Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Call for Judgment: The bounties worked

Uphold Josh’s attempt to pay out bounties earlier today.

Josh attempted to pay out bounties during Lacuna, even though the Bounty Payout action is in a dynastic rule. I think this worked, because Bounty Payout is partially defined in a Building Blocks rule, but am not sure – it depends a lot on whether you interpret the Building Blocks rule as doing the payout itself or triggering a dynastic rule to do the payout. In any case, I’d like to have certainty as to whether or not this works, and it seems desirable for it to have worked, so this is a suggestion to uphold it.

Proposal: Lacunaic Bounties

Move the dynastic rule “Bounties” to become a subrule of “Lacunaic Actions”.

As it is, it’s unclear whether or not Josh will be able to pay out his Bounty, because Lacuna started too early to make it possible and it’s unclear whether the Bounty Payout action is fully dynastic or not. This change makes it Lacunaic, making it unambiguously possible to perform it.

Proposal: Late Re-arrivals at the Nomicer’s Ball

If “Late Arrivals at the Nomicers’ Ball” failed, do nothing. Otherwise:

If any Nomicer has used the action defined in “Reinitialisation” this dynasty, for each such Nomicer, set that Nomicer’s Discs and Jokers to 0 and revert all dynastic actions that Nomicer has performed since then that spent Discs or Jokers.

In “Discs and Jokers”, change

These are publicly tracked and both default to 3.

to

These are publicly tracked and both default to 3 (except during Lacuna) or 0 (during Lacuna).

Replace the bracketed text in the first bullet point of “Announcements of Attainment” with:

(Nomicers with an Equity below zero, Nomicers who used the action defined in “Reinitialisation” during Lacuna, and Nomicers who were not Active when the current state of Lacuna began, are considered to have an Equity of zero for the purposes of these calculations.)

Lacunas interact really weirdly with Reinitialisation – you can use it last-moment to give yourself a median chance to win despite anything else that happens, and also use it to get extra Jokers to get extra Equity. This is intended to remove any benefit from Reinitialising during Lacuna.

Proposal: [Building Blocks] Back to the Drawing Board

Repeal the dynastic rule “Wording Fixes” if it exists.

Add a new rule to the Building Blocks section called “Revisions Allowed” with the following text:

For use in voting, an arrow https://blognomic.com/images/vote/arrow.gif shall represent a Vote of REVISE, which is treated the same as an AGAINST voting icon with respect to all other rules except when a rule explicitly describes other uses or effects of the REVISE voting icon. Nomicers should use an AGAINST voting icon when voting against a proposal due to disagreement with the general idea behind the proposal and should use a REVISE voting icon when voting against a proposal for which they agree with the general idea behind the proposal, but disagree with the details or with the exact wording.

If a proposal’s author withdraws it using REVISE, and there were at least as many votes REVISE as votes AGAINST among the other (non-author) Nomicers’ Votes on that proposal at the time, then the proposal ceases to count against that author’s limit of 2 pending proposals and can be failed by any Admin, even if it is not the oldest pending proposal, and the author should submit a corrected version. If a proposal’s author is planning to withdraw a proposal, but not to submit a corrected version, they should withdraw it by voting AGAINST.

 

The “arrow” method worked really well in this dynasty, thanks to ais having the idea available and proposing it. Maybe we want to make it an optional thing going forward for any dynasty? This essentially moves “Wording Fixes” into a Building Block, but with some changes as mentioned in the comments to Instead of Edits to improve the wording.

Proposal: [Building Blocks] Driving Engagement: The Sequel

Add a new rule to the Building Blocks section called “Official Posts Required” with the following text:

If BlogNomic has not been on Hiatus for at least the past 168 Hours (7 days), Nomicers who have been Active Nomicers continuously during the past 168 Hours (7 days) but have not posted at least one Official Post within that same time frame do not count as Active Nomicers for the purpose of determining if BlogNomic should be put on Hiatus as described in the rule Dormancy. Nomicers are encouraged but not required to propose a dynastic way of associating Official Posts with public tracking on the gamestate tracking page to make it easier to determine when Dormancy should apply.

If too few players are creating Official Posts, then the nomic conversation is being driven by too few voices and becoming stagnant as a result. This Building Block recognizes that fact and, if enabled, indicates a dynasty that needs more engagement from its players to remain viable, otherwise it goes Dormant to signal that there’s not enough participation to meaningfully continue that dynasty.

“Brick cloner” will copy this to the Building Blocks wiki page.

Proposal: Late Arrivals at the Nomicers’ Ball

If the proposal “A Dark Night” enacted, replace the bracketed text in the first bullet point of “Announcements of Attainment” with:-

(Nomicers with an Equity below zero, and Nomicers who were not Active when the current state of Lacuna began, are considered to have an Equity of zero for the purposes of these calculations.)

If the proposal “A Dark Night” failed, add the above bracketed text to the end of that first bullet point instead.

Hypothetical players who unidle during a Lacuna (and are given the average starting Equity) perhaps shouldn’t be included in its Roll Off.

