Subject: Proposal: Pharmacide

From: "Kevan Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 16:23:46 -0000

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Proposal - Pharmacide

{ All this fiddly stocktaking and mailing-list purchase announcement
is beginning to seem a bit pointless and unexciting, if you ask
me. I propose simple, random price fluctuation and occasional
total lack of stock. }

Reword Rule 9 to:-

An active player shall hold the office of Pharmacist. The identity
of the Pharmacist shall be part of the gamestate.

The Pharmacist tracks the pricing and availability of items in the
Pharmacy. All required information must be stored in one or more
Yahoo! Groups databases (which are part of the gamestate). As
compensation for such duties, the Pharmacist receives 75 cash
points during their Office Hours. If the Pharmacist is unable to
update the Yahoo! Groups database(s) at least once in between
their Office Hours, they will be declared unfit for office and Doc
must replace them immediately. 

During his or her Office Hours, the Pharmacist should roll a
20-sided die for each colour of Pill; each Pill's price is
increased by that amount, then decreased by ten. (If this would
take a Pill's price below 20, it is set to 20.)

On a roll of 20, however, the Pill's price does not change -
instead, the Hospital's suppliers have mucked up the week's
delivery; no Player may buy Pills of that colour until the next
Pharmacist Office Hours (and its unavailability should be noted
in the database).

Reword *cough* Rule 24 to:-

The Pharmacy sells pharmaceutical items to Players for cash,
and buys back superfluous medicine and equipment at reasonable
rates.

Players in the Pharmacy may buy and sell Pills at the prices
given in the Pharmacy database (although Pills are sold back
at 5 Cash less than their market price, to cover the costs
of cleaning and rebottling).

In the interests of public health and safety, a single Player may
not purchase more than 3 Pills of a given colour in a single day. 

Upon passage of this Rule, each Pill colour's price shall be set to
forty Cash. *cough*

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From: "Jeffrey J. Weston" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:53:16 -0800 (PST)

*sigh* You're not trying to make all my hard work of the last two
weeks a moot point are you? *grumble* *grumble*

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From: "Jeffrey J. Weston" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 10:02:39 -0800 (PST)

> me. I propose simple, random price fluctuation and occasional

Another thought... BORING. As the rule stands now, we actually
have some sort of strategy people can use to help imrpove their standing
in the game. It seems like EVERYTHING in this game is based upon random
this, and random that. Please... Not another random element in the
game. It would remove any sort of strategy these rules currenly allow.

If you don't like all the mailing list messages, perhaps you can
add pill purchase and inventory tracking functionality to the PDP.

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From: "Kevan Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 17:28:58 -0000

> weeks a moot point are you? *grumble* *grumble*

Just trying to make your hard work a bit easier and more interesting, 
chap.

Kevan

--
http://uncertain.org/~kevan
"Cartoon dogs laugh at me."

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From: "Kevan Davis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 19:58:53 -0000

> add pill purchase and inventory tracking functionality to the PDP.

Mm, I agree that randomness can be a bad and boring thing, and that 
there's generally a bit too much of it in the game at the moment, but 
it's often a useful alternative to something over-complicated, a way 
to provide an interesting game stimulus without having to muck around 
working things out in the background.

The current sliding-scale Pill market is, I realise, a fairly 
interesting little piece of game theory - it just feels a bit messy 
and disparate in its implementation, less than ideally suited to the 
media we find ourselves playing in, somehow too much of a tangent 
from the rest of the Hospital (strategy-wise, there's a *lot* going 
on with reciprocity of favours and the actual business of Nomic 
proposals, if you ask me). Pharmacide is a rather extreme solution, I 
know, but I feel it needs roping in one way or another.

Upgrading the PDP to support it would perhaps be worthwhile, though; 
maybe I'll play around with the implementation over the weekend and 
see what comes of it. Ignore the Proposal in question, if you would, 
Doc.

Kevan

--
http://uncertain.org/~kevan
"I know exactly what they are."

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 12 Feb 2001 12:53:08 -0500

-5 SP. (Hmm, does IGNORING a proposal count as judging it? If so,
Kevan should lose another 20 SP. But I don't think it does.)

REJECTED. I like the current market-driven system far better than
random price fluctuations.

-- 
- Doc

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From: [email-masked]
Date: 12 Feb 2001 12:54:46 -0500

> see what comes of it. Ignore the Proposal in question, if you would, 

Hmm, I don't see anything in the Rules that says I can ignore a
Proposal because its proposer requests it. Sorry.

-- 
- Doc