Chops Considered Harmful

By Josh, June 2026, in response to The Eleventh Dynasty of ais523

A chop, sometimes called a 'merit random' outcome, is the resolution of a dynasty by assigning each player a slice of probability, laying those slices end to end, and rolling a number to see where the pointer lands. It is sold as a way of ending a game. It is better understood as the admission that the game was never finished.

The first problem is structural. Good game design rests on a simple bargain: decisions accrue consequences, and consequences compound into outcomes. Through that flow, a win is earned: it is the product of the choices that resulted in victory as an output. A chop adds a step of remove between decision and consequence, often in a way that is contrary to the ruleset under which those decisions were made.

To be clear, this essay specifically refers to situations in which a chop is used to resolve a dynasty that promised a clear winner based on a merit outcome, and/or dynasties in which randomness played a minor role, if at all. Randomness is often held up as poor game design, but that's often unfair; randomness is fine, in the context of a ruleset that is designed to accommodate it. There is a useful distinction between input randomness, the kind that hands you a situation to play around — a dealt hand, a shuffled deck — and output randomness, the kind applied to the result after every decision has already been made, but in truth, even then, randomly selecting a winner from a range of outcomes can be a productive game design space, when a game a designed to produce that outcome. The issues arise when neither of those are the case, when a game featured neither input nor output randomness. At that point, the sudden incidence of output randomness to resolve the game is an admission of defeat. It is not just a denigration of the choices that led to the endgame; it is a repudiation of the core game design that brought those decisions into play.

It not only undermines the weight of past choices; it denatures the impact of future choices. It assumes that win equity is static and that future performance can be inferred from current gamestate, rather than being the product of the choices that players make as the game continues. A gamestate may imply that a player has an arbitrary % of win equity, a ruleset may suggest that a big swing is possible, and the chop may therefore reflect that; but each player may privately know that that player has no chance - because they have identified that player's blind spots, because they have a long-term attack that is close to fruition, or because they have formed a pool to disenfranchise them. A chop obliterates all of these factors, flattening them into an unnatural outcome that studiedly disrespects that play.

The second problem is one of legitimacy. A game ought to produce a winner who can be said to have won, someone whose victory is the readable consequence of how they played. A chop vacates that idea for expedience. It does not crown a player; it selects one. The difference is the whole point of playing. Given the choice, a clean merit result, even a blunt "the leader at the end of round three takes it", carries more moral weight (due to having been the direct result of a vote of the cohort) than the most elegantly weighted dice roll, because it is earned rather than drawn.

This is why the chop should be a true last resort, reserved for dynasties that are genuinely irresolvable: a collapsed playerbase, or a gamestate so broken that all prior progress is fool's gold. Those situations cannot be fixed by a rule change. Most chops are not those situations. They are reached because resolving the game properly would have taken effort, the effort of designing a mechanism by which a legitimate winner could be found, and for whatever reason, nobody could be bothered to attempt it. The damning fact is usually not that the merit mechanism failed, but that it was never tried.

And then there is the cultural cost, which outlasts any single dynasty. A culture of chopping produces players who are lazy - who think that they can cling into a game in the hopes of a dice roll that favours them, or who will abandon a functional game rather than concluding it or improving it. Within a game, the threat of a chop changes play. Once a chop is the assumed ending, the endgame curdles into inertia: leaders protect their position, and an ossification settled upon the ruleset in which it is assumed that radically changing the way that merit is earned or evaluated has become a zero-sum choice, with all of those choices being definitionally either ineffective or BAMPAM. A community that treats the chop as a normal, acceptable finish is quietly teaching itself that design and effort are optional, and that the dice will sort it out. The History of victories lists 20 dynasties that have been resolved through a merit random mechanism, shortly to rise to 21; that is just shy of 10% of all dynasties. That is comparable to the number of dynasties that ended with mantle rolls, another trend deemed harmful and eventually legislated into control.

There is a hierarchy of dynastic endings. The superior choice is clear victory - a winner emerges through play and their DoV is enacted without complaint. A contentious victory follows. A throw to metadynasty is considered a poor outcome, both for not producing a winner, and also for not respecting the play that went before it. Selecting a winner by proposal is considered only slightly better. Chops clearly fall within the second grouping; they produce a winner, but poorly, without much legitimacy, and divorced from the play that preceded it. Even the most elegantly designed chop cannot help but contain the possibility of a perverse outcome, and denies a functional game the dignity of a good end.