The Timeout Paradox

by Kevan, first draft September 2024

Whenever a dynasty runs some kind of turn-based or round-based gameplay that requires every player to take part, it's often tempting to add a timeout to handle situations where a player fails to take their turn. If the group has been waiting some number of hours or days for a player to take their turn, that player is skipped and the game continues.

Although timeouts can encourage slow players to act more quickly and are useful for setting a general tone, they can also slow the game down in several observable ways.

Tactical delays

Timeout mechanics generally penalise slow play: if someone takes too long to take their turn, they lose that turn, and if a group needs to coordinate on some action and can't agree in time, they lose the chance to. Players can employ such an automatic penalty against their opponents tactically, like any other mechanic in the game.

If the game is waiting for your rival to do something, you might avoid making any proposals or posting to Discord, in case the activity reminds them to check in with the game. If the group are discussing an action plan that you don't agree with, you could prolong or confuse the conversation in the hope of running the clock out.

Without a timeout, there's no reason not to remind people, even your opponents, to take their turns, and there's less incentive to drag discussions out. This keeps the game moving.

Expanding play

Parkinson's Law says that work expands to fill the time available. The same goes for play.

A fixed penalty for taking more than 48 hours to take a turn suggests that the group who wrote that rule consider it socially acceptable to take 47 hours and 59 minutes. A player who might otherwise have taken their turn after a few hours might feel that it's okay to mull things over for another 45. If everyone does that, the game slows down.

It's useful to establish an informal baseline for context, though. There have been dynasties with a lot of fast players and one or two extremely slow ones - with the slow players seeming unaware of how quickly the rest the game was moving, because from their perspective it only moved when they did.

Inactive players

If a player has little or no interest in playing the dynastic game, a rule of "players take turns" or "we wait for everyone to submit secret orders" will focus their attention: the whole group is waiting for them to do something, and they're holding the game up by not doing that. The social pressure will be very strong to either engage with the game or step away from it.

If the game has a 48 hour timeout, those players are given permission to ignore the gameplay, reassured that it will carry on without them. There is still some social pressure on them to keep the game moving quickly, but not very much. (The Road Trip and Atlantean City dynasties both lagged badly because of multiple inactive players seeming to feel under no obligation to take their turns.)

This can also be reinforced by tactical play aspects. An engaged player may reluctantly prefer a passive player to miss their turn and do nothing (even if this slows the game down), rather than perform a potentially disruptive move.

To handle passive players without a timeout, you could allow them to be removed (voluntarily or automatically) from the main game loop, so that the game doesn't wait for them. The Assassin dynasty ran on the principle that if a player failed to submit orders for round N, then round N+1 would still accept their orders, but wouldn't wait for them. If players default to being out of the loop and have to opt-in, then players who've never intended to play the dynastic game won't slow anything down. (The value to the Nomic of a player who takes no dynastic actions yet casts votes on the rules for those actions is questionable, though.)

In the rare situation of a player walking away from the game without asking to be idled, they can very quickly be idled (or set onto some side bench) by a CfJ from the active players.

Reaction to crisis

A gameplay loop with timeouts becomes less reactive to other events in the Nomic.

If there's a contentious proposal or CfJ that would change the gameplay and is generating a lot of engaged discussion, then under a simple "take your turn when ready" game loop, players are able to hold off until the issue has been resolved. If one engaged player is unavoidably offline for slightly longer than they expected to be, the game would wait for them.

Under a timeout, though, the game rolls on.

This doesn't slow the game down, but it can take some additional time and effort to clean up where it was obviously unfair (and didn't end the dynasty) for somebody's turn to have timed out.

Case studies

• The Road Trip Dynasty had players moving along a road: it was your turn to move if you were at the back of the pack. When a group of passive players showed no interest in taking their turns and/or playing the Nomic at all, a 48 hour timeout was added and five days later when they still weren't taking turns rules were changed to effectively omit them from the turn order. (There still had to be some fix proposals when that omission failed and stalled the game.) The passive players either idled out with 7+ days inactivity, or stayed to the end while taking no significant actions.
• The Atlantean City Dynasty had players taking turns in a queue, and being removed from the queue if they failed to take their turn within 48 hours. But a couple of people weren't actually playing, and the game had to waste at least 96 hours (13% of the dynasty duration) waiting for them to time out. In retrospect that dynasty should either have required players to opt-in to the queue, or simply had no timeout.
• The Great Machine Dynasty had a two-act structure where players spent the first act crafting complex "Agendas" for the second act. The ruleset required every player to submit five Agendas before the game could progress, rather than timing out and continuing anyway. With a clear minimum bar for expected activity, the players who did not intend to play the dynasty voluntarily idled out.
• The Wizard Duel Dynasty was a dynasty that stuck to having no timeout (after adding one and repealing it a week later), and it worked. Players submitted secret orders to the Emperor that were only processed when everyone's were in. The fact that orders could be retracted also allowed players to hold back and see whether a particular proposal would enact, before progressing the game. The Emperor publicly reminded players on Discord if they hadn't submitted orders within a day or two.
• The Thief Dynasty had "Haul" posts which could only be resolved if a quorum of players agreed on how to split them. The first four took less than a day each to resolve, but when the fifth was more contentious and discussion ran to 35 hours, the group proposed to have future Hauls time out at 48 hours. Some Hauls then started taking 48 hours to resolve (in part, I suspect, because players who could make no valid personal claim on a Haul had an incentive to keep quiet in the hope that it would time out).
• The Storytelling Dynasty had an "all players submit actions privately" gameplay loop with two 96-hour timeouts each round. The dynasty started with a 120 hour round cycle, with timeouts at 72 and 48 hour stages. When the timeouts were repealed, two players apparently dropped out in response to gameplay becoming compulsory. An amendment allowed the Emperor to announce a 24-hour deadline on ending the round soon, and later 96 hour deadlines were added, seemingly because the dynasty was "dragging on". The regular BlogNomic seven-day idle timeout was also lowered to four days for the duration of the dynasty in response to a player becoming unresponsive. In all the dynasty ran for two months, more or less to the deadlines it had set itself.
• The Alien DNA Dynasty had an all-players-submit-orders system with no timeout, but ended with the group giving up on the game after some rounds were taking six or seven days to process, even though the orders only required players to choose a single letter. With the Emperor silently updating a progress bar on the wiki gamestate page, it possibly wasn't clear enough to the slowest player (who didn't have much to say generally) that the others were all submitting orders within a day or two.
• The Food Truck Dynasty (where players submitted secret menus and their outcomes were revealed simultaneously) was running at 4-5 days per round but resisted a timeout under the Timekeeper Imperial Style, despite some being proposed: ending each round at 48 hours or small fines after 36 hours. An attempt was made to highlight the progress of rounds (when half the players had submitted, the names of the slower players were revealed in daily reminders) but it never got below 4-5 days: a Discord poll later revealed a couple of players saying that they were taking 4-5 days because they knew that was how long rounds tended to take, which may have been enough to self-perpetate this. A proposal to pick a recommended round length (with no enforcement) settled fairly unanimously on 48 hours, but came too late to be tried out.