The First Dynasty of Habanero
February 8 - March 2, 2023
Contents
Ascension Address
Day 142
It’s starting to seem like the snow is never going to end… the power went out a month ago, and I have a feeling it’s not coming back on again. We should be in the middle of summer right now, and yet here we are slowly freezing to death. My fellow villagers and I have been reduced to spending our days huddling around the fire. We’re down to our last pallet of wood. I can only hope this ends before one of us has to endure this apparently infinite blizzard to go cut some more.
Repeal all dynastic rules.
The theme for the dynasty shall be “Snowed In”.
Change the gamestate tracking page to “Quiet Village”.
Change the synonym for Player to “Villager” and the synonym for Emperor to “Blizzard”.
Players
The following players were active at the beginning of this Dynasty: ayesdeeef, Benbot, Brendan, Chiiika, Darknight, JonathanDark, Josh, Kevan, lendunistus, Misty, pokes, quirck, Raven1207, SingularByte, Trapdoorspyder
The following players were active at the end of this Dynasty: Brendan, Darknight, JonathanDark, Kevan, lendunistus, Trapdoorspyder
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- The Wheel of Time Turns kicked off the dynasty with two primary resources---Time, which increased up to a limit of 60 with every real-time hour that passed and could be updated by any player, and Heat, which started out unconnected from any scale but had a maximum of 100.
- Baby It's Cold Outside established Locations a player could occupy, with the default of Outside being the one that cost players Heat for every unit of Time expended.
- STzgXXU6GpI used the Events special-case rule to allow players to create Searches which anyone could join, and after 24 hours, might yield found Items. More subtly, it established a policy against trading or giving away items to other players. Most subtly of all, it established Brendan's running bit of titling each of his proposals after the YouTube video ID for a David Mitchell/Robert Webb sketch video, which some players liked less than others.
- I May Be Some Time moved Locations into a table and also gave them a limited capacity, though the latter remained unenforced for some time.
- I swear to god I will turn this makeshift tent around created Roughhousing, a pair of Time-costly attack actions, which would spend the dynasty more as a looming threat than a mechanic in proper use; only one Roughhousing attack was actually carried out in the entire dynasty.
- The Last Biscuit gave players privately-tracked variables, using a salt (called a Jotting) to make them provable. This would be incorporated as a way of tracking hidden item inventory in What Has It Got In Its Pocketses?.
- Tapping the Thermometer made Heat explicitly representative of degrees Fahrenheit, which some players liked less than others.
- Raiding Houses established the first actual items that could be searched out and kept in inventory, most of which related to Heat preservation (except the Cudgel, which prevented Roughhousing attacks unless the attacker also had a Cudgel). It also made a player's being Outside a requirement to yield anything for them from a completed search.
- Diffusion created Huddling, later renamed to Respiring, a slow but steady Heat-draining attack that ended up in much more extensive use than Roughhousing. It made the attack powerful by restricting Lifeless and Unconscious players from taking nearly any dynastic actions, leading to the necessity of Respawn (see below).
- Further Afield increased the Outdoors Locations from one to three, and also created the Cellar, the most defensible Location since it was connected only to one other indoor Location; Kevan (and later JonathanDark) would spend most of the rest of the dynasty there.
- Were you raised in a barn? made each Location's Capacity meaningful, long after it was established, by causing overcrowded Locations to be Draughty and thus lose their Heat-loss-prevention property.
- Love of Power added the Battery, Solar Panel and Electric Gloves to the list of items, the latter two of which combined for the scam that would end the dynasty.
- Hard to find solar panels in a forest made Searching into a weighted-random determination based on Location, a mechanic that would shortly be exploited to increase odds of finding more desirable items in the Locations some players already occupied.
- Can’t start a fire with the door open allowed the first indoor Searches, in the Makeshift Tent, which proposer Josh already occupied.
- Pork Barrels All Round retaliated by allowing indoor searches in the other indoor Locations.
- A Few Acres of Snow created an unexploited scam that, unlike some other vague wording, was not caught during debate and voting; the Douse Roughhousing attack was set up specifically to allow a player to teleport into the Cellar (which was the only Location which had no "Routes between" itself and the Outdoors).
- Tragedy of the Commons compounded the Douse scam by allowing a Nailed Bat--which was easiest to find in the Makeshift Tent--to make Dousing attacks an order of magnitude less expensive than any other Roughhousing. It also created another unused mechanic which nonetheless influenced play choices, by establishing that indoor Locations could be destroyed via Pressure Bomb.
- Though several victory-adjacent mechanics were passed by proposal, and several actual-victory conditions were proposed, none of the former were used, and none of the latter were passed.
Core amendments
- Respawn created the Special Case rule Reinitialisation, allowing players to reset to the dynastic-default values once during a given dynasty.
Ascension
When Brendan moved to the Village Square and revealed that they had a Solar Panel and Electric Gloves, Lendunistus remarked on Discord that they'd also noticed that scam ("wanted to abuse it myself but reinitialision kind of ruins it"): the Panel's electricity generation being written as "for every unit of Time spent for any reason" also included other player's actions, arguably even including those in the past.
No victory condition existed in the ruleset, however, so Brendan was unable to show that this would allow them to attain victory directly. Instead they made a CfJ to end the dynasty with a 6/3/1/1 die roll between themselves (for having attained the scam first), Lendunistus (for having seen it in the first place - it was later revealed that Lendunistus spotted the scam, and mentioned it to Josh, who mentioned it to Brendan), with JonathanDark and Kevan getting a 1 chance to get them on board with the CfJ.
It passed 4-1 with Lendunistus, JonathanDark and Darknight's support. JonathanDark was randomly selected as the dynasty's winner.
