This encourages pooling between small cabals with large numbers of Triumphs for a roll-off. As my team (currently just me) has the lowest number of Triumphs, I’ll veto this.

Very strong against from me, 7 actions from Brendan is likely a dynasty-ending amount (definitely so if he finds someone else to cooperate with).

I do think Triumphs should matter towards the victory condition, though – otherwise there’s no point in having any gameplay.

I’d encourage people to start thinking about how they should matter (no, Retired is not a real restriction because it is in a mutable rule, and much easier to change than it is to score). We could make them a conventional win condition, but Josh seems to be against that. Or we could make them help towards a rule-mutation victory, but Josh seems to be against that too.

In retrospect, I should have vetoed “Low Status” – as I thought at the time, it is being used as an excuse to make Triumphs irrelevant by giving them an incredibly weak and low-powered use (bypassing one anti-victory condition that is easier to bypass by other means).

OK, I’ve made two changes: a) this is more expensive (likely putting it out of instant-win reach even for players like Brendan), b) it can’t be pooled due to a 48-hour lockout.

It’s understandable to want to give Triumphs a use (though I’ll always vote against having the least of them among the non-Masterminds). This definitely isn’t the way to do it though, since it immediately multiplies the burst-action-taking power of Brendan by four. I am confident that if this passes we will see a very quick end to the dynasty

Ah, I didn’t see the changes. This makes it a bit more reasonable at least, I’m still against though

If, at this point, there are any players who didn’t suspect that Triumphs might become <a >fool’s gold</a> then I don’t know what to tell them. This is dynasty #231 of BlogNomic; the very first lesson of intermediate BlogNomic is that you want to avoid being the winningest before a VC is on the books.

A 5/4/3/3/1 split amongst non-Mastermind Participants doesn’t make Triumphs automatically fool’s gold yet, but I am willing to use my veto to help pretty much anybody who asks me to when it comes to VCs. We said from the outset that we encouraged scams but wouldn’t make it easy; for me, that goes for conventional, too.

That broken link was to this.

Hmm, this conversation is teaching me a lot about early victory conditions. There’s a bit of a paradox in that a) it’s hard to come up with a good victory condition unless you know where the dynasty is going, which often requires a substantial amount of gameplay to get a feel for it, but b) once there has been gameplay, the players who are behind will want to reduce the extent to which having done well affects the victory condition (especially if, as, in Habanero’s case, they are behind primarily due to bad luck), meaning that the victory condition really needs to be enacted early or you aren’t going to get a good one.

My feeling is that this sinks a number of dynasties in BlogNomic – they don’t get a victory condition until it’s too late, and then it’s impossible to get one that keeps everyone happy, so they eventually end up with a chop.

In this case, the dynasty technically had a very early win condition (Tools of the Trade), but it isn’t currently tied to any dynastic variables except arguably Focus. However, because it isn’t tied to dynastic variables, it also isn’t something that it’s reasonably possible to grind towards, so there’s no reason to expect it to be achieved unless either we give the variables more of a use, or players start pooling.

I think the best solution to this is to start dynasties with a conventional win condition that is implausibly difficult, but gets gradually easier over time. That way, if players can’t agree on a win condition later in the dynasty, the original condition eventually ends up mattering. But we didn’t do that this dynasty, and it’s too late to go back to that now.

@Josh: I’m aware of the Fool’s Gold problem but a) didn’t expect it to happen this early in the dynasty and b) didn’t expect it to happen when the dynasty has no other measures of success. Perhaps that was a bit naive – but I thought that given a straight choice between “the gameplay so far matters” and “nothing that’s happened in the dynasty so far matters” that players would choose the former.

I also an attempts to alleviate the issue by giving Triumph uses, in “Breaking the vaults”, but it got voted down. IIRC you were against that because you thought higher Triumphs should make it harder to win by scam rather than easier – but that doesn’t make sense if they don’t have a conventional use.

Oh I think we are mid-to-late dynasty, not early.

Perhaps part of the problem here is that it is not really for Emperors to define win conditions. But I also think that this dynasty has probably never needed a conventional VC - it’s fels like a scam win since day one.

No, this dynasty has needed a conventional win condition, or at least an incentive to participate in the conventional gameplay (which could be a hybrid scam/conventional win condition, but that is alienating to the players who are bad at scams). If the only win condition is a scam win condition, then players have no reason to do anything other than wait for the conditions for the scam to be available.

