BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

The Special Case rule should be “private messages to the Richardo von Nestor” (“the” because this will survive the dynasty and needs to make sense after keyword substitution); otherwise you’re effectively forcing everyone onto the Slack for a dynasty.

1 Puissance Observation is completely useless because Witching Hour is limited to a 24-hour period anyway, and the 8-hour version has a lot of Emperor discretion in whether you orient the time period to the start or end of the range. I suspect that just simplifying it to an “exact time” action is the way to go.

I do worry that a lot of this will come down to “guess when Josh wakes up”, though (although that version is nonetheless better than a “reverse everything that was late” version).

Also, Special Case rules don’t need a “While this rule is active”.

The special case rule doesn’t force people onto slack; private messages can still be sent via DM. The regular Private Message appendix entry isn’t overwritten.

Have tweaked the Observation costs and rewards.

“Guess when Josh wakes up” does loom a bit large here (with a fun UK-specific subgame of “get up slightly earlier than Josh”), if maybe a third of Witching Hours are going to occur when he’s asleep. It is an improvement on the current system, though.

I’d be open to suggestions of how we can land Witching Hour in a collectively intelligible range. What about if we connected data on which hours historically attracted the most activity (comments, posts) and weighed the witching hour calculation by that?

(Tongue in check… But only slightly)

I feel like this this greatly advantages people in Josh’s time zones. It also puts weird pressure on Josh to turn on the organ whenever possible.

Josh does love to pressure Josh.

@Josh: it forces people onto Slack if there’s any rule that might require them to be able to receive private messages. That doesn’t apply to people other than the Emperor this dynasty, but could matter in future dynasties.

I don’t think that you can send a message on slack to someone who’s not there, so the sender would not have substantively succeeded in sending it under those circumstances without using the EE PM system.

we can always fix it in future dynasties but I think its a fair point. Someone might have a slack account but not actively use it. I also think there are timing considerations to worry about when allowing stuff on slack but I guess can deal with that if we get a dynasty where that is a problem?

An actual dynastic rule of “when the Emperor has to formally notify a player of something important in private, they can do that through a Slack or EE private message, their choice” would get some pushback, I think, so a Special Case rule should probably be a bit more explicit about that, and maybe even be [Rare].

Ultimately two main reasons I’m against this:

1) The “guaranteed” time to get your moves in is always gonna be 24 hours after Josh posts. Josh will often be able to do his posts well before I’m up in the mornings. Which means to be safe I’ll always need to get my moves in before going to bed and others will always have plenty of time to counter.

2) Even if I were to nail down the actual witching hour, timezones still play a big factor a disadvantage. Witching hour being at 2:00:00 AM UTC isn’t really any different than witching hour being at 7:00:00 AM UTC cause Josh isn’t gonna be online to start the organ before then.

I think the proper fix is twofold:

1) Instead of doing 24 + D24, do something like 12 + D24 + D24. The first 12 + D24 is publicly announced. The second D24 is kept secret by Josh.

2) Any moves made after witching hour are automatically reverted when Richardo enters the crypt.

That way, doesn’t matter when Josh does a run its still completely random both when he might next enter the crypt, no timezone is gonna be at advantage. And if you do deduce that he’s entering at 2:00:00 UTC and are in a timezone where you can take advantage of that information great, you actually can do so.

This is certainly better than the current “rush to perform non-build actions at 23:59”, but tactically that clock is currently set to lunchtime BST and there’s maybe only one or two turns left in the game.