Discussion: Dynasty Ideas

This page is for people who would like to practice giving an Ascension Address, and to discuss ideas for future dynasties. Add new ideas to the end.

Suggested Ideas

The Poetic Dynasty

Replace all instances of Scribe with Poet, replace all instances of Editor with Director, replace all instances of Rule with Sonnet. Repeal all dynastic rules, and add the following: A poet, like my father: All rules, with the exception of this one, must have an acceptable rhyme scheme that that rule follows and is written withen the rule. It must not simply be an alphabetical string of letters. ExampleYes:ABAB ExampleNo:ABCD

The Nomic Time Travel Dynasty

A Dynasty based on the mechanic of taking "snapshots" of the Ruleset every week (each Sunday?), and granting players the ability to remove themselves from the current Ruleset, and play according to a snapshotted Ruleset.

BlogNomic Dynasty

A Dynasty where a sub-game of nomic is being played that initially has no effect on the outer Dynasty. It might be interesting to have the initial rules of the sub-game be slightly edited Core rules of BlogNomic, but it may be weird if a sub-Dynasty starts up.

Real life travel Dynasty

A Dynasty where, to go around the game map (our Earth!), you have to find real-world bus/airplane tickets and pay their real price in game money to travel around. (A different take on "real life" was tried in The Eighteenth Dynasty of Kevan. The First Dynasty of Wakukee involved some not-too-realistic travel between any real-world locations.)

A picture speaks more than a thousand words

All Dynastic Rules are pictures. Pictionary, nomic-style.

Reverse Nomic

You start with a ruleset and can only remove from it (or adding is significantly taxed). Repeal to your advantage and strategically remove words to change the meaning of rules!

Lawyer Nomic

Players are encouraged to challenge rules, change them, remove them, find loopholes. Maybe the goal is to change the core ruleset itself (if only temporarily for one dynasty).

Elector's Dynasty

The players are electors picking the next emperor. The emperor will make a number of promises before he is elevated, on issues ranging from land disputes to religious policy to high offices. Each elector secretly picks some issues to support. When the emperor is finally elevated, along with his platform, the game will be scored. Offices, including the emperor, will score points, which everyone can predict. But the issues will also be worth points, and those are a secret. Who will get the best deal out of this election of the emperor? This dynasty can also be done with a more modern theme: members of a parliament are forming a government.

Bidding Nomic

A fixed number of opportunities to gain points will be presented. Players will make blind bids for them. How much is too much? Do you prepare to win big or do you play it safe?

The First Dynasty of southpointingchariot was based around a bidding system. --Kevan (talk) 18:48, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Robotic Duels

Players begin with a certain amount of cash and may design a robot in a ? x ? grid. They may buy parts to be filled in the grid and battle other robots. The trick is that they cannot see what the others' robots look like so must deduce by money spent, who won, etc. ([Example robot design])

Pass The Rule

Like the drawing game where people fold paper before passing it to another person, players write sections of rules which would be revealed later after stitching them together. Some maybe limited the submitted rule to a certain number of characters would make it more interesting.

The Round One Dynasty

Mentioned on Slack by Trigon:

The initial proposals include multiple concepts from Round One like Karma and maybe the Gameboard. Players are encouraged to propose in the style of Round One. Players go inactive if they do not keep an active "blog" which just means wiki edits.

This idea could be extended to any number of throwback dynasties, but for some reason, Round One just seemed especially cool.

If someone does this it needs to be called the Round Two Dynasty. It just has to happen. Jumble! (talk) 20:52, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Diplomacy

Can't remember who suggested it during the current dynasty, but we should try a full-blown Diplomacy-style game some time: secret high-stakes actions submitted to the Emperor, which are resolved simultaneously (and may turn out not be what you promised your allies). The Fifteenth Dynasty of Kevan touched on it with its terrain and free movement treaties, but didn't really get there. --Kevan (talk) 15:01, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Straight Victory

Someone said this during a spate of "pick me, no, pick a random player, no pick a random player from this subset" victory proposals at the end of a dynasty: a dynasty where persuading a quorum to vote for a victory assignation mechanic is pretty much the whole game. Just needs a very light theme on top. --Kevan (talk) 10:31, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Unidentified Items

More a mechanic than a theme, but it's one I enjoy a lot: a pile of items and a list of defined item effects, but you don't find out which corresponds to which until you risk trying them out. (See the potions and scrolls in NetHack or the weapons in Awful Green Things.) --Kevan (talk) 10:12, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Car Maintenance

