Saturday, April 19, 2025

Proposal: Electric Boogaloo

In “The Break-In” after “may perform the following atomic action of Breaking In” add ” (which also can be referred to as the Break-In, the Break In, or Breaking-In)”

Currently, I think you can only ever do one Preparation Action because there is no “Break-In” action, just Breaking In)

Comments

SingularByte: he/him

19-04-2025 08:06:21 UTC

for

Kevan: Concierge he/him

19-04-2025 10:30:57 UTC

against Weak against. Not convinced that we need to explicitly define the term “Break-In” as referring to “Breaking In”, any more than we’d need to clarify that a clause checking “if the Patrols have been Assessed” was referring to the Patrol Assessment action. We certainly don’t need it for the hyphens.

qenya: she/they

19-04-2025 12:31:58 UTC

for I don’t see the harm in making it explicit.

ais523:

19-04-2025 17:17:21 UTC

for Although I agree with Kevan that it shouldn’t be necessary, BlogNomic’s current culture is (unfortunately) overwhelmingly on the side of requiring this sort of change.

Josh: he/they

19-04-2025 17:39:54 UTC

against Per Kevan. Overly prescripive to the detrement of plain langauge reading.

Darknight: he/him

20-04-2025 00:28:38 UTC

imperial

Trapdoorspyder: he/him

20-04-2025 01:17:35 UTC

against Doesn’t seem warranted

DoomedIdeas: he/him

20-04-2025 01:46:21 UTC

against

Kevan: Concierge he/him

20-04-2025 07:39:14 UTC

[qenya] The harm in making this kind of thing explicit is it suggests that verb forms and hyphens have to be explicit in the ruleset, and when they aren’t in other places (if a rule mentions a “Camera-Trap” or “Assessing Patrols”) there may be grounds for a breakdown or a scam based on those terms having absolutely no meaning.

Kevan: Concierge he/him

20-04-2025 07:48:33 UTC

... which is a valid way to play Nomic, if we want to play it that way! We should be careful about drifting into that without meaning to, though, if some players’ takeaway from this enacting would be “meaningless, does no harm” while others start working on their hyphen scams.

ais523:

20-04-2025 14:27:28 UTC

We should probably have an Appendix rule to settle this one way or the other, rather than having the debate every time.

It’s generally been interpreted very inconsistently in the past, even from one dynasty to the next, and it can make it very hard to (e.g.) determine whether you’ve won or not, because you can’t tell whether or not the normal gameplay mechanics worked as intended or whether they failed on wording precision.

Kevan: Concierge he/him

20-04-2025 15:07:40 UTC

It seems okay to me to leave that as a cultural thing that changes from group to group - sometimes dynasties are happy with “players carry items, players can pick up items”, sometimes they want to spell out “to ‘pick up’ or ‘take’ an item means to start carrying it, a player can also be said to ‘hold’ the items they are carrying”. The rare debates are mostly a matter of reading the room, and are a part of playing the game.

Josh: he/they

20-04-2025 18:28:49 UTC
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