Play Report: Committee Nomic
Earlier this month, my Nomic group concluded a game of Committe Nomic (explained below) after six sessions. Just as I would set down a postmortem on a completed TTRPG campaign, I have written up a brief summary of the game's arc -- certainly, Nomic inspired a comparable level of creativity & novelty.
Nomic & Committee Nomic
Nomic is a game invented in 1982 by the philosopher Peter Suber.1 Like other games, Nomic exists as a set of rules, but it is distinguished by the fact that those rules contain provisions for their amendment. The process of playing Nomic thus involves changing the game itself, (hopefully) in novel & surprising ways.
Committee Nomic was developed by my friend Wes2 with the goal of creating a version of Nomic that is more dynamic and participatory. Typically, Nomic (initially) proceeds in 'turns', with individual players proposing a rule amendment on their turn, subsequently voted on by all players. Committee Nomic innovates on this by rotating each player through a 'Provost' role who receives rule change suggestions during an open discussion phase and then assigns them to committees to draft. There is thus much less 'downtime' and less pressure to propose rules -- one could spend the entire game drafting and voting on rules proposed by others.
It's worth noting that Nomic -- like D&D -- requires organization & paperwork, in our case diligently carried out by Wes. After each session, he integrated all new amendments into an updated rules document & kept a running log of all committees, votes, & rule changes. He also prepared these delightful cardstock proposal forms:
The Arc of The Game
For this section, I won't go through every rule change, but will just note the general trajectory and some notable rules.
The game as a whole lasted 6 sessions (I was present at 5), each lasting about 2.5 hours. We played at Missing Piece board game cafe in West Seattle, usually on Monday Nights.
Much of the game consisted of negotiating ways of scoring points and ways of draining them to prevent a quick victory. Early on we settled on 100 points as the victory condition, but we ended up with lots of convoluted mechanics to award and dock points based on die rolls, passing/failing rule changes, and magic beans (see below).
Ultimately, one player (Jake) won, by diligently acquiring magic beans & points and cleverly exploiting the fact that a certain mechanic only triggers once per round.
Notable Rules
- The Committee system makes it possible for a player who suggested a rule to have no hand in drafting its precise language. Thus, committees can intentionally sabotage rule changes they don't like. To somewhat counteract this, I proposed a "Grievance & Retribution" procedure to award demerits to committee members who do not attempt to draft a rule in good faith. This would later be hilariously abused.
- Because we were sometimes playing with three players, we added "fate" as a fourth voter in these circumstances.
- Initially, there was a rule awarding 10 points to players who voted "no" on a rule change that passed anyways, intended to incentivize "no" votes and prevent rule inflation/bloat. However, this caused point totals to increase rapidly, so we passed a rule awarding a "magic bean" in lieu of the 10 points to players with a score above 50. The magic beans initially had no purpose, but were eventually integrated into several game mechanics.
- One of the rules instituted to head off early victories involved magic beans "conspiring against" players, reducing any point total above 100 by 1/(1+B) points (so that with enough beans the effect could be overcome). This was later amended to 1/(1+B-D), where D is the number of demerits a player has received from the Grievance & Retribution committee. We forgot to stipulate that the denominator could not go negative, so for a moment demerits were incentivized leading to some hilariously spurious grievance claims.
- Toward the end of the game, we had not one but three banks in play: Nomic National Bank, National Bank of Nomic, and Banque National de Nomic.
- One of the coolest rules, proposed by Emily, was to stipulate that when a game of Nomic ends, each player could choose several rules to carry forward into the next game of Nomic -- later referred to as the "Ragnarok" rule. This solves two key problems with Nomic: the tension between wanting play to continue indefinitely & desire to win, and the tendency for rules to become Byzantine & impenetrable. At the time of writing, I am eagerly awaiting the initial session with out stripped-down post-Ragnarok ruleset.
Reflections & Musings
Sam Sorenson has written about posing the question of what constitutes a "cool move" in different games. I was astonished to find that nomic had so many "cool moves" -- at least once per session I found myself going "whoah, that's cool". But its hard to explain in a blog post without setting out the whole ruleset.
Nomic is (in at least one sense) the exact opposite of Free Kriegspiel. Whereas FK® subordinates rules (or the consistency thereof) entirely to the task of modeling an imaginary phenomenon of some sort, Nomic is a system of rules concerned only with itself, modeling nothing (at least initially). However, I found I personally enjoyed the ways Nomic 'absorbed' secondary contents: the magic beans acquired rules for spontaneous multiplication and beanstalk cultivation (never fully realized, sadly, but they survived Ragnarok).
Nomic is probably a good exercise for amateur game designers, because it tends to draw out edge cases & exploits of whatever mechanics get added.
I'd like to try hybridizing Nomic with other games -- my group has discussed Nomic + Diplomacy ('Diplomic'), which I think could work very well. I think it would also be "funny" to try grafting a Nomic-like rules-amendment phase onto a crunchy trad RPG like Pathfinder 2.
Final Rules
You can view the final rules (beautifully formatted by Wes) here.
An extremely cool dude (imo) who is also a leading voice in the Open Acess movement.↩
Those in the Antarctica Jam discord may know him as Slothyyyy.↩