All I have right now is the word "differential". That's it. That's the idea. Tantusar (talk) 13:34, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

The Emperor is a busted car, the players are mechanics performing actions to try to get the car to work and complete a full circuit of the Nürburgring? Josh

And one of them is a traitor. --Kevan (talk) 18:46, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Actually, The Seventh Dynasty of Josh ended up being mostly about fixing cars up. --Kevan (talk) 18:50, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Cosmic Encounter

I only played the board game once and was entirely nonplussed by it: as I remember it's a basic but negotiation-heavy take-that attack game (you declare an attack and other players can either join in, help defend the victim or ignore you), with bizarre alien race abilities to shake things up. A simple game with combat voting plus weird effects sounds like a good fit for Nomic. --Kevan (talk) 16:59, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

The Nothing Dynasty

Players are trapped in a featureless void without dice or counters or anything. No gamestate beyond proposals. Maybe pointing at people and counting on fingers, at a push. --Kevan (talk) 09:20, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I think this would be super interesting. Probably an exercise in trying to create gamestate via Proposals? A Proposal that creates a copy of itself with infinite FORs and "updates" its own contents routinely via cycles of enactment (and the content of such an phoenix Proposal could be amended by other Proposals to break the loop or add more variables) could be used as a bootleg tracker wikipage. --Cuddlebeam (talk) 10:21, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

"Straight Victory" (above) would pair well with this. Josh (talk) 06:35, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Sevens

The ruleset may only and must always contain exactly 7 dynastic rules. Each rule may have an "alternate" text to which it may switch under circumstances. The rules could be structured by function (actions, scoring, victory etc) and the dynasty could be themed around the recurrence of the number 7 in human culture (sins, liberal arts, wonders of the world etc). Josh (talk) 12:15, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Foosnomic

This was tried a bit in Blegnemic in Tyguy II, but I believe the idea could work as a full dynasty theme. Basically, similar to how Foosball is a simplified, "toyified" version of football, there could be a parallel version for nomic play (Blognomic in particular) itself. Maybe "toy" players can be recruited and used with different stats and they play various "dynasties" within this Foosnomic world. --Cuddlebeam (talk) 09:58, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

The Dynasty of a Hundred Emperors

After noticing that the SCP Dynasty's "Attendant" NPC was an accidental reprise of the Emperor of The Third Dynasty of Brendan, it might be entertaining to dredge out the titles of all past Emperors, discard the duplicates, and see what we can do with that. --Kevan (talk) 19:03, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

The Festival of the Core Documents

Something using all of the discarded core documents from previous dynasties Josh (talk) 18:17, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Players vs Emperor

The Eighth Dynasty of Josh explored a somewhat similar theme, but one of the things underpinning the comments on this post is that there is a tension between the objectives of the Emperor role and the Player role, in some of the ways in which those roles manifest. Specifically - for some Emperors, the objective is to construct a good game with a robust ruleset, and for some players the objective is to break that game creatively and for personal gain. Why not make that the dynasty? One that draws out the tension between the GM-aspect of the Emperor and the anti-game chaos-monkey instinct of the Player? Josh (talk) 12:53, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Parallel BlogNomic

Perhaps a bit like The Sixth Dynasty of Josh except fictional - basically, exploring the BlogNomic of a parallel universe, 200 dynasties of unfamiliar players and game concepts that never were. What clever scam did Raxemblau pull off to win the Fourth Dynasty of RickyMorton? Isn't it weird how players were required to keep an active blog all the way into early 2018? What was the Dinosaur Dynasty actually like? Josh (talk) 21:41, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Parasitic Dynasty

A dynasty where the gameplay takes place offsite in some existing game system, with BlogNomic's rules merely being a system that recognises its players and turns game outputs into Nomic inputs (and, if treated carefully, disallows certain actions in the external games). This could either be lots of small games (like those at https://boardgamearena.com) feeding into some kind of challenge or tournament system, or one massive game like Diplomacy where we're basically just outsourcing all the subgame mechanics of a dynasty. Would be useful for allowing us to play a complex game without spending a week getting its bread-and-butter rules right, but it does limit how much we can alter that game. --Kevan (talk) 16:14, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Monster Trainer Dynasty

A Dynasty where you are Partnered with your own Monster. As you Explore the world, Train your Monster, Battle other Monster Trainers and other (possibly wild, possibly evil) Monsters, and eventually Evolve your Monster, you form a strong Bond that allows you to bring out the Potential of your Monster! May involve elements of media where Monsters are "digital", can go into "pocket"-sized spheres, or are "ranched".

