Reasonable Bounds of Cooperative Play

By Vovix, on Discord; adapted with permission by Josh

Not claiming to speak for the group or that this is the one true way, but here's what I personally do and don't want to see:

Things I'm okay with:

Traditional pooling. A has 60 apples, B has 40 apples, they agree to roll proportionally to see who wins and hand all the apples to that player. IMO "roll first and then trade to winner" and "trade to one player, they roll for mantle pass" are not meaningfully distinct and are essentially the same play with slightly altered steps.

Social/diplomatic gameplay as a whole. Trades, deals, alliances, betrayals, etc. If A needs apples for a turn and B agrees to lend them to A at 10% interest, or asks A to vote for their proposal, or whatever else, I think these are all a valid aspect of a multiplayer interactive game, so long as trades are strictly in-game.

Social bias and non-explicit favors. You can't stop people from having a bias with a "don't be biased" rule, no matter what HR tells you. Players are humans, humans are social, irrational creatures who behave altruistically towards people they like and antagonistically towards people who previously wronged them. While I think people should avoid "metagaming" too much and focus on the current dynasty, reputations and past experiences are going to unavoidably affect how people act.

Things I personally don't like, but don't think should be regulated:

Idle pooling. Idle players swooping in to change the outcome of a dynasty on behalf of someone who offered them winshare to get in on a dynasty they otherwise weren't participating in. It doesn't feel great, but I think it's a part of Nomic, a clever play when pulled off, and banning idle players from joining a dynasty "too late" is unnecessarily restrictive.

Long-term cliques. The "dark side" of social reputation, once a group of players have established a trust relationship with each other, cooperation becomes easy and the same group can end up constantly winning, leaving players who aren't in it feeling like they can't effectively participate in the social aspect of the game.

Kingmaking. A player who has no chance at their own victory jumping in to hand the game to one player over another for little to no benefit except getting to influence the outcome. I think it should be frowned upon, but mostly I think it's a matter of designing mechanics in such a way that players who are losing either have a viable path to victory, some other reason to keep playing, or lose quickly so they don't get bored and feel the need to disrupt the endgame just to make it go faster or out of frustration. And in the case of kingmaking for winshare, you can't really draw a line between what is "kingmaking" vs "pooling" and there's no good answer to what makes a win "justified" versus "undeserved".

Things I would like to be regulated away if possible:

Micro-pooling. Things like "I'll vote for your proposal for a 5% winshare." and other forms of direct trading of mantle scraps. Or "I can't win, but I'll just do whatever you need for a 10% winshare." In my opinion, winshare is such a liquid and powerful currency, that it pushes out all other potential deals. Why pay in apples of unknown value when you can instead specify exactly how much of your win potential you want to dish out?

Lazymode in general. Players who aren't really playing their own game and just acting as a second pair of hands to someone else in exchange for some winshare. Valid play, but IMO just not a fun dynamic to deal with, and accusations of being a puppet for another player, whether true or not, have caused animosity in the past.

Explicit agreements crossing dynastic lines. I like the boardgame model. Within a single dynasty, it's a diplomatic free-for-all and anything goes. But winning a dynasty based on actions in a previous one feels wrong, and has now been explicitly cited by two veteran players as a reason they are avoiding returning.

Full-blown pooling cabals/alliances. I.e. a situation where two (or more) players agree from the beginning to work together and split the mantle when one of them wins. The milder version is just an unbreakable in-game alliance (helping each other meet their goals), the extreme case is acting as a single entity, voting together and playing to maximize the chance of "one of us winning". This is a play that while valid, just leaves the other players at the table feeling like their only options are to join a cabal of their own (or get on the wininng team) or give up, because short of a coordinated resistance from all the other players, there's not really a way for an individual player to beat a team with twice the actions, resources, and votes as them.

Summary

I think the mantle passing limitations did their job in curtailing micro-pooling and cabals forming before the game mechanics are defined, while regular pooling is still possible, just in slightly more roundabout ways. But winshare is such a powerful resource that, as Josh correctly pointed out, the deals that used to be paid for with winshare are now gravitating towards sharing wins indirectly through long-term promises of future wins.