This week we are joined by a different bearded glasses wearing friend of mine on the West coast, Michael Herrera, where I give a small health update (I can see again!), announce who is on the Small Council, and then dive into the new design of the economy.
The Small Council is (drumroll)...
- dhuran as Littlefinger
- dRow_28 as The Spider
- Gameboon Treehugger as Maester
With backups, who are now plotting assassinations, WillSama and Caleb Hawkins.
I didn't expect everyone I asked to say yes, all are worthy of the post, so I had to make the final decision the best way one can: Secret GM rolls with a d20.
This week, I spent all my time sorting through the economy needs and comments and coming up with a design that will (hopefully) meet everyone's desires:
- easy to implement
- easy to understand
- fun to play
- lots of player agency
Technically this is probably version 4 of the economy because I threw out 2 in between versions based on what people were saying on the forums. See, commenting does change the game! :-)
This all came about because in Build 11 you couldn't profitably trade, nor was there much to trade, and the economy didn't work as a whole. I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning this week and came up with something I think will work, which I posted on the steam forums here as Economy Part II.
If you don't like to read, then this update video goes into the particulars of the new economy design and some of the thinking behind it.
If you don't like to watch long videos, you can just read the steam post which has no pretty pictures.
This week brought up an important question: between the doctors visits and calls, all I did was whiteboard and type in Word. Hardly anything sexy to show for a weekly update. Then I wondered if weekly updates are really that necessary. Sure, I like the consistency, but it is a bunch of work each week and I readily admit while some are great, some are duds. This week was about to be a real dud but I decided to put in the effort to make a full presentation of the economy so at least it had a chance of not being a dud. But I'll leave it to you to judge if it is a dud or not.
My thought is to go with updates every other week, until such time as there is enough changing in the game to go weekly. What do you think?