Welcome to the Enigmon Institute! I am the Head Professor of Enigmon Studies, or the Professor for short! There are mysterious creatures in this world we have dubbed Enigmon - as in Enigmatic Monsters. They can form powerful Bonds with the right human, and have the capacity for great growth and even Evolution, but nobody knows where they came from. Some think they are extraterrestrials. Others believe they have come from the future. Some even think they spawned out of cyberspace, escaping the internet into the real world somehow. All crazy theories, but each one has some solid proof. I, along with my collegues here, research these creatures, but people have found other uses for them. Some have their Enigmon Battle against each other as "Tamers" to help them grow and Evolve. Others use them for jobs. Still, some use them to commit crimes! I'm hoping you are not those kinds, as I am entrusting you with something important.I sense great potential in every one of you. While we have done much research, one thing eludes us besides the Enigmons' origins - what causes the Bond between them and Tamers. Bonds have a mysterious power that I would like you to research. Please, become a Tamer and Bond with an Enigmon! --Zyborg (talk) 19:42, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Caper Dynasty

A Dynasty based on running a heist/caper like in Mission Impossible, Ocean's Eleven, Now You See Me, etc. A lot of the theme would be actions relating to planning, casing, etc. for the Big Heist most likely, although much of the action could actually BE the Big Heist. Maybe smaller Heists, Capers, Cons could be a thing.

Good evening, friends. You may call me the Mastermind. I have gathered you all here today for your unique skills and certain perspectives on how things work in the world. If you choose not to undertake this... operation... you can walk away now, nothing gained, nothing lost. But if you choose to pull this off, you will end up walking away richer than kings, and feel good knowing the target we will have... borrowed from got what was deserved. --Zyborg (talk) 19:42, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

The Seventh Dynasty of Josh was ostensibly a heist dynasty but ended up being more about the getaway cars. The later Activist Dynasty was actually more of a heist one. --Kevan (talk) 10:49, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Fool's Gold Dynasty

Leaning in to Fool's Gold, a dynasty (maybe mining themed?) that's explicitly about stockpiling different resources and only giving them a worth when a quorum agree to do so. --Kevan (talk) 10:49, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Poker Dynasty

Poker has quite a lot to like as a basis for a BlogNomic dynasty. We could mess with betting / bidding mechanics, the nature and properties of the cards, what hands win and how - and if all else fails, it's full of extremely silly terminology that will be fun to throw around. Josh (talk) 06:32, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Already done, to some extent: The First Dynasty of spikebrennan had a "wild west poker" theme. There is other, equally silly card game terminology out there, mind. Maybe we could invent a new playing-card game from scratch. --Kevan (talk) 11:49, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Mafia Nomic Dynasty

Basically like Nomic but as a Werewolf/Mafia style kind of game. Players get to make proposals that can be anything Werewolf Mafia. You can make rules that convert players to other roles, you can make items possible to use in the game, or even change the Wincons in general. More can be said here. http://ludocity.org/wiki/Mafia_Nomic --Raven1207 (talk) 22:24, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

We've done the mechanic before fairly directly in The Werewolf Dynasty and The Android Dynasty, and more obliquely in a lot of others, but it'd be good to see it again if someone wanted to run it - it can mean a lot of precision work for the Emperor. (We're also playtesting a direct iteration of that Ludocity game on the BlogNomic Slack right now.) --Kevan (talk) 17:55, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

BlogNomic Legacy

An agreement that we'll play three dynasties (not necessarily consecutively) that are set in the same universe and have some gamestate transferring from each one to the next. The first one has its persistent gamestate plainly flagged up; when we start the second one we either bring that gamestate back unchanged, or take some spin on it ("as we arrive at our destination planet, the player who had the fastest colony ship in Age 1 gets first pick of territory"). Each dynasty still has its own winner.

