How and Why to Write Proposals
- By Kevan
This is a short essay giving some reasons to make proposals in a game of Nomic, and ways to to arrive at ideas for them. (Tips on how to write a proposal well are outside of the essay's scope for now, but I might come back to that.) This is written specifically for BlogNomic - a game played over a series of month-long rounds where each round has its own thematic setting - but should also translate to most other games of Nomic.
Why make proposals?
Proposals are moves
In "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" where he first lays out the rules of Nomic, Peter Suber writes that "Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move.", and the original Suber Ruleset starts play with it being compulsory for each player to submit some kind of proposal on their turn.
A Nomic player should think of their proposals as being like any other resource or action in the game. They can be used to advance or strengthen the player's position, or to head off an opponent's strategy. Submitting few or no proposals is like deciding to skip one of the available actions of the game: you will be less likely to win than an opponent who is using them.
Success in a dynasty often correlates to how many successful proposals that player submitted during it. The rules of the game are written by its players, so those who have done the actual writing will tend to have a better understanding of the game - and will generally have written it to their advantage rather than their detriment.
The golden rule of using proposals as effective moves is to make sure that any given proposal you write doesn't actually harm your position. Before submitting a proposal, take a moment to double-check how it might affect your position and your future gameplay, if enacted. If you think it might actually have a negative outcome for you, compared to other players, do not propose it. Either alter it to avoid that problem, or set the idea aside and write something else. Sometimes this will mean a conflict between pragmatism and good mechanics or narrative - where you've had a neat idea about using coal to power vehicles, but realise after writing it up that actually your main rivals will soon have more coal than you, so your enacted proposal would help them more than you. If you want to win the game, you'll sometimes need to kill your darlings.
If you're writing a decent number of proposals and all of them are neutral-to-good for your gameplay position, then by the time you reach endgame, you'll likely be in a stronger position than a player who's written few or none.
Proposals reveal the ruleset
The act of writing a proposal will often give you a deeper understanding of the current rules of the game.
If you're playing the dynastic game by itself, you may only have a superficial understanding of how its rules work. You might, for example, understand the intended function of the monster-hunting rule and be able to use it correctly by copying what other players are doing, without ever having read the ruletext in detail.
If you roll up your sleeves and start writing a proposal that modifies monster-hunting to, say, allow monsters to fight back, you'll need to give the rule a closer reading to work out how to phrase that amendment. Doing so will give you a better understanding of the rule, and may reveal misconceptions you had about it - perhaps you assumed that players could only hunt in open terrain, because that's how everyone else was doing it, but there's actually no such requirement. You may even spot a useful loophole, or realise that some players have been unintentionally breaking the rule in some way.
Proposals create and destroy scams
If you want to win Nomic with a scam, you're almost certainly going to need to make a proposal to get there. Even if your scam uses a loophole that has appeared accidentally in the ruleset, it's unlikely to be perfect - you may need to tweak another rule to connect that loophole to a victory, or to ensure that you're the only player who will actually be able to use it.
Proposals also disrupt scams which you don't intend to use. In the most straightforward case, if you notice a scam that you don't intend to use (perhaps you're not sure whether it would work, perhaps another player has already noticed it and may get to deploy it before you can), you can point the scam out to the group and propose to shut it down.
More generally, any of your proposals which amend the ruleset may - by chance - weaken or even nullify a scam that you weren't aware of, and which could have been used against you later on. This is even more true of proposals which simplify or repeal complex rules, which is often where accidental loopholes and deliberate scams reside. It can often be a good idea to make "sanity check" amendments to head off surprises: if players can theoretically have any amount of Fuel, but you can't see that anyone would realistically be able to get more than about 20 units of it and don't have a scam of your own to say otherwise, you can make your understanding into concrete reality by proposing a rule to explicitly cap Fuel at 20. If somebody had an infinite-Fuel scam that you were oblivious to, you'll have shut it down.
Votes reveal intentions
Proposals can be effective for sounding out the secret plans of rivals, particularly in secret information games, even if the proposals themselves fail.
If you suspect that an opponent might be planning something using a particular part of the game, you can propose to amend its rules in a way that would slow anything down, or (if it's a corner of the game that's otherwise neglected) repeal it outright because nobody is using it. If your opponent votes or argues against it, your suspicion may have been right.
This also feeds into inadvertent scam blocking, above. If you make a benign proposal which attracts unduly strong opposition from one player, you may have stumbled onto a plan or scam of theirs.
