Rumble house rules

From BlogNomic Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Agreed house rules and precedents for the game of Rumble, as played on the BlogNomic Slack Channel. These are clarifications or modifications of the base rules of Rumble.

Agreed house rules

  • Players may not communicate privately with each other during a game; all communication about tactics must happen on the #rumble channel.

Auction and tie resolution

There are some options for moderator around how auctions are resolved that are commonly used. They are:

  • Bid results: auctions can be resolved with no bids being revealed, bids being public, or with just the winners made public.
  • Ties: Ties can be resolved with rebidding or with all tied players winning copies of the power.
    • If rebidding, ties can be resolved either after bids and/or won powers have been publicly disclosed, or before. If the latter, they can be resolved secretly or with all tied powers known publicly.

Edge cases

  • The game is played to the end, to last-player-standing (under discussion)
  • Players may not voluntarily resign from the game (under discussion)
  • If a player becomes absent mid-game, they are considered to submit orders of "all Energy to Defence" for the remainder of the game. They no longer choose to use Powers, but if forced to make a decision for a power the moderator resolves it randomly. (under discussion)
  • Players may however choose to assign zero to Attack and Defence, allowing a weaker player to kill them if they want that player to win (under discussion)
  • Powers resolve in a specific order (currently determined on a moderator by moderator basis)

As of 21 July 2020 these house rules are still in flux.

Power restrictions

It's been suggested that powers should perhaps be discouraged that:-

  • Create additional timing steps, slowing the game down (eg. "Xenonite: At the start of each round, choose one power to disable." would require the moderator to wait for and broadcast a decision from the Xenonite owner, each round). All powers should be worded so that all decisions are made during the submission of bids and/or orders.
  • Create additional complexity for the moderator. The moderator may veto any power that they don't wish to moderate.
  • Use environmental effects to significantly modify the bidding system (eg. "Chaos World: If this power isn't discarded, all powers are reassigned at random.") - unless other players agree to it in advance. Taken beyond a certain point, the game stops being Rumble.
  • Use environmental effects to significantly modify the basic structure of the game (eg. "Telepathy Field: Players declare Energy assignments publicly in decreasing order of Energy."), without agreeing this in advance. Although such a power can be discarded by its winner, forcing people who don't like your Rumble variant to spend some Energy to veto it is frowned on.

Wild environmental powers might be better as a dealer's choice thing from the moderator: when announcing a new game, they announce an environmental power that will be put into the mix (possibly one that can't be won through bidding).