When you get a 1 and have to select a Thief to change their plans to Lay Low, I wonder if that selection should be based on Notoriety, such that Thieves with higher Notoriety are more likely to be picked. That would make it more plausible to wonder what happened. Granted, it would make the formula to do so a little more complicated: sum up all Notorieties and spread the Thieves out into a table where each Thief’s spread is as big as their Notoriety, then roll the summed up Notoriety die and pick the result from the table.

I’m not entirely sure this will help too much in that regard. Just make funding high arms things annoying because we not only have to trust everyone but we also gotta make sure we get lucky

The whole “the most coop dynasty ever instead of the banditry it presumes” issue I think is a weird quirk of how the dynastic rules work, that this doesn’t really address

The whole “split hauls pretty evenly among everyone who contributed” turns out to be a maximal way to play the game for a couple of reasons

first off, the rules encourages everyone to contribute. If I know from past events I’m not getting a cut of the loot I might as well linger and now everyone as a whole gets less. Cooperation leads to more profits overall than individual play

Secondly, and I think more importantly, we spent exactly one heist switching to more selfish gameplay. What happened was the inability to actually reach a quorum (as people could always undercut what they got in order to screw over another player more, and get people to support them instead) and so after a day of that not working we switched back to a fully cooperative approach

I completely forgot about that incident of selfish gameplay and the resulting consensus to cooperate instead.

Maybe we should instead incentivize “Lay Low” as a Plan that others wouldn’t be too upset about. Notoriety already increases the odds of getting Caught, but that’s a personal problem. What if it became a problem for Hauls, where if the total Notoriety across all Thieves is higher, it’s more likely that some Florins in the Haul will be lost?

Something like:

* Sum up the Notoriety across all Free Thieves and call this the Gang Notoriety. Then roll DICEX, where X is 50 times the number of Free Thieves. If the result is lower than the Gang Notoriety, subtract 2DICE3 Florins from the Haul, to a minimum of 0 Florins, and include this subtraction in the Haul blog post.

I think the issue with the dynastic rules hitting polite maximisation is that it’s just a bad idea to surprise other people by Lingering, or by buying Arms but declining to use them - the group will be told that you did it, and will simply cut you out of the takings.

“Just make funding high arms things annoying because we not only have to trust everyone but we also gotta make sure we get lucky” seems more interesting than maximal haul splitting, to me. You can compensate for the luck by spending a few additional Arms to make sure that you succeed even if your key player gets benched. And how exactly to factor in who can and can’t be trusted sounds like gameplay.

I don’t remember which Haul was the “exactly one heist switching to more selfish gameplay”, but I assume one of the current dampeners on prolonged, selfish negotiation is the Punt timeout encouraging (as we’ve seen) players just agreeing with whatever’s on the table so as not to be seen as contributing to a Punt.

Oh its a 1 and we lose one person. That seems reasonable. Gives people cover to lay low and still claiming it was just randomness

(originally thought we rolled the dice for each person)