Line Number: 11

December 1969.'>

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Proposal: Watering Can

Timed out and failed, 6-9. Josh

Adminned at 20 May 2011 04:05:20 UTC

Through all the Dynastic Rules, replace the word Sun with the word Water. In the GNDT, each Farmer’s Sun value shall become their Water value.

Replace “a Farmer may Harvest” with “a Farmer may draw from the river”.

Yoda vetoed Ely’s original proposal of this “to make way for Plant vs. Zombies” (because the PopCop videogame uses “Sun” as a player currency, and not “Water”), but the suggestion had 7 votes in favour at the time. It’d be good to check how the vote would have gone if more people had the chance to respond, and now that we know what the real dynastic theme is.

I quite liked Purplebeard’s comment that “running a successful farm during an unexplained zombie apocalypse might be interesting”, that we could take the basic concept of PvZ, but explore a very different take on it. Collecting and storing precious water could make for a more “realistic” game than somehow harvesting and redistributing sunlight, if people wanted to head down that route.

Comments

Hix:

18-05-2011 12:35:12 UTC

imperial

Purplebeard:

18-05-2011 12:57:21 UTC

for

Josh: he/they

18-05-2011 13:12:11 UTC

for

Yoda:

18-05-2011 13:54:39 UTC

against unless someone can come up with the name of a water-producing plant… (see sunflower for sun)

Kevan: City he/him

18-05-2011 13:58:13 UTC

A cactus. Or watercress, if this is about having a pun.

Although if you’re talking about the proposed “When the Planter [who has a Sunflower] Harvests, e may add 15 more Sun.” mechanic, that could easily be a water butt or something instead.

SingularByte: he/him

18-05-2011 14:06:49 UTC

for

Bucky:

18-05-2011 15:30:36 UTC

imperial

Winner:

18-05-2011 19:30:07 UTC

against

Keba:

18-05-2011 21:26:51 UTC

against Still think Sun is just cooler.

Ely:

18-05-2011 21:40:20 UTC

for

Bucky:

18-05-2011 22:33:32 UTC

CoV against

aguydude:

18-05-2011 23:07:24 UTC

against

Darknight: he/him

19-05-2011 00:00:22 UTC

imperial for what its worth, first plant i thought of was watermelon, though in the game thats a whole different plant.

Klisz:

19-05-2011 01:10:35 UTC

for

Galtori:

19-05-2011 03:40:20 UTC

against

Keba:

19-05-2011 12:23:46 UTC

CoV for

I will repropose water and rivers later, maybe I’ll find a way to let that interact with this one.

Josh: he/they

19-05-2011 15:56:16 UTC

CoV against , not because I don’t like the idea - I really prefer Sun to Water - but I would like this proposal to be enacted properly, and don’t really want a cosmetic change to be the thing that derails it. Would happily vote for this as a bolt-on to another proposal, though.

Keba:

19-05-2011 16:03:43 UTC

CoV again per Josh: against

Kevan: City he/him

19-05-2011 16:04:16 UTC

If you’re in favour of Water, it’d be safer to repropose the other proposal (which people are unanimously in favour of), rather than the one that’s tenuously hovering around 7-7 and might not survive a second vote with slightly different voters.

Kevan: City he/him

19-05-2011 16:05:22 UTC

It’s not as if the other proposal is doing anything other than saying “there is wood and juice but you can’t use them yet”, and there aren’t any pending proposals that use those mechanics.

SingularByte: he/him

19-05-2011 16:16:17 UTC

Even if this one would pass if reproposed, it would be likely to clog up the pending proposals for 48 hours, compared to the 12 or so that a reproposed wood and juice would take up.

Josh: he/they

19-05-2011 16:27:37 UTC

On the other hand, Keba has already said that he intends to repropose rivers, so there’s a thematic proposal already in the pipeline that can trivially include this. Incorporating it into a broader mechanic may even make it more popular.

Yoda:

19-05-2011 17:25:04 UTC

I think that this proposal will do more harm than good in any form in which it takes.  It’s a purely aesthetic change but has the potential to ruin several different proposals in the queue.  Why is it so important that the terminology make sense at the expense of other perfectly acceptable proposals.  I just don’t buy the “we can just repropose the other ones” argument.  Why should other proposals suffer because of a purely aesthetic change?

</soapbox>

ais523:

19-05-2011 17:51:54 UTC

Proposals like this should really be written edit other proposals in the queue. (I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t change a proposal by proposal…)

Josh: he/they

19-05-2011 17:57:36 UTC

I disagree ais, it’s just good form to make sure that a proposal that you right accommodates pending changes in the queue. I think that Bucky’s proposal was sloppy for not taking this into account, but given that future props may to rely on the dynamic set out in it, this purely aesthetic change sadly is the victim.

Kevan: City he/him

19-05-2011 19:01:24 UTC

Also disagree on that, ais - it’d mean that any good voter wouldn’t just have to read the proposal and the relevant rules, they’d also have to read every other pending proposal from the amending proposal’s perspective (and the number and content would change over time). This almost seems to be arguing that if someone proposes a solar panel right now. this is a bad proposal for not predicting and thematically replacing the phrase “solar panel”.

Yoda:

19-05-2011 19:45:33 UTC

Josh: I might feel the same way about Bucky’s proposal if this one actually did something meaningful.  It is true that proposal writers should take into account the already pending proposals, but what we have right now is so many pending proposals that it’s hard to keep track of.  I think if this proposal were proposed in about a week (or even a few days), when the sheer number of proposals has gone down to a reasonable level, it might have a better chance at passing.

Yoda:

19-05-2011 19:48:01 UTC

Kevan: I think what ais is trying to say is that the proposal could’ve been written to say something like “Through all the Dynastic Rules and Pending Proposals, replace the word Sun with the word Water.”

Travis:

19-05-2011 21:54:55 UTC

for

Kevan: City he/him

19-05-2011 22:50:46 UTC

Sure, I see what ais is saying, it just seems strangely at odds with how we normally play the game - when you make a proposal, you write it to fit with the current ruleset, and with any pending proposals which could pass between the time of writing and your proposal enacting. You don’t worry about future proposals, otherwise we’d have the nightmare of “reword the last paragraph of Rule 2.4; if any later proposals accidentally refer to the previous wording of this paragraph because they didn’t read this proposal carefully enough, amend or delete those clauses from those proposals according to, um, hang on”. It’s much easier for later proposals to react to the earlier ones, than for earlier ones to try to second-guess the later ones.

(A blanket “replace the word Sun with the word Water in Pending Proposals” is problematic; while the proposal was pending, nobody could make a proposal of “okay, looks like Water is passing; let’s say that if the proposal passes, we’ll define Sun as being something else” because it’d just get reworded to “Water” along with everything else.)

And for what it’s worth, I don’t think we should dismiss a simple word change as a meaningless aesthetic - any more than we can dismiss a Dynasty’s theme as a meaningless aesthetic. A game where you collect “Sun” is going to end up encouraging a different way of thinking and a different set of mechanics to a game where you collect “Water”.

Purplebeard:

20-05-2011 07:27:53 UTC

The reasoning that this proposal is at fault for disrupting others that were posted after it is a little odd. If a proposal fails to take into account possible changes made by pending proposals, then surely that proposal itself is to blame.

By the way, the sun already plays a role in the shade mechanic, and the fact that some squares are naturally more shady than others doesn’t really make sense if we get to harvest and distribute sunlight.