I realized that my first pass at this was causing a conflict with the “If the two Upsides are the same and the two Downsides are the same” step, so I merged it all into one step that should be repeated until none of the conditions apply.

It’s still a little weird with the “3rd word” bit. I’m not sure how else to say it.

I was wondering if these cases should explicitly become the “no effect” that I’m summarising them as - because there will presumably be future cases where “Gain 1 Food then Lose 1 Food” becomes nontrivial under an Innovation that eg. doubles Food gains, and that might start getting too fiddly to write plausible narrative for.

I’d assumed that the “or do nothing” Dilemmas were as interesting to consider as any other - if you take the safe option, you’re missing out on something - but I may have some Emperor blindness.

So far, I’ve been finding the “do nothing” choices too safe, personally. Purposely choosing the other move over the safe move has seemed suboptimal so far. Plus, I feel like a Dilemma suggests higher stakes where no choice is completely safe. I respect your guidance for the dynasty theme, though, so if safe choices still fit your vision, I can stand down.

As for the narrative, I think that since Innovations will likely modify gains and losses only for the Districts that have them, it doesn’t make sense to try to write a common narrative for everyone that describes the Innovation impact. Narrating the base outcomes makes the most sense, and then each District may or may not have the Innovations to handle those Outcomes in a different way than others.

I would have thought a do-nothing dilemma was still pretty high stakes in a survival setting - a player might come to painfully regret taking the easy option in Round 7 instead of taking a hit to get that 1 extra Food.

I don’t know how far the narrative can go before it snaps. I can probably narrate a base outcome for something like “Gain 1 Food then Lose 1 Food” if there’s only one Food-gain-relevant Innovation in play, but it’ll get vaguer if there are multiple ones which all have different ideas about what the act of “gain Food” means. If narrating the base outcome means offering “or nothing happens”, to which a player with Crop Rotation can then say “I gain 1 Food from Crop Rotation during the Raider Attack!”, that feels like the narrative’s not really doing its job.

Can see where this goes, anyway. I’ll completely defer to players on whether the or-nothing dilemmas are actually interesting.

but I do feel like “Do you want 1 Food at the cost of 5 People, or not; you might really need Food later” is a perfectly true dilemma.