AOVNomic

Essay by Cuddlebeam.

This is a condensed history of the rounds of live Nomic that are played on AOV (the "Attorney Online Vidya" server of "Attorney Online", which is an animated chatroom program). It can be interesting to see how a live nomic plays out, especially with players who are totally new to the game, and eventually start to learn and improve, which shapes how the game is played in future rounds.

Caution: Colorful language, adult content and horrible humor exists in the Rulesets linked below.

AOVNomic 1

Final Ruleset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HpqE7dqvw949aOGz0zgU5AVlRwZYEFovP44wQpJ-QNE/edit

• We started with 5 players and the "Minimum Nomic" ruleset I found off some essay.

• We started breaking rules very soon, probably because its hard to keep track of everything live and on the go, so a culture of just assuming that the rules are broken much like Library rules (people in the room must have shoes -> if you enter the room without shoes, you're in the room and have broken the rule), instead of having the rules define formal things (people in the room without shoes cannot exist) quickly arose.

• Once we got our fifth rule enacted, one of our players got nearly locked out of the game entirely. He had to start his messages with "God Ahead", but the voting format was a message of "[Vote] [Compliment if YES/Insult if NO]". And if you broke a rule, you were skipped. He gathered skips quicker than he could get rid of them.

• Discussion arose over just leaving him like that for giggles and self-profit, or to save him. Saving him eventually rose victorious via just removing that personal rule he had.

• The first Bampam (Benefit A Majority, Punish A Minority) arose with the 6th rule (although arguably sooner with Blackquill's personal "God Ahead" rule). "All men in the room get an extra vote". There were only two women at the time, so men were majority. It passed, and one of the women got pissed, but then started to realize that she could propose in more lockouts if she was sneaky enough (especially with how sloppy we were), and remove more players anyways.

• The trolling is pretty obvious in the "210: Soap komaeda has to end every sentence with 'fucking dangits' but it doesn't break 201, only for him. " rule and a player insisting in only speaking french, later crystallized into "Règlement 211. Lynne doit traduire pour moi! Vive La France!"

• The game eventually ended after people had to leave (me included), with all remaining players winning via "Règlement 215: Tous les joueurs en jeu gagnent. Cela a dû être le prochain règlement, mais les autres sont partis, alors vous deux gagnez! (Otasumi, Flamyng, Sierra.)"

AOVNomic 2

Final Ruleset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11vsMHNlCGlakUZJDcpWVwYNasq_CYLECzqWyNGycgfw/edit

• This time, Bampam was RAMPANT as fuck because the players have learnt how to win from before, but I kept on declining it to see what else happened (only 4 players, minority player+ me all that was needed to stop it).

• But nothing else happened. We made a "GAME SAVE" rule eventually and stopped playing

AOVNomic 3

Final Ruleset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jf_ekT-4qxSycoVJ2Y9nQWiW9pGRyLV2jGBjmH7sl4o/edit

• We extremely soon ran into the problem of "breaking" rules and what that meant. We quickly adopted a culture of that breaking rule meant nothing (or the rule-breaking action just wasn't actually part of the game) unless there was some penalty.

• The "Skipping" mechanic from previous rounds was added from players from those rounds. Likely to attempt to win with them again. The format of "If you miss a rule, you're skipped" has been very popular for AOV nomic.

• Due to wording, we ended up in a situation where, if you "Blankposted" (posted just spaces, which is popular to just post an emotive sprite of your character, often accompanied by silly sounds you have modded in yourself, just for the sake of being amusing), you skipped THE GAME. Which... a player soon ran into. Given how soon it happened and how we didn't want it to end there, we made that skipping was only for one turn. So, people, if they blankposted, skipped the game for a turn. Whatever that meant lol. We assumed that they were just not part of the game for a turn, and then returned as normal. It was a bit bizarre.

• We were just three players, and one of them (player Sherlock Holmes) eventually got kicked out by rule 217, because he had to leave to go to the little lawyer's room. With only Komaeda and Ibuki (me), we were in a stalemate, as neither could really get much of an advantage via the usual jesting Bampam (which is often a penalty for a single person). So we proposed for us to win and to end the game there. A new round was played soon after, that same day.

AOVNomic 4

Final Ruleset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ryrY5I39aOJZi4jTfXXJHjtVSJVzrBjaJUj_QBDZI4/edit

• This round we got 5 players instead of just 3. One of them was actually familiar with the game outside of our AOV games (Apollo Justice. He asked if it was some kind of reduced nomic and not the "really complicated" normal one).

• The usual skipping rules and rules which singled out individual players with penalties arose.

• One of the players changed their name and sprite, claiming that it was legal for them to. No rule was against it. It was ruled to be valid, as no rule states you can't change the position of your arm either, for example, yet you can change that freely. This verdict will be very important later.

• We got into a stalemate due to rule 207, because you could constantly make everyone else unable to vote, thus, nothing would pass. Luckily, my turn was very soon before we just gave up on the game.

• I had changed my name and sprite ("Cuddlebeam / Ibuki" to "Cuddlebean / Mikan") without notifying it to everyone, so when the usual masse voteskipping was called, they weren't naming me. I proposed rule 2008, voted [yes] to my own thing (everyone else was voteskipped and couldn't vote) and it got enacted, winning me the game.

AOVNomic 5

Final Ruleset: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14ySPIadMXz-r5tzmKSSzeQXaWC35q9Fkw3UQfVgqggM/edit

• More of the usual skip rules.

• Didn't get much momentum, was feeling more of a chore to play than the fun shitpost fiesta that it was yesterday.

• Conflict of interest between those who wanted to just fuck shit up and those who wanted to win the game.

• Proposals were too blatant, and the majority of them failed.

• I pulled something similar to the Nomic World scam, AKA "Dictator Lindrum" to win with Naoto and end the game via Judge bullshit.