The Third Dynasty of Derrick
24 June 2019 – 28 July 2019
Contents
Ascension Address
- The king’s court is garbed in black, for the second most important figure in the realm has died. Not the queen, nor the heir, but the Royal Wizard. For years, Garen Drakemage captured, bred, and enchanted monstrous beasts to serve in battle. The ferocious beasts have provided key victories, bringing both the realm and Garen much honor.
- But now Garen Drakemage is gone, and one of his apprentices must take his place as the chief supplier of military monsters. Each must strive to prove his worth. It is a contest of both skill and leadership. In the end, one wizard will be selected as the new Royal Wizard, and given a title fitting of his new station. And with the on-going conflict in the west, the demand for war monsters is higher than ever…
- Change Architect to Wizard and Supervisor to King. Keep all special case rules active.
Players
The following players were active at the start of the Dynasty:
card*, derrick*, Farsight, Kaia, Kevan*, naught, pokes*, TyGuy6, ubq323
Brendan also unidled, then idled again, later.
The following players were active at the end of the Dynasty:
card*, Cuddlebeam, derrick*, Farsight, Ienpw III*, Kaia, Kevan*, naught, TyGuy6
Final Ruleset
Gamestate
Posts of Interest
- (This list of significant dynastic events is currently incomplete.)
Votable Matters
- Creatures Great and Small introduced Creatures, as well as the main mechanic of the game: Mutations (later called Breeding).
- Frog Chow introduced Food, which was necessary to mutate Creatures.
- Administrative Assistants Great and Small introduced Underlings, which allowed mutating to be cheaper.
- Creatures Small added the List of animals page, which quickly became useless once everyone had a creature in their Stable.
- A Variety of Terrain introduced Battlefields, which would become the centerpiece of the combat mechanics in the dynasty.
- They Are Coming created the first Battlefield, the City Gates ("nearby, walled, level")
- Won the Cattle but not the Boar defined Battles (between two parties including Wizards and Armies) and Duels (where one player could call out a set of others, only one of whom could respond)
- Test Duel? Kaia defeated Naught at the City Gates
- Royal Armies allowed the King to create new Battlefields
- Ghost Egg created Spectral creatures ("cannot be selected as Stock, nor can it be removed from a Stable"), off the back of the failed I Wonder What’s Inside proposal to create Mysterious Eggs.
- The War in the West created Campaigns, a framework for starting Battles
- I like my fear like I like my monsters: visceral changed the Score of Creatures to Strength
- The First Campaign Season: Icy Caves
- Refined Terrain and Combat gave Creatures bonuses to Strength for particular environments (eg. "+2 if the creature has Stealthy and the battlefield has forest, farflung, underground, or sloped")
- The Right to Bear Armour prevented Armored Creatures from dying in Campaigns
- Call of the Wild created the NPC "The Druid", with infinite food, a Wild Underling, a Forest bonus and the requirement to accept combat challenges from Wizard stables that the King considered "particularly unnatural"
- The Second Campaign: Defense of Homelands
- Despising Cowards penalised Wizards who failed to send creatures to a Campaign
- Swamp Duel! Kaia defeated TyGuy6
- so what does a giant venemous armored swimming cat look like? allowed Wizards to submit drawings of their Creatures, gaining 1 Food for each
- Tactics allowed Wizards to select Tactics for combat, reducing Strength to cause specific effects
- Magical Monstrousities added additional creature types Merging, Mechanical and Mutant
- Getting too wild in here! limited excessive duplicate Creature traits
