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NG1 - St Francis Hospital - Game thread
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Also the least important. I just concluded that I'd run with whatever came out on issue IV. I did try to hide this position early on, as the game setup made it sound as though I really wanted IV-3. I hoped that conceding ground gradually there might result in a better negotiating position.
February 16th, 2017, 07:08
(This post was last modified: February 16th, 2017, 07:12 by Bacchus.)
Incidentally, here is the scoring system I came up with on Gavagai's request to tell him exactly how unacceptable is unacceptable and how does it compare to "no agreement". The number by each name is the number of points required in my mind to beat the "no agreement" option.
Code: Mason 50 Macnamara 55 Parker 50 Bennett 65 Marshall 50(February 16th, 2017, 05:07)AdrienIer Wrote: (I'll need to read what Gavagai told vnosikov, because I certainly didn't think we had a "rough discussion" as vnosikov later said) McNamara: Good to hear. I suggest that we both try to convince doctors into CAD4 then. At least one of them would be good enough. Marshall: Ok, we can try. I´ll go for Mason McNamara: Reasonable, I seem to have much better rapport with Parker than with Mason. My discussion with Mason went pretty bad. (February 16th, 2017, 07:42)vnosikov Wrote:(February 16th, 2017, 05:07)AdrienIer Wrote: (I'll need to read what Gavagai told vnosikov, because I certainly didn't think we had a "rough discussion" as vnosikov later said) Yes I just read that. That wasn't my opinion of the discussion, but maybe I sounded harsher than I thought. (February 16th, 2017, 07:47)AdrienIer Wrote:Our Dark Overlord actually has feelings. And they were hurt!(February 16th, 2017, 07:42)vnosikov Wrote:(February 16th, 2017, 05:07)AdrienIer Wrote: (I'll need to read what Gavagai told vnosikov, because I certainly didn't think we had a "rough discussion" as vnosikov later said)
Here are some of my thoughts, first on the set-up and then on the gameplay.
This set-up is nice for an introductory game, I felt. It is simple, in the sense that there are no bastard elements, nor conditionals, everyone's preferences are straightforwardly and consistently defined over the full range of issues. It is challenging in the sense that the range of potential options is relatively narrow, with no 5-way agreements unless some people accept the "unacceptable", and only two 4-way agreements. This makes it very important to figure out what is it that the parties are prepared to live with, and that's one of the major "learning" from this set-up -- they key task of a negotiator is to find out not so much what others prefer, but what they can live with. The biggest peculiarity of the set-up is probably Bennett's position on issue 4, he has to defend a requirement which just begs to be seen as a bluff, especially by Marshall, who is having to scrape by with barely acceptable options whilst Bennett gets away with first choice just because he says he won't accept anything else. On the gameplay, everyone has done very well to tease out each other's positions, and even Bennett's entry didn't derail you into starting to claim that you'll accept only the first option on your most important issue. What was quite interesting is that you conducted the negotiation entirely in a bilateral manner, but without any significant subterfuge. It seems that most of what you said could have been said openly, as you were telling each other relatively similar things. Frequently, bilateralism leads to no agreement because communication gets confused. But there is something else, bilateralism lets people form strategic blocking coalitions, not something that happened here at all. For example, Marshall and Parker have a lot of scope for helping each other out -- Parker will surely quickly realise that he is not getting 1-D under any circumstances, so the best he can hope for on his most important issues is CB**. For Marshall, the second most important issue is funding, he wants 4-1, and he actually likes 2-B as well. If Parker and Marshall commit to each other to stand by CBD1, as the deadline draws near, MacNamara will have a choice between accepting "unacceptable" on the least important issue and no agreement. Neither Parker nor Marshall can really be lured away from that commitment, the only risk to them is that they don't necessarily know how important issue 2 is to MacNamara. Some more awkward blocking coalitions are possible here, for example Marshall, Bennett and Mason could start by agreeing to never give in on 1-A, and seeing how it goes. This brings me onto the next point. Nobody really used time strategically in this negotiation. You knew from the start that there is no rush on reaching an agreement, you had time to test out several iterations before putting your foot down on what you felt you could get away with. For some people, like Bennett, waiting doesn't really do much, but for others being the last remaining unknown quantity could have given a lot of leverage. You can see from private correspondence how awkward it was for people to not really know what MacNamara thinks, so much so that Marshall convinced himself that any coalition must include MacNamara, and it's his job to persuade everyone to listen to MacNamara. Even this is right, there is time to first float some other ideas, test your hypotheses by trying to disprove them, you never know what you'll find. Time is one of the key resources in any negotiation, it's good to at least think about how to use it. Another thing that remained unspoken and maybe unthought until the end of the negotiation is process. This ended up being negotiated bilaterally, but was it as a result of somebody's conscious decision, or did it just happen? Process is incredibly strategic, a different process with the same parties can not only look different, but yield different results. In this case, I don't think the process the result much as in private you communicated pretty much the same things you have communicated in public, it seems. Generally, however, process is quite a cool thing to think about as a part of the game, the format you choose to communicate in is itself a "move", and people will respond to it, sometimes even unthinkingly, just by imitating. I get the feeling that this happened here -- Marshall felt it natural to invite Parker to a room, so did Mason, and off it went. If Bennett was around to answer Parker's plea to say some introductory words, the entire negotiation might have taken a different form. I am really glad this was enjoyable, and I hope some more of these will run on RB. I have at least one other set-up more or less ready, this one with actual, not homebrew scores. It's for 6 people, and I want to theme it around development of asteroid mining. It will be some time before I am available to run another one of these, though.
Hehe sorry for disappointing you...
It's interesting, though - I reckon that the blame for our relative lack of creativity lies with the fact that there really did seem to be a binary between 'unacceptable' and 'barely acceptable' / 'acceptable'. Like, why would anyone sign up for something that was unacceptable? Hence Gavagai's question - as soon as you start putting a number to things you start to realise that having something unacceptable in the mix is not the end of the world, and only actually represents a 5-10% hit to your overall score. But based on the fluff this did not seem to be the case - indeed for Parker and MacNamara resignation would seem a better prospect than any even slightly sub-optimal deal. With unacceptable seen to be, well, unacceptable, the challenge becomes finding a coalition of four who can put together a suggestion that is mutually non-unacceptable before someone else puts together a coalition of four that doesn't include you. This leads to a frenzied round of one-on-one meetings as you try to achieve this, to find such a coalition first. It becomes a race. Marshall, Bennett and I didn't think of holding the line over A**4 because we knew it was unacceptable to the other two and so by the apparent logic of the game we were just being impossible when, instead, we could be making sure we were in the final coalition of four. Incidentally I was only able to be blase about issue II because the fluff explicitly told me that it was something I wouldn't mind trading away if things got desperate. An 'unacceptable' option for any of the other issues would basically have felt like an auto-loss. But the process point is interesting. Had I not been otherwise engaged for the first few hours, maybe I could have grabbed the bull by the horns in the role of CEO and acted as a self-appointed mediator. Although it is difficult imagining Gavagai falling for that. And the result would probably have been strangely similar to what we ended up with anyway. |
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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
