The Third Dynasty of pokes
23 November 2018 -
Contents
Ascension Address
- Some relevant selections from the obituary:
- Morgan Chamberlain IV, Connecticut financier, passed away on the 22nd of November, after a brief illness. They were 83.
- Shortly after a string of high-profile business successes in the late 1980s, Morgan retired from public view and began a reclusive life. Public records show that Morgan remained in Connecticut for the rest of their life, but specifics of their whereabouts remained unknown outside of the Chamberlain family.
- Dr. Chamberlain is survived by a spouse, Casey, of four years; eight children: Morgan, Benjamin, Elizabeth, Isabel, James, Joshua, Anne, and Robert, all from previous marriages, and twelve grandchildren.
- Meanwhile, within the newly-reconstructed City Hall: Case number 2018-1022, regarding the estate of Morgan Chamberlain IV, begins to be heard. The courtroom is already at capacity with lawyers representing parties who would love to materialize any claim they have on the sizeable fortune of the deceased.
- Replace “Activist” with “Attorney” and “Veteran” with “Judge”.
Players
The following players were active at the start of the Dynasty:
Brendan*, derrick*, Kevan*, pokes*, Trigon
Final Ruleset
Posts of Interest
Proposals and CFJs
- The Clientele started the dynasty off with Clients, which would grow into the main draw of the dynasty. Each Client had a Worth (a dollar value) and a Reputation. Clients could be represented by Attorneys. This would be done by making requests to the judge.
- Habeas Corpus reworded the clients rule completely and fleshed out the requests mechanic, allowing Attorneys to choose a set of clients they would like to represent and having the Judge choose secretly from that set.
- Court Is In Session allowed the Judge to create, but not yet resolve Cases, the main mechanic by which money would shift between Clients and Attorneys.
- Business as Usual added four businesses to the pool of clients.
- The Guilty Party put more detail into the Cases mechanic. It gave Clients villainy scores related to their reputations. For each case, it gave Clients guilt, a variable between 0 and their villainy.
- Lawyer Up gave Attorneys two stats: money and integrity. Attorneys could Set up Shop by setting their money and integrity such that the sum of their integrity and their money divided by 1,000 did not exceed 10.
- Slush Puppy gave Attorneys the last of their stats: their Slush Funds, tracked privately by the judge.
- Gavelogue finally completed how Cases would work. Each Attorney could vote on cases. FOR icons decreased their client's guilt by two. The winning party would take a sum of money from the loser and give a portion to the attorney.
- I'll Allow It added underhanded tactics. Players voting with AGAINST icons on a case would now decrease their client's guilt by one and increased their opponent's by one at the cost of one integrity.
- Better Call Saul added consequences for having low integrity. Now, Clients could mistrust their Attorneys.
From this point on, most proposals are just quick afterthoughts, as gameplay shifted to the cases.
- Case Adjourned raised the stakes by making each case only able to have Clients represented by Attorneys in them. The first case to adhere to this rule was Case 9.
- Laundry Day allowed players to launder money in their Slush Fund, giving 90% of it back to them.
- Who Was That Masked Barrister? did away with some of the secrecy and inserted a list of representations into the ruleset.
- Noisy Withdrawal allowed dropping of Clients to be done by the Attorneys themselves.
- Open Registration finished the work of the previous two and allowed the acquisition of clients to be done by the Attorneys as well.
- The Winner Takes It All instituted a win condition -- earning $100,000.
