That second paragraph seems broken; with Bucky becoming Captain, the term “Captain” becomes undefined and rules that use it are disabled?

It is potentially game-stopping, but i think in combination with the first paragraph it won’t come up often. The Swashbuckler Name ‘Captain’ no longer has any relation to the ruletext ‘Captain’.

  Finally, some sanity.

So if I buy a motley which just happens to be named “Cutlass”,  I get no GPS bonus?  This proposal the way you interpret it would break the motley system.

If I interpret the sentence “Gamestate text outside of the ruleset cannot reference any other part of the gamestate, except as defined by the ruleset,” differently, it could also be construed to mean that a CfJ cannot reference proposals or unofficial posts,or even the dictionary.  A still stricter interpretation would bar a proposal or CfJ from referring to the ruleset at all.

Either way, there must be a cleaner solution.
 

Captain: I thought this was amazingly clean—I expected it to be much worse. With the Motley example, I see it as the ruletext identifying and giving a bonus for the Cutlass, not the Cutlass referencing the rule.  However, I see that CfJ’s are not explicitly given the power to change the gamestate in the current rules (but proposals are - strange), so that needs to be amended. In other words, CFJS WILL BE USELESS UNTIL THIS IS FIXED. I’ll try to address this ASAP.

meh, I’m feeling a bit dubious about that first part—it doesn’t forbid confusing names or really stop the problem from the ruleset side. Any ideas?

The other solutions are nice.

“If it is ever unclear which part of the gamestate is being referred to, actions based on that reference are undefined and may not be taken.” seems rather arbitrary.  It could well result in a minor error rendering a rule completely useless due to some completely, even if said interpretation is completely insensible.

If this rule passes, the sentence ” Posts following the format specified by a rule are considered official posts” could keep anyone from making official posts if a rule provides more than one format.

This may seem rediculous, but really, the last sentence is too broad.

What is the alternative? We can’t allow a conflict of target game objects. So either we restrict the creation and naming of things (which is really difficult, I believe) or we no longer have freeform objects in the game at all.

Propose a glossary entry to clarify the difference between proper nouns and keywords.  ‘Name’ semms to be the tradtional format, as it’s even in use in the ruleset.  Bar Swashbucklers from naming themselves or any nameable items the same as any existing keyword.

I don’t see what the problem is here—can somebody point it out to me? It certainly seems better than nothing.

The problem is that the sentence “If it is ever unclear which part of the gamestate is being referred to, actions based on that reference are undefined and may not be taken.” may be used to block certain actions (like making official posts in the case of the rule I mentioned above).  I beleive it would be better to CfJ in the case of contradictions then to prevent the use of the legitemate interpretation of a reference in all cases.

Captain: Names is a good concept, but sometimes we want names to match keywords, as with our current motley. I will think on it…

I haven’t self-killed this because I don’t think the second bit is too bad. I prefer the game stopping and being restarted by proposal or CfJ, rather than retroactively fixing things.

All right, but I think it will cause more trouble down the road.

I changed my mind.  I think the results of this proposal would be so chaotic and difficult to fix that, should this pass, I will exploit said problems as much as is necessery to convince a quorum to nullify this proposal’s effects.  The two parts of this proposal seem to combine particularly well to make CfJing this proposal difficult.

I can see how a CfJ can be stopped by creating custom objects to invalidate it:

If a CfJ says “remove Smith’s cutlass”. I could create another motley item called ‘Smith’s Cutlass’ and foil that CfJ. Obviously I can’t do that forever, but in a dynasty where custom objects were free, this would be CfJ-proof.

self-kill. I’ll make a version which excempts CfJs and proposals as ruletext.