E-Nomic beta test group

From: death@watcsc.waterloo.edu (Trevor Green)

Date: Fri, 07 Sep 1990 06:23:24 +0000

As it was mentioned in a recent issue of Electronic Protocol (if you
managed to get past the complete index of every article ever printed
in it), I am getting ready to beta-test E-Nomic, a revised version of
Nomic (from a very good book called _Metamagical Themas_), with hopes
that it will become wildly successful.  Well, okay, I just think it
would be fun.  I have modified the rules since I sent them off to
Eric, so if you would like to be in a game, drop me a line.  But first,
some background:

Diplomacy is a quite rigourous structure.  I still enjoy playing it
and shall continue to do so, but there's only so many things that one
can do with armies and fleets.  (Yes, I _am_ into variants in a big
way.)  So anyway, I was reading _Metamagical Themas_ by Douglas
Hofstadter (a very good author, or did I mention that already?) and I
came across Nomic, which is a rule-modifying game.  You take a bunch
of players, and a very few rules, and you modify the rule structure
until someone wins.  The catch is, *you* modify the rule structure, so
it can literally become anything you want it to!  Provided, of course,
that you can get enough votes (at least, at the start.  If you change
enough rules, voting may become a thing of the past!), and that's
where the diplomacy comes in.  The rule system is almost completely
fluid, so your imagination is the limit.

Anyway, I'd like to get a few (well, a lot of) playtesters so I can
discover the flaws in the rules before I ask Eric if he wants to put
it on line.  Also, I'm curious as to how it plays.  If you have read
_Metamagical Themas_, you will notice quite a few changes to the rules
for E-Nomic as opposed to Nomic.  Some of them are what I perceive to
be flaws or problems with Nomic's rules, and some changes were
implemented to keep things manageable for the GM.  So, as I said, drop
me an e-line.

Trevor Green