Celebrity "life" pool?

[kayT]

I agree completely with all of Loach’s points.

Reading the thread as the year goes by is lots of fun plus it does keep me up-to-date on who’s still around and who is gone (since I never read the news and get all my news from SDMB in various places).

And yes, it’s morbid. Which is part of the point. Hate to break it to you; we’re all gonna die. Might as well start now dealing with it in a light-hearted way.

[Biotop]

Just a few more thoughts on a life pool:

1. All players start the year with a different score determined by whatever age-based scoring system that is used for their different celebrities. Your celebrities are alive and thus you have the maximum potential points possible right there at that time. When one of your celebrities dies, that score is actually deducted from your start-of-the-year potential high score.

2. In the regular death pool, it matters pointwise during the year whether your celebrity keels over before or after their birthday. But in a life pool, the only thing that matters is the celebrity’s age on December 31st of the year in play. Points can only be finalized after that date and are only confirmed and awarded as the New Year begins. Thus December birthdays can give an almost twelve month advantage over January birthdays. These can be critical months when talking about the lifespan of the super-aged.

3. Getting all your celebrities across the finish line breathing should earn extra bonus points in my humble opinion.

[Chronos]

@Biotop

Getting all your celebrities across the finish line breathing should earn extra bonus points in my humble opinion.

I don’t think it’ll matter: If we go with a system of one point per year, and everyone’s going with octogenarians at least, then the loss of points from even a single death would almost guarantee that you’ll score less than anyone with no deaths. Even without the all-survive bonus, if there’s any player with all surviving, the winner will be one of those players, and so those bonus points couldn’t change the outcome.

[Biotop]

@Robot_Arm

Well, it puts you in the position of hoping people will live, rather than hoping that they’ll die.

I agree that the death pool game is morbid. I’ve never even read one of the threads. Rather than aged-based, it seems like the scoring should be like Boggle; if you pick a celeb that other players also pick, that should be worth fewer points than a celeb that only you have picked.

The thing is, if you are going to win the Life pool, your (um…) competitors will have to lose some of their celebrities. Gamewise in a Life Pool, you may thus be pulling for a lot more other celebrities to shuffle off the mortal coil so that your picks can outlive other lists and win. Meanwhile in the regular death pool, we are cheering on all those other people’s list celebrities hoping for a year of robust health for the lot. Indeed we cannot win the regular Death Pool when other player’s celebrities keep croaking.

So in a strange sense you may be rooting for more celebrity deaths in the Life game than you would in the Death one.

Note: I don’t think anyone much really pulls for celebrities to croak. Instead the game is all about poking death with irreverence even though AND BECAUSE Death will at some point come for us.