Subject: Re: MN: Whither Mornomic?

From: Richard_M_Brockie@n...
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 10:07:20 -0700

I am with Kevan on this one - a concise set of rules seems to me to be the
better way to go.
Not that I have given much in put to MorNomic recently, but part of the
reason why I didn't get back into it is that I didn't have the time to get
my head round the huge quantity of rules which had appeared in my absense.

Now, with the possibility of getting an ISP at home, I will be able to play
from home rather than work. I am suffering from the same realisation as
PaulWay, these buggers for whom I work actually want me to do something
whilst I am here, not piss about like I did when doing my PhD.
Can't complain too much, the money is rather better than being a postgrad
student.

So, I think a Proposal along the lines outlined by Kevan should be tabled -
do we actually have a functioning Speaker at the moment?

miKi

"Kevan " <kevan@s...> on 05/12/2000 03:17:47 AM

Please respond to [email-masked]

To: [email-masked]
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Subject: MN: Whither Mornomic?

>IMO the current Ruleset is too bulky for sensible play. I would
favour
>a much slimmer Ruleset. I would dump everything from Mornomic other
>than "a game played on an underground map with MC as the winning
>station" unless it definitly helps the game and start from there.

Mm, two ways to go, really - we can either sit down and try to make a
fitting replacement for the existing Ruleset (keeping the basic
mechanics, trimming extranea and writing a snappy and legible set of
rules) or detonate the whole lot and start afresh (maybe making the
game more word-based than physical, or whatever, taking a completely
new tack).

The former appeals more to me, I think, although it would mean, for
sanity's sake, dropping the "Nomic" side of things and establishing a
ruleset via informal discussion (with one person acting as scribe, I
suppose). "This week we're going to discuss Blocking."

Ultimately we'd produce a concise, comprehensible ruleset, as user-
friendly as something you might find packaged with a boardgame; from
there, future ruleset amendment and expansion (not that there'd be
much) would be along the lines of a slow-but-sure IMCS-style review
board, I suppose, with new Actions and fixes to old ones maybe
creeping in every few months. Hm.

(If anyone mourns the loss of Nomickery and feels the urge to get
back into it, incidentally, I might recommend the DNA-based Genomic
(http://www.crosswinds.net/~genomic) or cleverly-automated Unanomic
(http://www.ravenblack.net/~unanomic), both going rather strong and
still in early-ish days.)

Kevan

--
kevan@s...
http://www.stormloader.com/kevan
"Foot-and-a-half max. We could keep it in the breadbin."

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From: riffraff@n...
Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 17:47:31 -0500

>It's a challenging and long-considered balance, though, getting
>something that's as playable in real life as it is via sluggish email.
>Clearly the existing Mornington Nomic framework is far too fiddly and
>complex to make an easy transition to the tabletop (stuff like Game
>Time would be too much effort for too little purpose, LV and Charge would
>be a pain to keep tabs on, remembering all the Actions would be a
>nightmare, and so forth), just as a normal, information-heavy
>boardgame (Monopoly or Scrabble, say) would be rather fiddly to convert to
>>email play.

It would just require more widgets in the box - a clock face with movable
hands for the time, dials from 1-10 for LV, special tokens placable on the
board to identify blocks, suspect packages, and station fires... and so on.

What you end up with is less like Monopoly, and more like one of those huge
strategic wargames with a zillion cardboard chiclets in little zip-loc
bags, that take a helluva long time to play. Which is fine - I like the
idea of people hunched over the board, examining all the little interface
gizmos and quietly pondering their next move...

Note that I don't mean that it should be designed _purely_ for RL play;
just that, in designing an e-mail game, we should keep the idea of a board
game in mind and reject rules that would be impossible to use on a board.

>The alternative - having a canonical list of Actions which anyone can
>use if they can afford the Tokens - isn't entirely ludicrous, though.
>Provided we can develop a snappy language for the game, there's no
>reason why it can't be played on a memory-and-reference basis ("Right,
>I'll play a Parks and Greens Cascade." "What does that do, again?"
>"Denies Moves to non-Park, non-Green Stations, until someone Moves to
>a Plant Station." "Oh yes.") Providing each player with a little booklet
>of Actions (using simple iconic notation for the situations in which
>they can be played; has anyone else seen "Zarcana"?) would allow them
>to both choose their tactics and check on those of other players, and
>it'd probably work quite nicely.

Yes, that's what I was thinking. This also falls in line with Original MC:
"Has anyone got a copy of the '45 Finsbury Revisions?" "Which volume?"

Throw in a laminated card chart of Actions, Costs, and Fosdyke Codes, and
you're set. And if there's enough room for simple one-sentence
explanations of what the Action does, and a page number for the long
explanation in the book, so much the better.

>The only problem, of course, is that this gives a particularly hefty
>advantage to veterans, who'd have a far better idea of the Actions
>that could be useful in a given situation; something that, I fear, has
>maybe scared away a lot of potential Mornomickers over the years. I suppose
>it's not *too* bad in an email environment, where timid players can
>spend hours poring over available Actions and past games before making
>their move, but in a world of swift real-time play it would become
>rather intimidating, and would certainly dampen the "teaching a friend
>to play in five minutes" factor (something which I think any game
>should try and keep in mind).

Well, the current version of Baker Street is an excellent start to that, I
think. And then once a new player has mastered Baker Street, e could move
on to Baker Street With Langerhan's Upgrade, which add some possessions and
a few more actions. And so on. And of course, the e-mail version would be
useful for training as well.

The extra time available in an e-mail game would make it play somewhat
differently, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, the impetus to speed
things up a bit might compel players of the board version to invent
strategies and complex manoeuvers beforehand... possibly leading to classic
strategies being named and passed around: "And then he came out of nowhere
and hit me with 'PaulWay's Death Shunt', and that was it for me."

>Boiling down my own conclusions, I think the only way to keep the
>wonderful, baroque complexity of Mornington Crescent (for me, most of
>the point of the game is being able to cry "But you can't cross-Shunt
>me to Amersham, not with Higginson's Nullifier in effect!") is to somehow
>restrict the Actions available per turn, and having them in a hand of
>cards seems the most reasonable way to do it (an alternative might be
>to have ten publicly-visible Actions playable at any given time,
>shuffling a new one in each Turn, although this seems less dramatic).

Hard to do in e-mail, too.

Perhaps we could set up a new class of Manoeuvers that produce a game
condtion instead of simply rewarding tokens, i.e. "Higginson's Nullifier:
Bank -> Zone 4 -> BR Station (Prevents Shunting for 3 rounds)"

>The time has come to jettison the Nomic underbelly, anyway, I think.
>Ideally any design decision we make should be unanimous, with
>objecters being brought around by persuasion rather than blankly
>out-voted. >And Nomic-style ruleset authoring is invariably very piecemeal
>and untidy,
>in any case - the best approach would be, I think, to just casually
>discuss how to do something, and nominate someone to write it down
>neatly when we've decided.

Ditto to that.

cheers,
--Riff

"I'm a non-local quantum event - I exist at _all_ points in space and time!"
--Riff