory wasn’t legally declared.

More generally, this dynasty’s mechanics did not handle pauses in gameplay well at all. It would not have recovered from a failed Hiatus-creating DoV, even if it was widely acknowledged to have failed, because timers would still be running during Hiatus and everyone would get to act simultaneously when the DoV ended, leading to a huge mess of simultaneous action attempts in which the enacting admin would have an advantage. Combine that with the fact that the actions are possibly rule edits attempting to cause a victory, and you may end up with a completely broken gamestate in which players are racing to finish off partially-complete victory conditions. (In a sense, the ban on declaring victory was helpful in that sense – it would allow DoVs that were found to have trivially failed to be closed early, and would allow players to act while the DoV was “open” on the understanding that if the DoV failed due to lack of Retired the Hiatus wouldn’t have existed, so the DoV wouldn’t hold up gameplay like they normally do. But that only works if players are aware that the Hiatus might not necessarily exist and thus don’t attempt to revert actions performed during it. I should have noted the Hiatus issue during “Functional reputation”, but it wasn’t at the front of my mind at the time (I had noticed that the rule would mean that DoVs no longer worked as a way to determine victory, but wasn’t fully focused on the “this makes it unclear whether or not it’s a Hiatus” situation).

This dynasty has also made me realise that BlogNomic’s dispute resolution mechanisms don’t at present work. CFJs are fine as a recovery mechanism, in which everyone agrees that the gamestate is in an undesirable state, or at least agrees on what the desirable state is, and uses a CFJ in order to fix the actual gamestate to match the desired gamestate (even when the desired gamestate would not otherwise be legally obtainable or everyone agrees that it isn’t the actual gamestate). But if the problem is a dispute, you have two different possible gamestates and CFJs are very bad at reconciling them – it’s unclear what the various possible votes even mean (it’s usually clear what they do, but unclear whether a FOR or AGAINST is desirable with any particular set of opinions). In order to perform actions, you have to edit the tracker, which means that the tracker has to be “correct enough” for the action to be performed; we currently seem to have a culture of “leave the tracker in the incorrect state during a CFJ, so that the CFJ can fix it” and that inherently creates pauses in gameplay that most action systems can’t handle. (Just look at what happened with “Reading Rainbow”, which was in effect a dispute resolution – it created an admin-advantage scam and a timing breakpoint even though the dynastic mechanics were designed to prevent that, with the situation becoming “whoever admins this scores as long as they can get a confederate online”.)

I’ve realised that there is a fairly easy fix to this (stolen from another nomic) – I think that when the gamestate is in dispute, we should put both versions on the tracker, marking it as disputed. That way, we can continue gameplay in both possible scenarios while we try to determine which is the correct one, updating the tracker accordingly. For example, the whole Bounty thing would have been much less fractious if we could simply write SingularByte’s Triumphs as “7 or 8” in the tracker, with a footnote explaining the situations in which the value is 7 and the situations in which he value was 8. The current system was designed in the days of the GNDT, which couldn’t easily have done that; but now that we have a wiki tracker we can make use of the wiki’s powers to add arbitrary text. Likewise, the end of this dynasty would presumably have been less controversial if, on the ruleset tracker, we could write “if the DoV is valid, and thus there is a Hiatus, the rules say X – if the DoV is invalid, and thus there is no Hiatus, the rules say Y”.

In general, though, I was very confused about the rules interpretation used by most other players this dynasty. I sometimes feel like either I am, or the rest of you are, speaking a foreign language that’s like English but where sentences sometimes mean something entirely unrelated to what they say. For example, I still don’t understand how many players were arguing that the use of a plural verb rather than a singular verb in the Bounty rule caused a sentence to become uselessly meaningless, but “(...) attempt to perform that action by, (...) rolling (gibberish).” is an instruction that allows you to roll a dice of your choice, including a 0-sided dice (which in practice wouldn’t really be rollable due to not having any sides). I thought the DICE0 argument was at least mildly plausible as a way to resolve the gibberish (in the sense of “roll anything that’s rollable on the dice roller” rather than “default to 0”, which only works for variables) – but I’m really confused as to why the other players agreed with that argument, given strenuous objection to much smaller wording errors. Given the other potential issues with SingularByte’s scam (the “is DICE48 actually Gibberish” argument and the “previous 0 hours” argument), I am very confused as to why it received FOR votes so quickly; I was expecting it to trivially fail and was concerned about the effect that the disputed Hiatus would have on gameplay. Likewise, in a dynasty where “untracked” had earlier been treated as a synonym for “orphan” (which it isn’t in English – that relies on a BlogNomic-specific definition), it’s surprising that players were willing to treat “DICE48” as not being a word, when it clearly is in regular BlogNomic language. The only way I can reconcile this is to assume that BlogNomic is not played in English, but intead a hypothetical “Blognomicese” which is like English, but redefines a few words and adds a few new ones (like “DICE48”) – at that point, DICE48 becomes Gibberish due to not being an English word, even though it is simultaneously treated as a valid word in general for BlogNomic purposes.