Cases
- Isabel Chamberlain v. James Chamberlain
- Winner: Isabel
- Fine: $50,000
- Goldberg Technology v. Benjamin Chamberlain
- Winner: Benjamin
- Fine: $100,000
- Anne Chamberlain v. Bananasoft
- Winner: Anne
- Fine: $100,000
- X Express v. Anne Chamberlain
- Winner: X Express
- Fine: $89,000
- Robert Chamberlain v. Bananasoft
- Winner: Bananasoft
- Fine: $90,000
- Isabel Chamberlain v. James Chamberlain
- Winner: Isabel
- Fine: $54,000
- Bananasoft v. Joshua Chamberlain
- Winner: Bananasoft
- Fine: $70,000
- Connecticut v. Morgan Chamberlain V
- Winner: Connecticut
- Fine: $90,000
- X Express v. Benjamin Chamberlain
- Winner: Benjamin
- Fine: $108,010
- Anne Chamberlain v. Goldberg Technology
- Winner: Goldberg Tech
- Fine: $80,100
- X Express v. Casey Chamberlain
- Winner: X Express
- Fine: $100,000
- Goldberg Technology v. Joshua Chamberlain
- Winner: Goldberg Tech
- Fine: $63,000
- Casey Chamberlain v. Morgan Chamberlain V
- Winner: Morgan
- Fine: $90,000
- Isabel Chamberlain v. Goldberg Technology
- Winner: Goldberg Tech
- Fine: $70,260
- Robert Chamberlain v. Goldberg Technology
- Winner: Robert
- Fine: $81,000
- X Express v. Elizabeth Chamberlain
- Winner: Elizabeth
- Fine: $106,209
- Robert Chamberlain v. Casey Chamberlain
- Winner: Casey
- Fine: $72,900
- Elizabeth Chamberlain v. Anne Chamberlain
- Winner: Elizabeth
- Fine: $72,090
- Bananasoft v. Elizabeth Chamberlain
- Winner: Elizabeth
- Fine: $104,400
- Elizabeth Chamberlain v. Bananasoft
- Winner: Elizabeth
- Fine: $93,960
- Bananasoft v. Elizabeth Chamberlain
- Winner: Bananasoft
- Fine: $129,874
- Connecticut v. Elizabeth Chamberlain
- Winner: Connecticut
- Fine: $116,886
Ascension
Commentary
pokes
Similar to the missile crisis dynasty, this dynasty had a sizable component of me doing relatively complicated things on secret information. This made me nervous then and now about accidentally throwing the game by handling these steps incorrectly. Near the beginning of the dynasty I began implementing the opening and closing of cases as a computer program, to find out if this would be a net positive or negative for my stress of handling these steps. Hopefully, less stress. (At least compared to the missile crisis dynasty, this had almost no opportunities for wording-based scams that would then require a decision about whether to CfJ the scam, unfairly blowing it up if it would be considered legitimate but CfJed, and unfairly allowing it to go on if it's not legitimate and not CfJed.)
I think that, overall, it was a good thing to have the programmatic implementation. There were some pros:
- The main pro is that it made opening/closing cases much faster, and made it so that I didn't have to re-understand the list of steps 38 times, and could avoid a significant amount of double- or triple-checking myself.
- If the steps the code took passed a human double-check, I had much more confidence that they were done correctly than if I had done two human checks.
- It was fun.
and some cons:
- Manual interfacing of numbers with the GNDT and ruleset: I had a local database of gamestate that needed synchronization with the gamestate here. I think there were only a few mismatches, none significant, but that there might have been was an ongoing concern. In some cases, it helped: most recently, I had entered Kevan's money incorrectly, but the local database was still correct. So, on the next update, when I went to type it in, my old typo got fixed without me even being aware of it - Kevan was the first human to figure out what happened.
- Manual translation of rules into code: each new enacted proposal also required me to update the code accordingly. Thankfully nothing was that hard, but if something that would have been hard to code did come through the proposal pipeline, I'd be on the hook for implementing it.
- Double-checking was required anyway. I never really fully trusted the code, but it gave me enough output to check that the steps were being done correctly.
If I were to do it again: I would use some construct that can log each individual change to the database, like the GNDT does, so I can review it in more detail. I made use of version control to keep some snapshots of my local gamestate. But VC still needs me to choose when to snapshot, which is less granular. Thankfully I think I was still able to catch all the errors, but it would have been easier to do the forensics if I had a GNDT-like view of the changes.
Overall, even with the support, I was often too burnt out or low on free time after closing and generating cases to author many significant proposals. I had a weak excuse in that proposals coming from me while having secret information could be biased, or seen as being biased, consciously or unconsciously. --Pokes (talk) 14:46, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
For the curious, I'll document the code here: The Third Dynasty of pokes: helper code