- Duely Duel McDuel: Tyguy defeated Cuddlebeam in the Royal Swamp
- Wild Goose Chase limited Creatures to one copy of each trait
- Druid’s Duel: Withholding Food - Ienpw III defeated the Druid
- The Third Campaign: Approaching the City
- Level the Duel Field: TyGuy6 defeated Farsight in the Royal Forest
- Duel at the Pool: Kaia defeated Cuddlebeam at the Subterranean Falls
- Outsider Art repealed the Food bonus for drawing pictures of Creatures
- Royal Duel Rumble in the Royal Forest: Kaia defeated Farsight in the Royal Forest
- This forest ain’t big enough for the two of us Duel: Kaia defeated Madrid in the Royal Forest
- Duel: Puel Duel Tue closed as impossible
Destinywas an attempt by an alliance to vote through their own victory now that (with a rival idling) they were at quorum; it failed- The Fourth Campaign: Seiges
- The Hunger Duels proposed to take the game into sudden death, where losing a duel would result in a player being eliminated
- Duel: Fall Duel was an unacceptable duel
- Choice of Battleground made it harder to force Duel opponents to fight on bad terrain
- High Noon locked the processing order of Duels
- Duel: Duel Fuel saw TyGuy6 defeat Farsight in the Caravan City
- Duel: vs TyGuy6 was unresolvable
- Duel: vs Kaia saw TyGuy6 defeat Kaia at the Royal Barrens
- Showup locked new players out of the endgame showdown
- Duel: Kevan vs Kaia saw Kevan defeat Kaia at the Subterranean Falls
- Duel: TyGuy6 vs Ienpw III saw TyGuy6 eliminate Ienpw III at the Worthless Mountains
- Duel: TyGuy6 vs naught saw Naught provisionally eliminate TyGuy6 at the Island Fortress
- Duel: TyGuy6 vs Kevan saw TyGuy eliminate Kevan at the the Island Fortress
- Duel Speed sped the game clock up twofold
- Call for Judgment: Soup Starvation Settlement invalidated the TyGuy6 vs Naught duel
- Call for Judgment: Done Deuel resolved that same Duel in favour of TyGuy6
Creature Portraits
Winged Gaudy Venomous Swan (Farsight)
Mole (TyGuy6)
Caterpillar, Pack Hunting (TyGuy6)
Winged Fire-Breathing Swimming Giant Armored Venomous Numbat (TyGuy6)
Armoured Wild Numbat, aka Armadillo?! (TyGuy6)
Swimming Winged Giant Emu (TyGuy6)
Stealthy Wild Sponge (Kevan)
Other drawings, some just submitted to get the 1 Food bonus:
- Swimming Sponge
- Armoured Swimming Sponge
- Surefooted Armoured Swimming Sponge
- Venomous Swan
- Wild Wild Wild Zonkey
- Fire-Breathing Swimming Giant Armored Numbat
- Stealthy Swimming Giant Numbat
Ascension
A cabal was formed between Kaia and Cuddlebeam (If Kaia won, Cuddlebeam would get 100% of the Emperor mantle), which then had Ienpw III (given 33%), and Farsight (given 33%) join, for a 4-person cabal, with a plan around the victory condition at the time, which was Favor-reliant, and it was possible to pool actions to benefit Kaia. Victory seemed assured, but after ubq323 idled, Quorum lowered from 5 to 4, making the cabal potentially able to control all proposal outcomes.
Seeing this as unhealthy gameplay, Ienpw III left the cabal. A July 17th proposal to assign victory to Kaia failed, with Kaia and Ienpw voting against it and only Cuddlebeam in favour.
A week later Ienpw III proposed a new victory condition The Hunger Duels, which shifted the game from a favor-based victory condition to a single-duel-elimination, free-for-all Battle Royale.
Meanwhile, Farsight privately promised support to TyGuy6. They dueled to pool resources, and Farsight was eliminated.
There was lack of coordination/motivation in the old cabal, and soon Kaia and Cuddlebeam were Eliminated.
While TyGuy6 had the largest, most costly stable, Kevan and Cuddlebeam hade been saving up food for a while. Once duel acceptance became enforceable, TyGuy6 challenged all three of the remaining Wizards: Kevan, naught and Ienpw III. Cuddlebeam passed his food to Ien, giving Kevan and Ien a strong food lead.
