How are “informal promises” managed anyway, mechanically speaking? I’m just wondering what the real effect of this Proposal is, other than a guideline on how to operate when Possessed and when not Possessed.

It’s a partial revival of a former Special Case. See https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=Ruleset_188#The_Traitor_.5BActive.5D

The Special Case was a countermeasure for an era of excessive Pooling. The idea was that the Traitor can enter a victory pool and then backstab for a 100% win without costing their credibility for future dynasties.

This is more short-term. It weakly discourages making long-term deals within the dynasty lest one of the partners be possessed when it’s time for them to uphold their part of the bargain.

Perhaps the players who are more experienced with Traitor dynasties (Josh, Kevan, Raven1207) can explain it better.

I think the Traitor special case rule turned out to be meaningful maybe once ever? If this is going to be a betrayal-heavy dynasty then it may need stronger spelling out and social protection clauses than this wording.

The old Traitor rule was a counterweight to BlogNomic’s natural tendency for all recurring players to know that they could trust one another: betraying someone at the last minute in one dynasty would be at a great social cost for all future games, so it was generally safe to make extremely precarious alpha-player plans (“okay, I’ll throw the diamonds down to you, then you open the door to let me out”) in the knowledge that your accomplice was a socially-bound automaton who wouldn’t get any selfish ideas. Despite some grumbling from one or two players that they would still choose to permanently mistrust any traitor who ever did any traitoring, I think it broadly did its job of making lazy teamwork more difficult, but it always had an air of misunderstanding over why it was there, and we dropped it after a couple of years.

I like the dual personality thing a lot here.