On history tracking.

The “History of Victories” page on the wiki is trying to record both who won a dynasty, and who was responsible for causing the win, and any mantle-passing or mantle roll details.

From the perspective of someone who wasn’t involved in the planning for the scam, what apparently happened is quite obvious: the player responsible for causing the win is SingularByte, and the player who won is Raven.

But I’m interested in what actually happened, so that it can be recorded correctly – a) how did you decide which of you was going to win (e.g. was there any “mantle roll” involved, or was it just a case of “it’s about time Raven had a dynasty”), and b) was this actually a purely solo scam by SingularByte or did other players provide useful information or otherwise manipulate circumstances to help the scam succeed? (I suspect that SingularByte might have been prompted to attempt a dubious/risky scam early in the hope that players accepted it, rather than waiting for Habanero to come off cooldown to do a more complicated but more unambiguously valid scam, due to Raven telling him that me/Brendan/Raven were planning to do a victory scam before Habanero’s cooldown ended. But I don’t know whether that’s actually the case or not.)

@ais523: When it came to deciding the winner, the choice was quite simple: Habanero didn’t feel ready to have a dynasty, and I’d worry about running out of steam if I got a dynasty of my own (since I favour going all out for a dynasty or two then having a break, rather than taking it slow and steady). Of the three of us, Raven is the only one who actually wanted to win.

We’d all been pooling info about the other scams for a long while, but the winning scam was the result of an off-hand question from Habanero about whether DICE48 was actually defined as gibberish. At first I was going to cfj it, but then me and Habanero actually looked at the rules and worked out what the likely consequences would be as a result of it (and game terms in general, like cfj) being skipped over.

In terms of timing, I’d say I implemented it maybe half an hour after its discovery since I needed to get the sequence of actions worked out and I was feeling the time pressure from knowing that you were planning to win soon.

This dynasty was a great time. The actions themselves changing the dynastic rules was a very creative/clever form of gameplay (though I may be somewhat biased on that, given that the mechanics reminded me of my all-time favourite video game Baba is You). The Coregency worked out quite well; it was nice to see some team mechanics with privately tracked information from the team leaders. Stuff like that is a largely unexplored design space that’s really only feasible with two Emperor figures. I don’t think Coregency should become a regular thing, but it was nice to see regardless.

I don’t know how to feel about the randomized 48-hour countdown on actions. It wasn’t all that effective to me at its stated purpose of preventing timing breakpoints (there were many points where the passage of a CfJ/proposal or the availability of fellow team members would encourage players to be online at a very particular time they wouldn’t normally want to play the game anyway, and as ais mentions the 24-hour lockout produces another timing breakpoint where you want to act immediately before your opponents come off cooldown). It also felt pretty bad to have a couple dice rolls determine whether or not you were able to Triumph, especially with the already very random team and target selection making the winning team callable from the start in many cases. It did introduce a dramatic push-your-luck feel. The earlier you act, the more likely you’ll be the first to act, but the less likely your plan is to succeed, meaning the two teams were often both trying to act as late as possible to maximize success chances while still beating out the other team. Also, it gave an incentive to find a better route even if your team had enough actions to get to their Target, which was a good thing (if you can get there in 4 with no actions to spare, your odds will significantly improve if someone finds a way to get there in 3 and gives you room to fail an action). Maybe most importantly, I enjoyed it for its novelty; it was quite different from your typical action system, and sometimes being different is a virtue all on its own.

Gameplay wise, there is a LOT to say about what was going on behind the scenes. It felt to me like the dynasty was bound to end in some sort of arbitrary text scam from the moment it started, and therefore I spent most of my effort this dynasty in a conspiracy with SB and Raven plotting various ways of doing so, which started way back when SB proposed the Archivist. We came up with several different plans before the dynasty-ender, which SB has already detailed.

