On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 12:54 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > ok now I've done my offical duties and I'm sitting bored in three > days of meetings so I want to do something here, but nothing's > going on... what next...
I had an idea for a new gameplay/economy thing I wanted to proto, but I don't have time to work out the details. (In general, I think we have enough players to keep Agora going when all of them are not otherwise occupied, but when someone gets busy, we end up slumping.) The basic idea was to do something in the deckbuilding genre, because it feels like a perfect fit for nomics. The basic theme is that there's a defined list of actions that can be taken within the subgame, but each player starts "owning" only a small subset of them (the same for each player), and each week, you gain access to a random subset of abilities you own (so if you own a lot of abilities, you don't have much advantage over players who have only a few; the trick is to tweak the set of abilities you own in order that the more useful ones come up more often). Each ability has a cost (either negative or positive), and you can use any subset of accessible abilities that have a cost totalling zero (i.e. you use the negative-cost ones to pay for the positive-cost ones), causing them to become inaccessible again. In a typical deckbuilding game, most of these abilities manipulate either which abilities you own, or the other rules of the game (which is why I thought it would be such a good fit for a nomic). For instance, you might have an ability to buy other abilities, with a cost depending on some attribute of the ability you buy; you might have an ability to discard unused (but accessible) abilities so that they are randomly chosen less frequently; you might have an ability to get more random abilities to be selected each week (each turn in a typical deckbuilding game), and so on. Abilities can also mess with the holdings of other players. This seems to fit quite naturally into the things that economies normally want to interact with (extra votes on proposals and the like). Are you interested in working out the details of something like this? -- ais523
