[Bnomic-private] A New Subgame

[Daniel Lepage]

Ok, here's the subgame I'd like to propose right now. I call it 
Grumble, as it's basically an adaptation of Kevan Davis' game Rumble 
(www.kevan.org/rumble.cgi) to a Grid. Because, y'know, grids are cool.

Here's how it works:

Each player initially has 100 points of Energy, and is somewhere on a 
small grid (8x8, maybe).
Each nweek (checking period?) is one Turn; players submit the actions 
they want to take for that Turn to some moderating entity (I think Joel 
has a mailer thing that'll do this), and then all actions are revealed 
and resolved at the end of the nweek.

Each Turn, each player may use any number of Energy points that e has 
(this doesn't destroy those points). The four uses for Energy points 
are:
1) Moving. You spend 10 energy and pick an adjacent square, and move 
into it; no more than once per Turn.
2) Attacking people. You choose another player and spend X energy 
points to attack them. For each player, we have the player's location 
during that turn and the location they moved to during the turn, if 
any; if either of your locations are adjacent to either of theirs, then 
your attack succeeds and they get attacked for X (where X is how much 
energy you spent).
3) Defense. You say "I spend Y energy on defense". Then at the 
resolution, you lose energy equal to the total amount you were attacked 
for, minus the amount you spent on defense.
4) Super Powers. This is where the game gets interesting:

Before the game starts, we all submit 'super powers'. These are 
basically little rules that players carry with them; an example might 
be "Regeneration: Each turn, you gain 3 energy". All submitted super 
powers are pooled together in a big bucket, and one by one they're 
selected at random and auctioned off. The currency for the auction is 
starting energy, so the more you spend on super powers, the less energy 
you have when the game starts.

Super powers can be static, as in "Big Beefy Armor: It costs you 20 
energy to move, but all damage dealt to you is halved before defense is 
applied"; others are triggered, as in "Eye-Lasers: Spend 20 to deal 5 
damage to any player within three squares of you".

Some shorthand is also common: "Spend X: foo" means spend X energy to 
do foo; "Burn X:foo" means lose X energy to do foo; the "Power 
Strength" of a power is the amount of energy that spent by the highest 
bidder to buy it.

If you run out of energy you die and are out of the game; you keep 
playing until somebody's the only one left.

I see a lot of potential in this game on a Grid; however, there's one 
critical flaw: The game needs to be tracked, and I can't do that.

I'm basically devoid of free time - this email is pretty much my 
allotment for this weekend. So in order for this game to work, either 
somebody else needs to volunteer to run the game, or we need to work 
out a good way of distributing the task amongst everybody.

I'm thinking a Wiki rendering of the Grid, and we either rotate who has 
to update it each nweek, or we make it a very high-paying ministry 
thing, with a new ministerial election every two nweeks or so.

Also, we need something to store actions and then dump them at the end 
of each nweek; that shouldn't be too hard, though.

Thoughts? Volunteers?

-- 
Wonko

"Write a wise saying and your name will live forever"
      -Anonymous