To me, this dynasty has the potential to have the perfect blend of conventional, pooling and scam in its victory – it supports action-pooling towards a scam already, so you just need to make the conventional gameplay relevant towards that too in order to make all three parts of the game important.

I think we should probably have a purely-conventional win condition within the ruleset, but don’t expect the dynasty to actually end like that. A workable hybrid win condition (like this is intended to be) is probably more urgent.

(A good comparison is Wakukee I, which was intentionally set up for scamming to be the primary win condition. There was very little gameplay for most of the dynasty, and the ruleset is very short as a consequence; not much happened until I attempted the game-winning scam, at which point Kevan cut in front of me with a retroactive game-winning scam that built off mine.)

To be clear: Wakukee I did have some amount of conventional gameplay, but none of it ended up mattering (except to the extent that it contributed partly to making a failed DoV plausible).

I see the retirement tag as the conventional sauce in the recipe - one of the reasons why I insisted that it prohibit declaring Victory rather than achieving it was to ensure that it was a separate step to bypass on the way to winning.

Well, it isn’t a step to bypass on the way to winning at all – just to declaring.

The retirement tag is much easier to bypass than the existing Vault rule, though (which is unsurprising given that it’s Mutable), and thus doesn’t do much towards making a conventional win matter. Bypassing it with Triumphs would be incredibly wasteful; if you have enough ruleset-modification power to get past the Vault, getting past Reputation is trivial by consequence. (Really, you can do that even without scams – in the unlikely case that you have an otherwise usable victory scam that gets through the Vault, but not enough Triumphs to retire and no ability to bypass Reputation, you can just spend a week or so gradually removing dollar signs from the Reputation rule, which would be much faster than gaining enough Triumphs to retire.)

It would make more sense to allow Triumphs to bypass the difficult part (the Vault) rather than bypassing the easy part (Reputation), but you voted that down.

Winning requires declaring. You keep missing that. Declaring is a step towards winning. You Achieve, you Declare, the Declaration is enacted - that is the whole arc of a “win” in BlogNomic. The only one of those steps that is optional, under the standard ruleset, is Achieving.

In any case, that doesn’t change the relative difficulty of breaking the Vault rule and breaking the Reputation rule.

As a thought experiment – suppose someone modified a dynastic rule to allow someone to win without achieving declaring victory (which might potentially be a real possibility for bypassing both the “achieve” and “declare” blocks). Would you accept the win as valid? If not, why not?

“Win” is a meaningless term, in ruleset terms. It’s an outside-of-the-game idea that we have that the ruleset doesn’t acknowledge - the ruleset only has a mechanism for Victory, which is Achieved, and then Declared, and then effectuated by the passage of an Ascension Address.

If someone scammed “I win” into the ruleset it would be meaningless, not even invalid. It would simply mean nothing as BlogNomic does not inherently have the concept of winning.

The only way someone could do what you’re describing through direct dynastic ruleset manipulation would be to allow someone to post an Ascension Address, probably along the way requiring them to force the game into Interregnum and make themselves Mastermind. That is the only way that the ruleset allows for shortcutting the win process directly.

But that’s not the question because the question is corrupt. It’s not about “winning”. If someone sidestepped the whole edifice and put a rule into the ruleset that said “xxx may, at will, blank the whole dynastic ruleset and start a new dynasty with themselves as Mastermind” then the question would not be “is it winning”, it would be “is it legal”.

Of course, votable matters can sidestep all of this, and have.

Back on this proposal for a sec: it is a slight buff to ais’ team at any given moment, as neither ais or I need to use our actions for scamming. At present, ais could use this to instantly win any Target that required two or fewer steps as soon as it was posted. I could not use it at all.

Basically a free Triumph to whoever is on ais’ team when he decides to cash that particular chip in.

Ah, OK – I think I understand.

I’d express it as follows: “winning” is an outside-the-game concept that we use to, subjectively, judge events in the game, deciding whether they’re considered a win or not.

What you consider a win is to get a DoV enacted – so if someone doesn’t declare victory, or the DoV is voted down, you don’t consider them to have won.