Kevan having the first duel, he opted to concede rather than convert his food advantage into a creature force that could win this duel but would leave him vulnerable to the next duel. He then secretly allied with TyGuy6 to prepare him for the next two duels.
While Kevan plotted with TyGuy6 to make his final creature set uncopyable, card unidled and gave food support to naught. naught converted it to creatures and submitted to the duel. TyGuy6 likewise converted and sent, but called out naught for receiving extra food and for doubling up on tactics, and the duel ended by CfJ in TyGuy6's favor.
At which point, Ien idled to allow TyGuy6 to claim the throne, and TyGuy6, after DoV, passed it to Farsight.
Commentary
I found this dynasty much more dense and challenging than the previous one, but I really enjoyed the bargaining and intrigue of the endgame. I allied first with Cuddlebeam and Kaia, then with TyGuy6 for a chance to win, and I was very lucky that TyGuy6's GNDT dice roll was in my favour, resulting in me being named the next emperor. I was also very fond (maybe too fond!) of the creature portraits. Farsight (talk) 17:25, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
i got bogged down by the sheer length of some of the rules that were passed after being absent for a few days and with even more of the same length in the proposal queue, I decided to sit the rest of the dynasty out and wait for the next one. Card (talk) 18:19, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
The core battle mechanic did feel like a lot of work to keep up with: that there was no way to see at a glance how suited a Creature was to a particular terrain, you had to manually cross-reference all of their Qualities to find out their Strength. It felt like a big advantage to anyone who had the time (or had automated a way) to calculate this. It was good to see the game being complex enough to reward clever calculations at the end, though, with TyGuy6 doing a good job of working out the most efficient way to turn two Wizards' Food into powerful Creatures. --Kevan (talk) 08:33, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
- And oh, this was our first dynasty with the Traitor special case rule. I was picked as Traitor a couple of weeks after the rule enacted, and found it interesting to have more freedom to lie during endgame negotiations, particularly when haggling for mantle splits, where I could misrepresent rival bids, and waste people's time by pretending to be waiting for responses from others. I was also briefly in a position to argue for assistance from and a mantle-split to another player, who I'd have betrayed if they'd taken it, but they didn't. Had I been marked as Traitor earlier I might have built some rules to leverage the position more. --Kevan (talk) 15:57, 1 August 2019 (UTC)
I had two scams things that I didn't end up really using unfortunately.
- 1: The Duels technically started the instant that they were created, because the values of what the Opponent and Judge were had to default to some value, and having it just be "empty" hadn't been defined. So it had to be some of the valid values it could take, so it would take the alphabetically first one (or the only one). And when it does, the Duel starts, because a Duel starts when the Opponent and Judge values have been assigned. So Duels start instantly (and against people's will).
- 2: There was a really unethnical victory method which involved two loopholes that worked together, one where that you could buy Court Allies endlessly, because you actually didn't have a limit to how much Favor you could spend - even if you have negative Favor, you can still spend Favor, because you can still spend a positive amount (and Favor could be any integer, so you weren't doing any illegal move). The second loophole is probably best left omitted lol. But I had requested the help of other people to pull it off, we just didn't end up doing it, because it was really badguy bad.
The dynasty ended up really interesting, even if I joined midway. I thought I had it all under control and I hadn't overgreeded on alliance size, until ubq's idling caught me by surprise and everything changed. I should probably go for Quorum-2 alliance sizes next time, instead of Quorum-1.
--Cuddlebeam (talk) 20:07, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
As the first dynasty I actively played in, it seemed like it gave me a nice introduction. I was brought into the secret wheeling and dealing early on, and that became a core game element. I can't say why Ien conceded the win, but if he had spent his food on Mutant (repeat-breedable) creatures then his army might well have surpassed my final, mechanical army in strength. --TyGuy6 (talk) 17:20, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
