Daniel Lepage on Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:55:28 -0600 (CST)


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Re: [s-d] Re: Card and Arena Play



On Mar 10, 2005, at 7.58 PM, Peter Cooper Jr. wrote:

Iain Scott <iopgod@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I play Petty Theft. I choose Peter to lose the points (far too many!)

Well, I'm rather surprised that nobody's proposed a pay cut for
ministers yet. Some of the ministries are quite easy for the amount of
points they pay out.

The Meta-ministry nominally only does something every 4 nweeks. The
Chairman just needs to click a button on the Wiki and cut-and-paste
the output into the email (And I'm betting it wouldn't be too hard to
automate that part of it, too). Some of the ministries are more work
than those, but still, but for what I do, there's no way I should be
being paid the same each nweek as if I'd gotten a dozen proposals
passed.

I'd propose one myself, but I figured that all of the other players
would have been up in arms about it and must be about to do something
about it anytime now.

I'd prop one too, but I can't come up with any way of reducing what you get without also docking my pay, too :P

We should really do something with the arena which involves more than
just incarnateing and shooting at people who shot at you...

Well, I believe there are a couple proposals on the table this nweek
regarding the Arena, although I have to say that they're so long that
I haven't given them a thorough looking-through yet.

But in general the subgames are kinda lacking... PGo isn't interesting
with only 2 people playing, the Board Game doesn't have any kind of
objective so it's just kind of sitting there, the Gardens are starting
to have a goal but they seem like so much work to maintain, the Arena,
as you say, is merely spawning and shooting for now. The Card game is
starting to pick up some, although it could probably use a few more
participants too. I'd prop some changes to make them better, but I
have no idea what I might want out of the subgames of this Nomic,
either. Maybe removing some of the subgames and removing a good chunk
of rules to kinda reset things would make things more interesting, or
maybe it'd just be a part of the slow decline of anybody's interest in
B Nomic.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, as I'm certainly having
fun so far trying to figure out the game and maybe how to make the
game better. I'm just not sure what direction the game is moving in,
or what direction it ought to be moving in, or something or
something.

I wouldn't miss the BoardGame or PGo - I basically stopped playing them when the Arena came out. Then again, I basically stopped playing the Arena too, though there it's primarily because I hate rolling all these dice. But I think it could be worthwhile, if there were more to it than incarnate-shoot-repeat. I think focusing primarily on cards and the Gardens would be a good way to start, since they seem to be the best suited to random acts of craziness - the other three are all limited by the need for easy representation. The Arena is pretty good, but I can't help missing the Grid, if only because the Grid was easier to think about (and required fewer dice). I didn't realize the Gardens were so much work to deal with, but if you tell me what takes the most work, I could probably rig some simple scripts to help out. Also, we might triple the Watering costs but make them nweekly instead of Checkpointly; I know I spoke out against doing that earlier, but that was back when "remember to water the plants" was basically the entirety of the gardening subgame.

I'm also working on a prop to remove a lot of small useless clutter from the ruleset; a short ruleset would make things much easier, IMHO.

--
Wonko

Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250
     -Harper's Index, October 1989

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