“Could”? Don’t you mean “would”?

“could” is used for situations like:

“Roll a DICE50 and subtract the result from your points”

If you have 40 points, someone would argue that this action would not always set their points to negative, and so can be taken. “Could” prevents this.

Wouldn’t it also cover “a player may update their nickname at any time by editing the GNDT field” and “a player’s nickname must be a noun”, though? Because I could change my nickname to something other than a noun, the entire “update your nickname by editing the GNDT” action can’t be taken at all, even by people who are trying to use it legally.

(“Spending” a random number of points sounds a bit of a strange and obscure case, unless I missed something last dynasty.)

Which is why we have ‘require’.

You could change your nickname to an illegal value, but you could not be required to change it to an illegal value.

  Kevan seems correct here.

because, if Kevan is correct, this is disastrous. If it’s reproposed with would, I’ll vote for.

As an administrative sidenote, Kevan, how can someone become a wiki Admin?

But Kevan isn’t correct. Unless someone changed the definition of require. Me thinks Qwaz is just upset than he can’t write good proposals and so I vote them down =P

*shrug* Maybe. Or maybe I know that you are good with loopholes (see: The First Dynasty of Amnistar) and I want to make sure you’re not making one here.

I only get one vote.

Because I haven’t some hundred times expressed full support of exploiting possible loopholes in dynastic rules and avoiding or plugging possible loopholes in the rest of the ruleset.

Dependent clause, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Thinking over the possibilities here, “would” would be more secure, but it doesn’t look like this could cause a problem unless we made another poorly worded rule. So CoV

That was me, obv. CoV

CoV From the REAL Wak.

Kevan has a point. I’d support it with “would”.

Would doesn’t work though. If you guys don’t think ‘could require’ is clear enough, someone else come up with something.

  as Kevan

CoV.  I forgot the implications of “require” lol

Require negates the issue of optional could actions.

Fair call on “require”, which I’d overlooked in the nickname example, but it still seems too broad to say “if there is any way - however obscure - that an action could result in an illegal value being set, then all usage of that action is illegal”.

If a commonly-used action has a random effect, and someone realises (or scammishly reveals) that there’s a 0.01% chance it’ll try to move a player to an illegal location, then that entire action shuts down (possibly in reaction to a DoV - “you couldn’t have won, because if you’d rolled a 999 for your final attack, and a 1 for your damage roll, it would have set Bucky’s hit points to an illegal value, therefore you could never have attacked”).

What problems does “would” have? In the “roll DICE50 and subtract from your points”, it doesn’t seem too damaging for a player with 25 points to either lose 1-25, or (half the time) lose zero. “Subtract DICE50 from a non-negative variable” is clearly something that we’d have to fix anyway.

I’m not sure, if an action could potentially result in an illegal gamestate then it means there is a problem with that action that needs to be resolved.  Otherwise, as you said, someone could attempt an action and get a result which would be illegal, thereby dissallowing him from taking an action then attempt said action again (as the rules stated he wasn’t able to take the action, thus did not, so it doesn’t count) rinse and repeat.

With could, it means we HAVE to fix it so that actions that require a response are unable to result in an illegal ruleset, which is, in theory, something we should be doing anyway.

Passing 8-3 . . . I think.

Kevan should unidle, btw.

Rinse and repeat isn’t a problem if the repeated action “could not be taken”; you won’t gain anything each time through the loop, you’ll just bounce off the illegal results until you hit a legal one.

Afraid I’ve got too much work on at the moment to unidle, I was just lurking a bit as the new dynasty dawned.

So obviously the real soultion is to cover all cases in the rules we write. But I would rather err on the side of caution and in the case where we forgot to define it in the rules, prevent potental abuse by preventing the action all togeather as I can see the potential for an action that has positive or negative effects, but a user finding a way to negate the negative effects.

I think I can see ways to do a full takeover of BlogNomic based on a rule like this. Imagine that someone somehow sets up a situation where voting on a CFJ would set a gamestate variable to an illegal value; in some dynasties, that sort of thing could even be accomplished without a proposal.