This may be flawed for naturally punishing outliers - if I build an incredibly fast ship in Age 1, the players in Age 2 might just write a rule where a fast ship was at the most risk - but maybe there could be some agreement that all persistent stats always had to be beneficial. Or we could even write stub rules for Age 2 ("fastest ship will get first pick of territory") while still in Age 1, and agree to bring them back in Age 2 and generally honour them. --Kevan (talk) 11:39, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Finite Resource Dynasty

There is a set amount of some item at the beginning of the game that can be destroyed, but not created. When there is only one item left, the person holding the item wins. Jumble! (talk) 13:11, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Faction Contest

A dynasty made up of a large number of very quick mini-dynasties (mynasties?), each of which has a victor. The overall winner of the dynasty is the first player to achieve at least one mynasty victory (mynctory?) of each type - conventional, scam and pooling. Josh (talk) 12:57, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Jenga

The venerable game of tower integrity, online. Pokes (talk) 02:33, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Real-Time Dynasty

A round where we initially agree on a several-hour window when we will all be online, and then play the dynasty out in real time, aiming to declare a winner by the end of that period. --Kevan (talk) 16:44, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Annotated Dynasty

Inspired by Trigon's recent diaries and the spectacle of some boardgamearena tournament being seriously live-commentated right now: a dynasty where either the players keep secret diaries (possibly publishing them secretly on pastebin or somewhere so that we can look back and score them later according to what people planned and predicted correctly), or a designated commentator (perhaps the Emperor) gives a running sports-style commentary of the game. --Kevan (talk) 17:32, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Rule 1: Any human being who maintains an active weblog may apply to join BlogNomic... Josh (talk) 14:15, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Historical Game Dynasty

Suggested by Cuddlebeam talking about the Royal Game of Ur; a dynasty where we recover an old (fictional) boardgame whose rules are lost, and attempt to recover those rules and play the game out, perhaps as a real-time tournament. --Kevan (talk) 11:25, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Visual Language dynasty

All proposals, rules and EVCs must be expressed purely as images and may not include any written language markers, such as letters of any alphabet, commonly rendered codes, emoji etc. Josh (talk) 18:01, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Dictator Game dynasty

Each turn, every player gets a secret random amount of currency. They can choose a percentage of it to keep with the rest being donated to another player at secret random. At the end of the turn, each player is told how much currency they have received and from whom. They can then anonymously grant an unstructured amount of gratitude to any or all of their benefactors. The player with the most gratitude wins. Josh (talk) 08:28, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Secret Rules dynasty

I know we've done an Emperor-secret ruleset before, but we could try something more Mao-like where every player writes their own secret rule about gamestate manipulation, from a rigidly-defined grammar of possible rules, and can choose to revert anyone who breaks it. --Kevan (talk) 09:05, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Roguelike dynasty

Each player is running through a dungeon; each chamber has a number. The first to spawn each chamber populates it with some persistent, some randomly generating features. Upon death the player goes back to the start with some persistent progress being tracked. Josh (talk) 21:13, 12 November 2020 (UTC) There was the Nethack dynasty, which was a roguelike, so this might already have been done. Jumble! (talk) 19:11, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Conlang Dynasty

A ruleset where the rules are written in a complex constructed language, with a dictionary rule allowing translation. The game becomes about expressing rules within a limited language, and interpreting or exploiting ambiguities in it. (We apparently had a "Gostak Metadynasty", but it didn't do anything with language.) --Kevan (talk) 19:40, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Corrupt Budget Dynasty

Based on Tiefe Taschen and the budget phase of Junta (which The Eighth Dynasty of Josh approached but didn't cover, I think): one player is the Treasurer and offers a split of that year's budget between players, if it's voted down then they are fired and someone else becomes Treasurer. Repeat. --Kevan (talk) 16:56, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Railroad Dynasty

Drawing from Northern Pacific which has a strong core mechanic of being able to choose which towns to invest in, and whether the railroad actually heads that way, feeling very reminiscent of the fool's gold in BlogNomic. --Kevan (talk) 16:58, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Exquisite Corpse Dynasty

That's pretty much the whole 1% inspiration right there, the 99% perspiration is making it not a total mess. Maybe there could be multiple rounds of people writing proposals that can only see the last proposal, and then when it goes they're all revealed and then voted on. Pokes (talk) 13:40, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Card Game Tournament Dynasty

Dynastic rules define a playable card game with a regular poker deck: periodically during the dynasty, pairs or groups of players pause the proposal queue and play out a real-time game of the current ruleset at https://playingcards.io. --Kevan (talk) 18:10, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Robot Wars Dynasty

Rumble: Battle Bot Duel makes me realise that we've never done this as a theme. Might be good as a programming-style game: players design robots as a bunch of simple and secret instructions from a master list ("if distance is greater than 2, move forward; if distance is less than 2, swing axe"), and the Emperor processes fights between them somehow. --Kevan (talk) 12:02, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Crossover Dynasty