To answer ais’ question, neither SB nor I wanted to run a dynasty, so we decided to just pass the victory off to Raven, who was the only member of our cabal who wanted to win. We did both play a significant role in the dynasty-ending scam, though, and in fact while we were plotting out the Treasurer scam we noticed this scam essentially simultaneously (while trying to hash out the exact words we would copy, we considered “a Participant may skip the DICE48 roll for any Heist Action with any roll being classed as their result for that roll if relevant” from The Crew, but then we realized that DICE48 is arguably not a word and hence couldn’t be copied, which then quickly resulted in the key realization that DICE48 was Gibberish).

Interestingly, when we were going through the ruleset to ensure nothing else thus far was broken in preparation for the final scam, we found that ‘CFJ’ was also Gibberish, which prevented CfJs from changing Immutable rules (“The only ways to change the ruletext of an Immutable rule are via the legal enactment of a proposal or <s>CFJ</s>”), but that never happened at any point in the dynasty post Reading Rainbow and pre-scam so it was fine.

Ooh, I think I would have baulked at the CfJ thing - Call for Judgement is definitely the name of a type of votable matter, and CfJ is a defined abbreviation for it as defined in the Core Rules.

We never seriously considered the cfj=gibberish logic as a vector of attack anyway. I figured at the time that there would be core or appendix protections on it anyway.

@Josh: It’s defined as an abbreviation for three words, though, which doesn’t make it a single word. I think that if you accept the “DICE48 is Gibberish” scam, the dynastic rules did attempt to enforce “CFJs can’t change mutable rules”. However, a) fortunately Reading Rainbow / On Parsing Nonsense was limited to affecting the interpretation of dynastic rules (meaning that it didn’t break any of the core rules – it very nearly could have done!), and b) the Calls for Judgement rule can’t be overruled by dynastic rules. So the dynastic rules did attempt to limit the ability of CFJs to work, but failed at doing so. (SingularByte is correct that the CFJ system has both core and appendix protection; although there are a lot of potential loopholes in it, this particular breakage didn’t happen to exploit any.)

Anyway, because I didn’t explicitly state it – I also consider this dynasty a success. Partially that’s because I was trying to design a dynasty that I wanted to play, and actually got to play it! It possibly wasn’t quite as fun for Masterminds as for regular players because we couldn’t participate fully in, e.g., team-based playing and cabals (why was the win attempt that I was involved in being does as me/Brendan/Raven? because that’s what the dice said), but there was still enough gameplay there, both conventional and scam-based, for me to enjoy playing it.

The actively-playing-player counts throughout the dynasty were also somewhat higher than BlogNomic has had for ages, which is also something of a sign of success. I think having the Masterminds able to actively play helped with that – it means that we had eight players’ worth of actions rather than six. We haven’t had eight players at the end of a dynasty since Vovix I (over a year ago).

I try to turn on “Everyone’s Playing” whenever possible, but it would probably have been impossible to make it incompatible with the “two teams” theme in a regular solo-Emperor dynasty. So in a way, the Coregency was a huge opportunity to actually make the theme work.

For what it’s worth, I expect Coregencies to be more common in the future, due to how many limitations we’ve added on mantle-passes; players are very creative in finding things to barter with, and with most of the possibilities now cut off by the core rules, we can probably expect more players trying to slip joint-win rules into the ruleset by proposal, like happened last dynasty.

The advantages of a Coregency seem to be primarily that, because Imperial power is diluted, you can have the Emperors play without biasing the gameplay too much (as long as you have protections against the Emperors pooling with each other, which won’t be a problem with most imperial styles), and you can have secret information without needing a “player outside the gamestate” to track it (by having each Emperor track information that should be secret from the other Emperor). That means you can have one more player actively playing than normal, which seems like it could be useful in a smaller playerbase. Metadynasties can do that too, but are often somewhat rudderless (that said, one of my favourite dynasties was a Metadynasty – they work great if you have the right sort of theme, and tend to collapse otherwise).

@SingularByte “That was around the time I unset Rogue, as neither Raven nor Habanero would have enough triumphs to wait for the cooldown to finish before losing their targets.”: wow, so Triumphs did end up mattering after all.

You really deserved that Bounty (whether or not it was actually legally awardable) – the Rogue rule was incredibly well-designed. (Bounties can be awarded to a combination of votable matters, and although it didn’t fix the conventional half of gameplay, it did fix the scam half.)