Proposals are cover
For all of the tactical uses of proposals above - moves, scams and revealing intentions - if that's all you ever do with your proposals, then regular players will become suspicious of you and will give your proposals greater scrutiny. This is particularly true if you submit few or no proposals all dynasty and then, nearing the end of the game, suddenly suggest a fundamental change to the victory condition.
Making benign proposals throughout the game is a good way to head that off, so that when you need to make a critical tactical or scam proposal, it may pass through on a surface reading.
Proposals make a game that you want to play
If there's something you don't like about the game - if you think there's too much dice rolling, that one of the game elements is too complex, or you dislike an angle of the narrative - you can propose to change that rule, or even remove it. If other players agree, you'll be taking the game towards something that the whole group is more interested in playing. (Even if they disagree, you can probably still find some compromise.)
Conversely, if there's some aspect of gaming that you enjoy but which isn't represented in the current dynasty - whether that's something mechanical like a gambling subgame, or something more flavourful like giving all the board locations descriptive text - you can propose to add that. This can even give you a tactical edge, if it involves a particular skill that you think you may outshine some other players on.
This is all worth bearing in mind if you're ever tempted to stop playing a dynasty. If your reason for leaving is mainly down to some aspect of the game that you aren't enjoying, you can at least try repealing or amending it before you go. It may be the case that the majority of other players actually agree with you, now that somebody has raised the question.
The rules in a game of Nomic are built collaboratively. Players riff off of each other's ideas and suggestions, and if everybody contributes something to the ruleset, then the finished game (and maybe even the final, dramatic moves of it) will reflect elements of different people's work somewhere, and be a work of art that no single player could have come up with by themselves.
If players have different strengths in game design and storytelling, with their own ideas about how to improve on one another's work, the finished game will be greater than the sum of its parts.
Coming up with ideas
Filling out the theme
BlogNomic dynasties always have some kind of thematic setting. Think about whether there's anything obvious or interesting from that setting that isn't yet represented in the game. If you're playing a cowboy-themed dynasty, cast your mind over classic moments or aspects of Western films: the corrupt sheriff, the high noon shootout, the saloon brawl, etc.
When you've got something, think about how that could function as a rule. If you're some way into a dynasty, you should be able to find a way to tie it in to the rules and resources that already exist. If not, you can propose it as a new and standalone rule and leave it to be worked in later.
And you can always propose narrative with no deep mechanic effect, for others to build on. Stub rules like "one player is the sheriff, this is chosen at random" or "a player may call out another for a shootout at any time" can be developed by other players. There's usually a degree of symbiosis in Nomic between players who have a strong narrative imagination but aren't confident about writing functional rules, and those who enjoy writing rules but don't always have narrative ideas to support them.
Filling out the mechanics
The flip-side of a thematic idea is a mechanical idea. Instead of looking for a gap in the narrative, look for a gap in the rules: for new actions or objects or other game elements which could exist, but don't yet.
If you're playing a dynasty about collecting different resources, where the rules define nothing else except collection, think about what could be added to that to make it more of a game, based on the kinds of things you might find in other boardgames or videogames: making some resources harder to collect than others, adding a way to lose or destroy resources, a bonus for a complete set, a way to trade with the "bank", etc.
When you've got that, think about what it would mean in the game world for that thing to happen. If you think the rules need a way to trade resources, you could just write that as a flat "at any time a player may swap 2 of one resource for 1 of another" rule. Or you could look at the setting of the game and add a flourish of theme to it, so that players will have something to talk about and build upon: "at any time a player may visit the travelling merchant to swap..."
Mechanic-led proposals also connect strongly to the idea of proposals as moves. If you're looking at the game board and lamenting the fact that the current rule only generates ore in distant mountain hexes, when you need three more to upgrade your town, one possible route to resolving that is to propose an additional mechanism by which ore can be generated, which you'll be able to use when it enacts.
Filling out the game world
If an existing rule defines a list of something - game locations, items, magic spells - then adding a new one to the list is usually a safe and easy bet.
You can use the existing list elements to get an idea of how to phrase things, and can apply either of the two previous angles to spark an idea - is there some aspect of the game's setting that's otherwise absent, that could be dropped in as an element of this list? Or is there a small, desirable game mechanic which the game is currently lacking, and which could be added here?
Joining the dots
Look for a rule which players aren't really using - perhaps an action or resource which has some defined behaviour but no significant outcome - and consider whether it could be connected to another part of the game which people are using.
Sometimes a direct and simple connection will be obvious. If nobody's catching rats and the game has currency, propose that catching a rat earns a 1 currency bounty.
Sometimes it may need some renaming to get things to line up. If nobody's catching rats and players have espionage ratings, propose renaming the rats to goblin spies and awarding espionage points for tracking them down.
