The sentence you have mentioned seems descriptive. It doesn’t specify an amount of Acclaim you get if your post meets that list of criteria, and 2.2 suffers no similar ambiguity.

Also Criteria is established as a keyword, which means that the absence of the elements that make up a Criterion makes it not actually a list of Criteria at all.

I’m reverting your edit; as always, feel free to CfJ if you disagree.

The phrase “a <whatever> is a list of things you can optionally <something>” seem to me to mean: For each item in this list, you may optionally <something> that item.

So if there are no items in the list, you have no such options.

@Josh - I don’t agree with that either. An empty list of Criteria should contain no Criteria (because it’s empty), so this is indeed an empty list of Criteria. (It’s also an empty list of elephants and an empty list of famous Belgians.)

I disagree with Josh’s argument, but think that the scam in general doesn’t work, because there’s no mechanism by which to perform the action of increasing Acclaim to satisfy the empty list. The normal mechanism would be to edit the results of the action into the GNDT, but the rules don’t specify what the results are, thus there’s no way to calculate them, thus there’s no way to perform the action correctly.

Oh, and for the beauty of the attempted scam.

coppro - Indeed it is descriptive, but the description has consequences. The other rule does not work as a precedent.

Josh - I don’t see that Criteria is a keyword - It isn’t specifically defined anywhere (not in the dynastic, core or keyword rules), just used. In any case, it makes no difference, as I’m reading the rule as referring to the list as a Single item, not as a group of items.

Bateleur - My argument is that the ‘List of Criteria’ is what is being referred to, not the ‘Criteria’ itself. It’s also not an empty list of elephants, but an empty list of criteria. I quote:

“A rule specifying “bananas are blue” cannot be overruled by posting a dictionary definition or a photo of a banana”

The rule states that it is a list of criteria, so that is what it is, whether there are any criteria within it, or not.

Ais - You’ve got the best argument, which is that I’m violating Rule 1.1:

“The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset.”

Here is where my counter-argument, as best as I can make it.

My action was to post my endless staircase image. I met the ‘list of criteria’ which was nothing, by doing nothing. The result of meeting this list is that I score Acclaim.

Under the current rules, Acclaim is spoken of as being ‘Gained, Reduced, Scored, Rewarded, Received and Lost’. Since there is no keyword apparent, I think it’s safe to say that “to score Acclaim” means that my number in the GNDT is increased - after all, what else could this mean?

I think I will raise a CfJ, as I don’t feel my actions have been sufficiently shown to be illegal.

Prince Anduril: I don’t disagree with your interpretation that you have successfully satisfied the (empty) list of criteria, but more that it allows you to arbitrarily pick the amount of acclaim you score for it. Why that number? Why not 0? That’s a number. The rule doesn’t say.