The ordering of events in the final act of the dynasty here was pretty crazy. Team ais was planning on acting at 19:30 UTC (which was before our cabal even noticed the Gibberish scam). Team Josh just happened to make their moves less than an hour before, forcing team ais to take an action, and that single action (unknowingly to the rest of us) delayed team ais until 1:33 UTC. In that six hour window our cabal very luckily found and executed on the dynasty-ending scam. Wild to think it could’ve gone very differently if Team Josh had acted a little later

I’m also amused that the dynasty ended in an actual scam (i.e. “this rule doesn’t say what everyone thinks it says” and convincing enough of the playerbase of that), in rule wording that was introduced entirely by proposal, rather than in a series of edits-made-via-dynastic-mechanics that broke the rules enough to go infinite. The latter play would have been somewhere between a conventional and scam win, and could have been hard to classify, but this was much closer to a traditional scam than I was expecting with this dynasty.

Well, Brendan at the very least doesn’t seem too surprised by the dynasty ending in a normal scam, given the “I cannot be emphatic enough that I told you all so” on the DoV. He did call it a few weeks ago, after all.

I enjoyed playing with the mechanics and teams of this dynasty right up until the post-DoV hours, which have tarnished it for me. This is a game. I play games for fun. There are a few players whose approach to the game I find not at all fun, but exhausting and dispiriting, and I’m old enough to know better than to involve myself with the game when they are active. I hoped that the emperor-player divide might limit the conflict because most of the time emperors and players don’t compete directly against one another; I was wrong. I suppose I should be grateful for another opportunity to learn my lesson.

@Brendan: This sounds like fruitful ground for core rules changes – as always in a nomic, if something isn’t working, often the best option is to fix it rather than abandon it.

In this case it’s very clear that the current dispute resolution systems in the core rules aren’t working properly. I have been trying to establish the exact nature of the issues, in the hope of being able to change the rules to something that actually works. I think there are problems both a) with the rules themselves not covering handling situations appropriately and b) players not interacting with the rules in a way that the rules envisage, leading to larger problems.

One thing that does seem to be a recurring problem is situations where one player in a disagreement feels that the other player is entirely disregarding their point of view / reverting maliciously, in a situation where the other player doesn’t realise that the disagreement even exists. There are plenty of cases where a player has misread a rule or forgotten to complete an action, and someone else reminds them of the rule / completes the action, and we move on; BlogNomic would be almost unplayable without that. This means that when there’s an actual disagreement, i.e. one player does not acknowledge that they simply misread the rule or forgot an action, but the other player thinks they did, it looks a lot like an actively malicious revert, and can lead to a lot of tension/friction, even though the other player was actually trying to avoid trouble by not calling a CFJ over what appeared to be a routine action. (I’ve been on both sides of that scenario, this dynasty.)

Once we’re out of Hiatus, I may try to work on a fix to them in the hope of avoiding a reoccurrence of the problems (even though that would cost slots that might be helpful in terms of dynastic gameplay), as it’s clearly one of the biggest problems with the nomic right now.

I think it’s a cultural issue, in that some players are willing to overlook edge-case risk possibilities in the name of a fun game and for other players the pursuit of those edge-case risk possibilities is a part of the game.

The end-game - ais was genuinely pursuing something that they thought was a necessary game consideration. Everybody else saw that no-one was ever going to break CfJs deliberately, and if they did there were outside-of-the-game mechanisms for dealing with it. Those are irreconcilable views.

Absolutely no point in attempting to legislate those problems away. End of the day, either people find a way to have their playstyles co-exist, or they don’t.

@Josh: I was thinking more of some of the CFJs earlier in the dynasty, e.g. the whole “charactery” revert. I think some of the bad blood there could have been avoidable with better dispute resolution mechanisms. (In a way, that lead fairly directly to the eventual win – “Reading Rainbow” probably received less debate/scrutiny than a normal proposal would have done, as it was needed to get the game going again, and even though there was no malicious intent by anyone, the haste increased the chance of bugs slipping through, one of which eventually ended up being used to win.)

I was very angry at that point in the dynasty ­– from my point of view, after enacting a CFJ that reverted the rules to a specific version, I would have expected the rules (not just the tracking page) to be at that version, and arguing that the CFJ actually did something different from what (to me) it obviously said looked like it was undermining the entire CFJ system (because if CFJs don’t give you certainty about how a dispute was resolved, what does?) I do now understand the general nature of your position on that, and I think it’s a reasonable sort of change to want to make (although I still disagree about that the wording of the CFJ actually specified making it – I guess my opinion is that wording mistakes in enacted CFJs need to be respected in just the same way that wording mistakes in the rules need to be respected, even if it isn’t what anyone actually desired the outcome of the CFJ to be).