We have a collaborative/competitive dynasty with one of the two other big Nomics (Infinite Nomic / Agora.) We might have to sync on Ascensions if we want to cross with Infinite, though. Jumble! (talk) 02:58, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

Used Ideas

Seeing the future Dynasty

A Dynasty where you state your actions X days in advance, and by consuming a resource, you can check on someone else's stated action planning and then change your own, as if seeing the future allows you to change your timeline because you have new information. (In true future-seeing, wouldn't the act of seeing the future also be predicted by that same future seeing? Anywhoo, like this its more cool and mechanics-worthy lol)

Used in The First Dynasty of Axemabaro

Card nomic

Inspired by a thousand blank cards, this is a dynasty where actions can depend on draw of a card and playing the card. There may also be rules concerning what you can write on a card.

Used in The First Dynasty of Derrick

Programming

Suggested by card as a syntax in the Ape dynasty, but I think worth a full dynasty. Maybe a single rule written in Javascript which is periodically copypasted and executed offsite - opening with an array of player stats, and the script outputting new code for that array, to paste back over the top.

It's worth noting that my proposal there expands to English and really was meant to shorten long sentences I couldn't get around while drafting the Steal action and allow others to use that notation later. It wasn't based on any programming language or intended to turn the dynasty into a programming dynasty. Take a look at http://nomyx.net/ and slashdot's old perl nomic site/google group for this Dynasty idea. Card (talk) 06:40, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Used in The Second Dynasty of card

Detectives

Mentioned here: a dynasty where players are rival detectives trying to solve a crime. --Kevan (talk) 11:04, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Used in The Twenty-Fourth Dynasty of Kevan

Boss Battle

Players take turns being a big "Boss" entity, with the rest of players fighting against it. --Cuddlebeam (talk) 18:03, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Used in The Fourth Dynasty of Cuddlebeam

SCP

Something in the vein of SCP or The Lost Room: a catalogue of objects and/or lifeforms with powerful abilities, locked securely away until the players or the objects themselves break containment. --Kevan (talk) 10:12, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Used in The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty of Kevan

Unbounded Auction

An auction dynasty where players can bid whatever they like on items - any number, completelt made up - but at the end of the game the player who has spent the most is disqualified and the player who has spent the least gets a big advantage. Josh (talk) 18:17, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Is this inspired by Q.E.? I've still not played that one. --Kevan (talk) 20:51, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It is inspired by QE, yes, which is the dumbest smart game I've played in ages. Josh (talk) 20:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Used in The Eleventh Dynasty of Josh

Dinosaurs

No mechanic in mind, but I'm amazed that in sixteen years we've never had a dinosaur themed dynasty - historical, theme park or otherwise. --Kevan (talk) 10:16, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Another year has passed. Still no dinosaurs. Josh (talk) 06:36, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Dinosaurs finally arrived on an alien planet in The Twenty-Seventh Dynasty of Kevan, I think sufficiently to cross this one off

Bluffed Actions

Something like Coup, where players are assigned some secret identity information (possibly just announcing new MD5 hashes at any time) but are free to take actions claiming any identity they like, only having those actions blocked if they are challenged and unable to prove themselves. --Kevan (talk) 17:56, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

The First Dynasty of naught gestured towards this, but didn't quite convert. Josh (talk) 19:47, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Parallel Universe Nomic

Two universes with two slightly different (or maybe even significantly different) rule sets. You can step into portals to change your universe and gain advantages.

The First Dynasty of The Duke of Waltham did this exactly, and The First Dynasty of Joranj was working in a similar milleu

Don't pull the lever Dynasty

The first proposal allows any player to unilaterally declare victory. How long or how many added mechanisms will it take before doing it is considered socially acceptable?

Do you want to pull the lever together? Dynasty

Or maybe: Any group of two or three players together can declare victory, which is awarded to one particular player among them, with the expectation that there will be a roll for the mantle. But something akin to the Traitor rule applies to everyone. Who builds trust with their team the fastest? This could play well with a heist theme, but it's been done. Pokes (talk) 18:50, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Pokes, this idea is a monster. Please win so you can implement it Josh (talk) 12:37, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

The Fourteenth Dynasty of Josh took this idea on. Josh (talk) 09:58, 25 March 2021 (UTC)