Proposal: Windows of Opportunity
In the rule “The Hotel”, after the text “A Spot is an Ingress if and only if it appears on the List of Ingresses, which is a publicly tracked list of Spots.” insert the text “By default, C, G, N and X are Ingresses.”
In the rule “Assessing the Patrols” add the following text:
There is a Guard Timer, which is a time and date that is privately tracked by the Concierge and contains the most recent time and date among the following events:
* The time and date the Concierge most recently performed Breaking In
* The time and date of the most recent enactment or failure of an Accuasation
* The time and date of the most recent change of a Guard’s routeWhile the current phase is Setting Patrols and there are no Pending Accusations, if it has been at least 48 hours since the time and date of the Guard Timer, and the Concierge should perform Secret Entrances, which is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Collect the set of Spots where each Spot meets all of the following criteria:
** Is not an Ingress and is not adjacent to an Ingress
** Is not in the Home(s) of any Artifact and is not adjacent to the Home(s) of any Artifact
* From the set of Spots in the preceding step, secretly randomly select a Spot and add it to the List of Ingresses.
In the rule “The Break-In” insert the following text as the first paragraph of the rule:
There is a Burglar Timer, which is a time and date that is privately tracked by the Concierge and contains the most recent time and date among the following events:
* The time and date the Concierge most recently performed Patrol Assessment
* The time and date of the most recent enactment or failure of an Accuasation
* The time and date of the most recent change of a Burglar’s routeWhile the current phase is Planning the Break-In and there are no Pending Accusations, if it has been at least 48 hours since the since the time and date of the Burglar Timer, the Concierge should perform Security Enhancements, which is an atomic action with the following steps:
* If there is at least one Artifact with the Mundane trait, secretly randomly select one such Artifact, secretly randomly select a non-Mundane trait, and set that Artifact’s trait to the result.
* If no Artifacts were selected in the previous step, secretly randomly select an Artifact that has the Antique or Keycard type and set that Artifact’s type to Evidence.
In the same rule, just before the step of Breaking In that starts with the text “Post a blog entry”, insert the following step:
* Reset the List of Ingresses to its default value
The idea is that if the Guards delay too long in setting routes, that gives time for the Burglars to discover an additional way into the Hotel.
Similarly, if the Burglars delay too long in breaking in, that gives the Guards time to set up extra Security around an Artifact or swap Artifact types.
If an Agent is delaying things for a team, they can use an Accusation to try to kick out the offender and avoid the issue.
48 hours after a team can start planning a route plus 48 hours after an Accusation is resolved (in addition to the 24-48 hours of that Accusation pending) plus 48 hours after each route submission should be plenty of time.
primarily per Kevan.
Kevan: Concierge he/him
I’m against this on Timekeeper Imperial Style grounds, for being impacted by timezones and online frequency. A player or group online at the 46 hour mark will have some leeway in deciding how to approach the looming penalty; someone who only logs back in at 50 hours will have to commit to a decision much earlier.
There are also the usual perverse incentives of timeouts that can end up slowing the game down. Aside from traitors blatantly running the clock down as you say, they could also be deniably subtler about it (dragging out decisions, derailing conversations, pretending to be offline), and the other team can try to slow things down in dynastic play (privately offering a tantalising information trade but being deliberately slow or unclear about it) or at the Nomic level (making a proposal or CfJ whose outcome will be affected by the current phase’s actions, so that the other team hesitate).
A sign on the wall of about turn length expectations would be useful, but if you attach any output effects to that, “the passage of time” becomes an optional tool to use within the game.