What to me counts as a win is a) achieving victory and b) getting the rest of the players to acknowledge that the win is valid – in the latter case, that’s normally determined by votes on the DoV. If a player achieves victory but is unable to declare it (say due to core rules bugs), that might potentially still count as a win if the other players agree that the win should be valid, even if the DoV system is broken for some reason. (As a concrete example, my first DoV in Misty I failed with 11 FOR votes and 0 AGAINST votes. I think that it’s reasonable to consider a win, despite a core rules bug causing the DoV to fail rather than pass, because the voting record speaks for itself.) Meanwhile, on a similar basis, I wouldn’t consider a DoV enacted via scam (or becoming Mastermind via scam) to be a win (just a scam that resets the ruleset).

In most cases these two intepretations match each other, but there are some cases where it falls apart a bit.

Personal feelings on what counts as a win are personal and unique to each individual. How we craft rules and evaluate the ruleset should be blind to personal emotional senses of that counts as achievement and what does not. The Retirement tag targets Declaration because it is a separate and stricter block to Victory than Achieving Victory is. As a mechanical matter the distinction is important.

(our messages crossed)

Re: the “slight buff”, that hadn’t crossed my mind – it doesn’t make sense, to me, to use my Triumphs to help other players on my team score, because that doesn’t help me score. I’ve been playing this dynasty from a point of view of trying to maximise my own Triumphs, as the closest option the Mastermind has to working towards a win, and I don’t normally sacrifice my own position to help someone else unless I’m getting something out of it (which traditionally has been “the fun of being part of a dynasty-winning pool”).

It crosses my mind that the Imperial Styles page doesn’t really consider the possibility of Imperial pooling separately from player protection. With teams changing at random, I don’t think the “protect players on our team” agreement really defines how and whether an Emperor should pool.

I think we should probably come to an agreement on what rules for Emperor pooling we should use this dynasty. My current rule is “don’t spend Triumphs just to increase the Triumphs of team-mates” – that would be unfair based on when they were spent. But there is probably a good reason to keep it symmetrical.

I think that while I’m on a team I am morally obligated to act in the interests of my team, and zealously attempt to achieve my Target by whatever means I have available.

Oh – that’s somewhat different from how I’ve been playing it (which is to attempt to maximise the win chance I would have if I were a regular non-Mastermind player). Fortunately the ruleset is designed so that, to a large extent, those incentives are aligned.

This might explain some of the differences in outlook, e.g. I am constantly looking for potential victory scams because that’s what I’d be doing as a regular player. I usually try to turn on “Everyone’s Playing” in my dynasties (or whatever the equivalent is under the core rules at the time), partly to get a feel of what the dynasty is like for the players / help avoid Imperial blindness, and partly because I want my dynasties to be a fun game to play in, and if my dynasty is fun to play I want to be able to play it and have that fun too.

If I were devoting my resources entirely to helping my Team score – as opposed to playing the dynasty normally – then that would a) create imbalances when one Emperor has a better personal gamestate than the other, and b) mean it would be less fun for me because I’d be locked out from a large fraction of the dynastic gameplay.

(As a simple example: suppose I happen to roll a word that’s two away from a word in the ruleset, like “paving”, and have nobody else on my team at the time because the team-mate selection roll hadn’t happened at the time. Would I, under this rule, be obligated to spend two of my Triumphs to immediately gain one Triumph? Or select team-mates and then give them some free Triumphs, too? Neither of those lines make sense to me – instead, I should be trying to score the Target without Triumph expenditure.)

As another example: if I am ever selected as Josh’s Spy I would be working towards Josh’s Target, rather than mien.

Ais mentions rolling paving, and then immediately after rolls paving. Coincidence? I think not!

On an unrelated note,

  because adding a large number of free actions to the game economy can’t go well.

@Habanero: it isn’t, I made that comment after rolling “paving”. (It would have been a hilarious coincidence if not for that, though.)

I do strongly encourage the AGAINST voters to consider how they are going to make Triumphs relevant to a scam win, in any case. Reputation does not count – it is a very flimsy protection compared to the other existing protections.

If conventional gameplay has no way to help towards a scam win, and there is also no conventional victory condition, then there is no reason to actually participate in the dynasty, and it will end up collapsing – that’s the situation I’m most afraid of, and that I’m actively trying to avoid.

My vote isn’t saying that I think you’re wrong in general. I just don’t like this particular approach to it.

:D