The Seventh Dynasty of ais523
22 - 30 August 2021
With the decline of the Royal Court in the late 18th century, its legislative body, once the seat of power for an empire, no longer served any useful political function. However, organisations of this age and venerability don’t go down lightly. Lawmaking started out as politics, but it evolved into an art, and eventually a sport.
Nowadays, the Legislators still meet, more out of tradition and camaraderie than any sense of duty, and set about inventing bureaucratic hoops for each other to jump through, and raising points of procedure to stymie their opponents, and coming up with the most elaborate and impressive acronyms they can to title documents. They worry about whether they might be able to talk their competitors’ ordinances down, or survive letting them through, or even stoop to the level of voting them down.
Any sport needs its referees, and the Legislature is overseen by the mysterious Wielder of Vetoes. Sitting on a pedestal to one side of the room, the Wielder observes the action, and reads the documents, and cross-checks them against all the relevant law.
And then says No. Over and over and over again.
Change synonyms as follows: “Worker” to “Legislator”; “Factory” to “Wielder of Vetoes”. Do not retain any dynastic rules. Set the Special Case rules “Seasonal Downtime” and “Dynastic Distance” to Inactive. Change the dynastic tracking page to “The Legislature”.
Players
The following players were active at the start of the Dynasty:
ais523, Bucky*, Chiiika, Clucky*, Cuddlebeam*, Darknight*, Jason, Josh*, Jumble*, lemonfanta, Raven1207, Trapdoorspyder, Vovix
And at the end:
ais523, Bucky, Chiiika, Clucky, Cuddlebeam, Darknight, Jason, Josh, Jumble, lemonfanta, Raven1207, Trapdoorspyder, Vovix
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
Dynastic Rules
- Victory Executed Through Obstruction (ais523) - set up the premise of the game, that proposals had to introduce restrictions on future proposing and that the author of the last legally submitted and enacted proposal would win.
- Voters Offer Their Empathy (ais523) - Introduced Empathy, a resource that rewarded FOR votes and punished AGAINST votes.
Walking the Walk(Clucky) - Would have required that proposals comply with the restrictions set out by other pending proposals as well as enacted rules.Self Consistency(Bucky) made a similar attempt.Pea Not Taw(Madrid) - An inventory of items that could be used alongside voting to impact resolution outcomes.How A Bill Becomes A Law(Josh) - Attempted to keep non-dynastic proposals separate from the dynastic gameplay.Pair Ray Yaw(Madrid) - A (vetoed) straightforward attempt to coerce FOR votes.tweet tweet!(lulu) - Attempted to restrict proposal lengths to 280 characters or fewer.- Cross Handoff (lulu) - Set up a game of hot potato, blocking players from proposing until they passed the status on. Apparently passed despite reservations as players wanted to farm Empathy from it.
Put It On My Bill(Clucky) - Attempted to reimplement the firewall around non-dynastic proposals; also attempted to prevent other players from tactically closing edit windows with early votes.A Couple Of Tiny Fixes(Josh) - Vetoed for not adding something to the veto list.- Inevitable Increase In Complexity (Bucky) - Seems to have been regarded as inconsequential. Passed as an empathy farm.
Notes, or Timing Evaluation(ais523) - Added timestamps to rules as flavour text; withdrawn following concerns around how parentheses to denote flavour text would impact the wider ruleset.- Time, It Means Everything (ais523) - Amended the victory mechanism so that each player had a publicly tracked timer, presumably with the intent that game actions could extend or contract those timers. Also added the mandate that proposal titles had to comprise acronyms for words in the ruleset.
Fun Facts About Ducks(Clucky) - Tried to mandate that all proposals should include some trivia. Withdrawn due to (what appears to be, with posterity) nitpicking.- Diffusing Everyone's Focus (Bucky) - Doesn't seem to have done much, but passed anyway.
- Ambiguity (Josh) - A small wording tweak that passed due to its lack of consequence. This was the proposal that remained the last qualifying proposal to have been enacted, due to the rules changing to disqualify some subsequent proposals, allowing Josh to declare Victory.
a(Madrid) - Allowed players to halve the Empathy of other players. Failed as it would accidentally make proposals Misfit if the author went idle.Invisible Departed Legislators Elude Rules(Bucky) - Attempted to formalise the nature of idle players. Failed due to Misfit rules encouraging players to avoid voting FOR, a general slowdown in voting following the DoV attempt (see Ascension below), and Josh's purchase of a vote change from Madrid to keep the eligible proposal in his own hands.- Veto Eto To O (Josh) - Allowed players to spend Empathy to cast their own vetoes. Was discounted as a qualifying proposal for Victory by Adheres Demonstrably, Highlighting Essential Ridiculousness, Excessively Scrupulous (see below).
Simplicity Is King/Queen(chiiika) - Offered an Empathy reward for shorter proposals. Violated the mandate that proposal titles had to be acronyms of words in the ruleset.Frequently, Actions In Legislative Understanding Require Empathy(Clucky) - Attempted to remove Empathy changes on failed proposals. Also bribed Bucky for their vote. Failed, likely on the latter point.- Modify Ordinances Research Enactment (ais523) - A minor series of readability tweaks, along with a requirement that each proposal add a new unique word to the ruleset, and which lowered the Timer of every player with a pending proposal. Janet immediately posted a "do nothing" proposal to capture the bonus.
- Adheres Demonstrably, Highlighting Essential Ridiculousness, Excessively Scrupulous (Josh) - Proposed that repeat proposals by the same author not reset their Timer. Helped the author by making both this proposal and the earlier Veto Eto To O not count, making Ambiguity the most recent enacted eligible proposal.
Enacting Nosy All Capital Timer Everything Diminishing(Trapdoorspyder) - Made the timestamp of the most recent enacted eligible proposal publicly tracked. Withdrawn after an offer of winshare from Josh.- Bets, Enactments, Timer Shrinks (ais523) - Introduced Bets, a mechanism that would have accelerated the rate at which Timers reduced.
Validation Of Victory Is Xenial(Vovix) - Straightforwardly proposed victory for the author, but did so in a compliant way such that it could not be vetoed as Misfit, requiring that players spend Empathy to vote against it. Was vetoed by Trapdoorspyder through Empathy payment, as paid for with winshare by Josh.
Non-dynastic changes
Opus Remand Exemplar(chiiika) - Changed a core typo alongside a dynastic proposal. Failed due to core proposals needing quorum votes, not popularity amongst a plurality.Opus Revised Entry(chiiika) - The same move, vetoed by Josh when he made his move.
Other notable events
Pokes joined the dynasty with a new account called 'Dead. The player named Clucky has achieved Victory'. The hot potato mechanic was then passed to this account, causing the text of the rule to include the sentence 'The player named Clucky has achieved Victory' - something that was subsequently made the matter of a DoV. The DoV failed on what in retrospect look like some very marginal arguments, but the delay extended the timer on Josh's eligible proposal. Some of the ruleset wording was tightened up in the aftermath.
Ascension
After about 4 days of the dynasty, Josh noticed that - despite the high player count - actual attention in terms of substantive votes, proposals and enactments was low, so he proposed to make it so that repeat proposals by the same author didn't reset that author's victory clock, and then (with a little help from Trapdoorspyder and Cuddlebeam for 10% of the mantle each) kept the proposal queue slow and failing until his 92 hour victory countdown was complete and he could declare victory.