DIS: now what
ok now I've done my offical duties and I'm sitting bored in three days of meetings so I want to do something here, but nothing's going on... what next...
Re: DIS: now what
On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 12:54 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: ok now I've done my offical duties and I'm sitting bored in three days of meetings so I want to do something here, but nothing's going on... what next... I had an idea for a new gameplay/economy thing I wanted to proto, but I don't have time to work out the details. (In general, I think we have enough players to keep Agora going when all of them are not otherwise occupied, but when someone gets busy, we end up slumping.) The basic idea was to do something in the deckbuilding genre, because it feels like a perfect fit for nomics. The basic theme is that there's a defined list of actions that can be taken within the subgame, but each player starts owning only a small subset of them (the same for each player), and each week, you gain access to a random subset of abilities you own (so if you own a lot of abilities, you don't have much advantage over players who have only a few; the trick is to tweak the set of abilities you own in order that the more useful ones come up more often). Each ability has a cost (either negative or positive), and you can use any subset of accessible abilities that have a cost totalling zero (i.e. you use the negative-cost ones to pay for the positive-cost ones), causing them to become inaccessible again. In a typical deckbuilding game, most of these abilities manipulate either which abilities you own, or the other rules of the game (which is why I thought it would be such a good fit for a nomic). For instance, you might have an ability to buy other abilities, with a cost depending on some attribute of the ability you buy; you might have an ability to discard unused (but accessible) abilities so that they are randomly chosen less frequently; you might have an ability to get more random abilities to be selected each week (each turn in a typical deckbuilding game), and so on. Abilities can also mess with the holdings of other players. This seems to fit quite naturally into the things that economies normally want to interact with (extra votes on proposals and the like). Are you interested in working out the details of something like this? -- ais523
Re: DIS: now what
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Kerim Aydin ke...@u.washington.edu wrote: ok now I've done my offical duties and I'm sitting bored in three days of meetings so I want to do something here, but nothing's going on... what next... Not much, given that we just entered Holiday. -scshunt
Re: DIS: now what
On Mon, 30 Jun 2014, Alex Smith wrote: In a typical deckbuilding game, most of these abilities manipulate either which abilities you own, or the other rules of the game (which is why I thought it would be such a good fit for a nomic). For instance, you might have an ability to buy other abilities, with a cost depending on some attribute of the ability you buy; you might have an ability to discard unused (but accessible) abilities so that they are randomly chosen less frequently; you might have an ability to get more random abilities to be selected each week (each turn in a typical deckbuilding game), and so on. Abilities can also mess with the holdings of other players. This seems to fit quite naturally into the things that economies normally want to interact with (extra votes on proposals and the like). Are you interested in working out the details of something like this? Happy to try. But main issue I've had in the past is coming up with specific abilities that people actually want to use. Do you have a quick bullet list of a set of abilities to try this out with?
Re: DIS: now what
On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 13:28 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: On Mon, 30 Jun 2014, Alex Smith wrote: Are you interested in working out the details of something like this? Happy to try. But main issue I've had in the past is coming up with specific abilities that people actually want to use. Do you have a quick bullet list of a set of abilities to try this out with? The basics within the game itself would be: something that lets you buy more abilities (in the starting set), something with a negative cost so that you can play your other abilities (also in the starting set), something that increases the number of abilities you can buy, something that increases the number of abilities that activate, something that discards unwanted abilities. Plus various things for helping/hurting other players. Normally, there would be multiple versions of each, at different sizes; the ones with larger effects are harder to buy and cost more (or have a more negative cost). For interacting with the nomic, something that boosts voting, something that interacts with offices, and a way to win. In general, owning more interacting with the nomic abilities puts you at a disadvantage in the game itself, because your pool of abilities becomes more dilute. Some potentially unwise and crazy ideas I had: a) add an ability to make numerical changes to other abilities (thus adding some nomic-like functionality directly); b) have an ability that (with support from the target) gives the target a starter pack of abilities, in order to let players recover if they reach a state where they can't progress further, and as a method of greeting new players (rather than having the rules create the abilities automatically). -- ais523
