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

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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