Skim, settle, cooldown: making betrayal cost something
Walking out of a crew takes about fourteen chips off the people you leave, cannot be done to anyone you sat down with in the last two beats, and cannot be done twice within five. Together those put betrayal on a specific beat.
- SKIM
- 14 chips, off the people you leave
- SETTLE_BEATS
- 2, so you cannot walk on people you just sat down with
- WALK_COOLDOWN
- 5 beats
- Best moment
- the beat before a count
Skim gives betrayal a clock
Walking takes chips off the crew you leave. Because the cage pays at fixed counts, the value of doing that peaks on the beat immediately before one, which converts an abstract question (should I betray these people) into a concrete one (is it now).
Timing pressure is what a simulation of scheming needs and what most of them lack. The tension is never whether somebody is loyal. It is whether this is the beat.
The two brakes, and why they exist
SETTLE_BEATS (2) stops you walking out on people you sat down with two beats ago. WALK_COOLDOWN (5) stops anybody doing it twice in a row.
Both are there because of what happens without them. One walkout wrecks a crew's trust; wrecked trust clears the betrayal bar for everyone else in that crew; and the night collapses into churn, with constant motion, no drama, and nobody ever having sat anywhere long enough for leaving to mean something.
A general lesson about cascades
The bar was not wrong. The bar was right and the feedback loop around it was unbounded: an event that lowers everybody's trust makes the same event more likely for everybody. Any threshold whose input it also moves needs a damper, and a settle plus a cooldown is the cheapest one that reads as a social rule instead of a rate limit.
Read next
The betrayal bar, measured rather than guessed
An alliance dies when the model's P(better off without them) clears a bar: 0.42 in the pair rooms, 0.45 in the crew room. Both numbers came from asking the same question across a ladder of situations and putting the bar in the gap.
Blocs and crews: two shapes of alliance
In the pair rooms an alliance is two people who share heat and cover each other. In The Syndicate it is a crew of any size that splits a pot evenly, which turns every recruitment into a maths problem.
Why a crew may only lead by one
crewCap() stops a crew recruiting once it is two clear of the field, because without it the room finds a dull equilibrium where eleven people sit together, win every count, and each take ten chips.
What a beat is
A beat is the simulation's unit of slow time, fifteen seconds of wall clock and twenty or twenty-four to a party. It is the only moment at which heat cools, energy returns, trust drifts and a room makes a decision.