There are some approaches (e.g. having both sides of a dispute tracked in the tracker) which would greatly reduce the chance of a CFJ being accidentally worded in a way that could inspire that sort of disagreement, which I think would be helpful for reducing friction going forwards.

I agree that the DoV issues were probably unresolvable, once “Low Status” had passed. They could have been trivially avoided by vetoing Low Status in the first place, though, and it was my fault for not doing that (I didn’t understand the full implications at the time).

@ais Your continued insistence that everythign that went wrong was everyone else’s fault and that all that was required for the game to function properly is to do what you say at every juncture is the problem.

You think you can veto your way out of a situation in which every other player thinks that youre acting like a petty autocrat?

Read my last post again. I’m trying to find a nice way of saying “everyone else is playing a different game from you, ais, but for some reason you want us all to change instead of changing yourself”. If you want to keep playing BlogNomic then it’s time you considered conforming, instead of being the rock that this game keeps breaking itself on.

Needless to say I will vote against any further attempt you make to reshape this game in your own image.

@Josh: I think the problem is that I have an irreconcilable playstyle difference with the current core rules – not with the other players.

I do agree that a range of playstyles exist, and I hope to find a way that they can all be compatible with each other. I think this CFJ from 2021 is quite a good demonstration of the range of playstyles; there was a core rules bug that prevented CFJs making certain clearly desirable gamestate changes, and the CFJ I linked aimed to fix it. Many players voted FOR, because they wanted the core rules to unambiguously cover that case; some other players voted AGAINST, because they thought it was already covered by a metagame agreement. In other words, there’s a clear disconnect between some players and others as to how dispute resolution and recovery from emergencies work, and that showed up in the voting patterns.

I don’t, however, think these playstyles necessarily have to be at odds with each other. This is basically because the “the rules are all that matter” crowd (which, I suspect, is actually in the majority at BlogNomic, even nowadays) are quite happy to have a metagame agreement encoded into the core rules, if it’s a useful one – that causes the two sides of the argument to agree with each other, and is also useful to new players because it allows them to learn what the relevant agreements are on their own. On the other hand, the “we can solve this by metagame agreement” crowd are generally better off if the core rules correctly reflect their viewpoint on what the metarules are, rather than being at odds with each other, because it will reduce the number of apparently bizarre reverts and CFJs that they have to deal with. Things like the Fair Play rules were a big improvement in bringing the two sides closer together, which has been helpful for BlogNomic long-term. I am in favour of being more inclusive of different playstyles, partly because dealing with the disconnect has historically been one of the things that can lead to interesting core gameplay (as opposed to dynastic gameplay), and partly because it brings player counts up and having more players to play with usually creates a better game. (This includes playstyles much more extreme than mine or yours – at least one former player had a reputation for intentionally breaking agreements and intentionally and flagrantly violating rules, and creating rules to deal with that sort of behaviour is an interesting challenge.)

I do think that the core rules / appendix currently don’t reflect the metagame agreements well. This includes some fairly benign things that aren’t in dispute at all – just look at the comments on Snisbo’s proposal, for example. If a player doesn’t do something that they “must” do at BlogNomic, it happens anyway – but I don’t think the rules clearly specify that anywhere, and that can cause confusion among players who aren’t fully aware of the metagame agreements. (The Appendix gives permission to “complete incomplete actions on behalf of the original Participant” but that leaves the timing very unclear.) Specifying that more clearly would probably be an improvement, as a) it’s very core to how BlogNomic works and b) the details can matter, and yet the details don’t seem to be fully established.

I also think that much of the core rules and appendix are from an earlier time, when players frequently tried actions that should clearly be illegal in an attempt to gain an advantage. When I first joined, there were several cases where, e.g., non-admins attempted to illegally admin their own proposal, and a lot of rules were added to stop that sort of thing. The rules are written in a very Platonic style in an attempt to stop various illegal actions ever having an influence on the gamestate, rather than reverting them, and that’s a symptom of players having actually attempted those illegal actions in order to try to make use of the resulting gamestate before it could be reverted. BlogNomic generally doesn’t have to worry about that sort of thing nowadays, especially given the Fair Play rule against core rules scams, but the rules written back in that era still persist, and still cause trouble.