Since this isn’t a proposal, I have to explicitly vote on it, right?

The rules were bad, but they’re being fixed now by the normal means.  As I said earlier, even if this is a slipup rather than a malicious rule, it is important that we honor the letter of it.  Also, this change would either have no effect or would provide a class of proposal that is unvetoable.  This seems like a bad idea.

1) It’s not being entirely fixed; Kevan vetoed the seance, so Brendan’s proposal won’t save it.  And we still need to get rid of the clause that lets the Mayor veto seances for no reason at all.

2) If it were a malicious rule, I’d let the person who got it passed enjoy their success.  Since it’s a slip-up, I think we should go with the intent, which seems fairly obvious here.

3) This doesn’t make anything un-vetoable.  The Mayor can still Nighttime Seances which he “considers to be physically impossible, or otherwise inappropriate.”

4) This will have an effect, namely salvaging the seance.

Err, can still VETO Nighttime Seances, at any rate.

I doubt it’s the case here, but it’s entirely possible that in a similar situation the person who set up the rule wouldn’t want to make it known that it was a malicious insert.  I’m not sure if any of us are really qualified to determine the difference between a mistake and a sneaky rule whose creator doesn’t want to mention.

In any case, I meant to say that the rules changes don’t do anything, and the seance shouldn’t be salvaged because it was initiated under a bad set of rules.

Also, as long as Town Meeting remain proposals, the Mayor can veto them for no reason at all.

:ABSTAIN:  I want to speak, but let the living villagers sort out what the rules are first.

Maybe not in the sense that it will actually prevent the Mayor from doing anything, but it will cause him to have to give a real reason when he wants to veto the seance, and not just say, “well, I’m doing this just because I can” or suffer some kind of general disapproval.  It just doesn’t sit well with me.

He did give a real reason: the entire situation was getting out of control.  If the Mayor believes that a proposal will break the Dynasty, he has the right to veto it.  To me, that appears to be what happened here.

How would it break the Dynasty?  He could have decided to resolve the conflicting rules in a logical way, and the wording would have been fixed in Brendan’s proposal.  Nothing broken.

just wondering, whats stopping us from holding them during the day in a really dark room? like the basement of the inn?

Darknight: Only the rules

As the person that originally wrote the rule (with that wording) I can say it was a mistake in the typing, and I think the first seance shouldn’t be canceled because of a mistake in the forming of the rule.

Ugh, I’m all for trying to salvage the Seance—I already did once—but I really don’t like the proposed wording change for Town Meeting vetoes.  The new text of the rule would be “The Mayor may Veto any Town Meeting which was not a Seance, and which was called during the Nighttime, was called by a Villager who was dead or in gaol at the time, or which calls for action which the Mayor considers to be physically impossible, or otherwise inappropriate.”  There’s no order of operations on the ands/ors there, and the comma after “Seance” does make it seem like Seances are not subject to veto.

Well, unless Kevan can un-veto, I don’t see this doing anything. Otherwise , since it the rule wasn’t made as intended.

You’re right, Brendan, that is clunky.  We’ll have to tidy that up a bit by rearranging some commas and and adding some ‘or’s.  But like Tiberias said, that sentence doesn’t actually prevent him from vetoing whatever he wants to anyway.

Chivalry, doesn’t a CFJ take precedence over pretty much anything?  Besides, we’re not really un-vetoing the seance.  We’re just retroactively pretending that it wasn’t vetoed.

The “may” change is badly worded and incomplete, though. (I know I can veto daytime seances anyway - I can veto anything - but it’s a mess to mention one case but not another. An exception in the Seances rule would be easier.)

To respond to the rest of the post - I wasn’t seriously suggesting that the rule was written by a werewolf, just pointing out that going by the letter of the rule is how Nomic should be played in cases like this. Cleverly subverting that is a valid part of the game, and it’d cheat people out of that tactic if there was an unspoken “we’ll overlook any subtly non-functional rules and just go with their assumed spirit” rule.

And the exact reason I vetoed the proposal was that Seances could not be called during the day (because they’re seances) and could not be called during the night (because they’re town meetings), therefore they can’t be called at any time.

I get that, Kevan, really.  If I had had any reason to think that someone was cleverly miswording stuff I wouldn’t have tried to save it.  But in this case it just feels like a lot of red tape over an obvious mistake.

COV

I’d prefer to let the veto stand.  Regardless of whether one thinks the seance / town meeting proposal was legal, certainly we all agree that _if_ it was legal, then so was the veto.  Either way would mean that the seance doesn’t occur.

It’s a shame to have lost this one opportunity to hold the seance, but it hardly requires urgent attention.

Because It is true that wording is more important than intent.

Man, it bugs me to say this, but…
Unlike real life government here, the point of Nomic is to play by the rules, not the spirit of the rules.

Now, somebody needs to get the rules changed so we can have seances.

CoV.

I once had a rather large load of lice confiscated because words are not more important than intent.

dare i ask what ya had planned for that big a batch of lice bucky?

I slipped some malicious wording into some flavor text in a proposal that should have allowed me to pull an unlimited number of lice out of thin air and add them to my inventory.

The lice thing hinged on the over-creative interpretation of a verb, rather than the over-literal interpretation of a logical rule. If it was concrete and unambiguous, you’d have got grudging scam applause for it.