Proposal: Lacustrine Cities

Unpopular, 2-5. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 22:42:39 UTC

Add the following as a subrule to the rule Announcements of Attainment, called Lacuna Protocols:

If the game is in Lacuna, and the Nomicer who posted the Announcement of Attainment no longer meets the criteria to make such a post, then as a Lacunaic Action any Nomicer may spend a Joker to make the following atomic action, called a Lacunaic De-escalation:

* Increase the numeral between the words “least” and “times” in the first sentence of the rule Announcements of Attainment by one
* Set the Jokers of all Nomicers to 3
* Make a post to the blog announcing that the game has exited Lacuna.

Once that action has been completed, the game is no longer in a state of Lacuna.

The dynasty is only a week old. I don’t have a strong view as to whether a week is enough for this one of if there’s more meet on the bones that people are interested in exploring, so I thought I’d give you the option.

Proposal: A Dark Night

Popular, 8-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 22:40:44 UTC

To the first bullet point in “Announcements of Attainment”, add:-

(Nomicers with an Equity below zero are considered to have an Equity of zero for the purposes of these calculations.)

With Darknight at -3 Equity it’s not clear to me what “all Equity in the game” would total to, or what proportion that -3 would be of a larger positive number.

Proposal: Brick cloner

Popular, 8-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 22:38:49 UTC

Add the following to the end of the top-level text in the Building Blocks section:

Whenever the text of a Building Block rule is changed in the ruleset, or a new Building Block rule is added to the ruleset, those changes are also made to the Building Blocks page of the wiki.

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Proposal: [Core] [Appendix] The Emperor’s New Style

Unpopular, 2-5. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 18:30:04 UTC

In the core rule “Victory and Ascension”, change:

The Imperator’s Imperial Style, which if specified is a set of nonbinding guidelines that the Imperator is encouraged to follow, using the terms defined on the wiki page Imperial Styles.

to

The Imperator’s Imperial Style, which if specified is a set of nonbinding guidelines that the Imperator is encouraged to follow (possibly using terminology from the wiki page [[Imperial Styles]]).

(where the double square brackets represent a hyperlink to a wiki page).

In the definition of “Gamestate” in the subrule “Other” of the Appendix rule “Keywords”, change:

(except for the FAQ, the dynastic histories and discussion pages)

to

(except for the FAQ, the Imperial Styles page, the dynastic histories and discussion pages)

 

The limited set of Imperial Styles has been a problem for multiple Emperors recently – you might want a style that isn’t on the page, but the page is gamestate and so you can’t edit it. I can’t think of any exploits from editing the page, so this proposal makes the page in question non-gamestate, and also allows the specification of dynasty-specific styles that aren’t there and aren’t expected to be used in the future.

Story Post: Announcement of Attainment: A Lacuna

My Equity is 24, at least three times greater than the Float of 8.

Proposal: Saints and Sinners

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 18:27:51 UTC

In the rule “Actions”, add a subrule named “Peacekeeping” with the following text:

As Daily Action named Peacekeeping, a Nomicer who has exactly 1 Disc, and in the most recent 2 instances of performing an action that required spending a Disc that Nomicer did not reduce the Equity of another Nomicer as part those actions, may spend a Disc and immediately increase their Equity by the Standard Reward.

Encouraging Nomicers to not spend their last Disc before the refresh on Milling, but only if they haven’t been Milling recently.

Proposal: A proposal. full of sin

Failed, 1-4. Josh

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:35:21 UTC

Add a new subrule “Sinful Proposals” to “Actions”, placing it immediately after “Ladder Combo”:

The author of a proposal that was enacted within the previous 48 hours may spend 1 Disc to increase that author’s Equity by the number of Sins that appeared as words in that proposal minus 4. This action cannot be performed twice for the same proposal.

I wanted to make the Sins list matter more (currently its only purpose is blocking Ladder Combos). This mechanic should hopefully be safe now that we’ve fixed the bug that allows the addition of arbitrary Sins via EVC. The “enacted” here is to stop people overtly filling proposals full of Sins in order to make a profit – if you’re going to fill your proposal with Sins you only get a profit if it’s still good enough to enact (despite the potential risk of other Nomicers voting it down to deny the reward).

Proposal: Power of Love

Failed, 1-4. Josh

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:34:37 UTC

In rule “Discs and Jokers”, add a subrule called “Love Perspex” with the following text:

As a daily action, a Nomicer may remove 1 of their white perspex Discs and 1 of their red perspex Jokers from their Spendables, and then add 1 pink perspex Heart to their Spendables. As a weekly action, a Nomicer may remove may remove 5 pink perspex Hearts form Spendables to increase their Equity by 1.

Proposal: The Short Short

Reached Quorum, 5-1. Josh

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:33:40 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called The Troll:

At any time, up to one Nomicer may be a Troll, with the existence and identity of the Troll being privately tracked by the Imperator. If there is no Troll then the Imperator may randomly select a Nomicer to be the Troll and commuicate that fact privately to the selected Nomicer.

The Troll’s objective is to generate negative Equity. Whenever a Nomicer ceases to be the Troll through any means other than an Accusation, any negative Equity they earned while they were the Troll is both reverted and then added to their Equity.

As a Daily Communal Action, provided that they have not done so within the preceding 72 hours, any Nomicer who is not the Troll may post an Accusation, which is a post with a title comprised of the [Accusation] tag and the name of a single other Nomicer, and optionally body text setting out their reasons for believing that the named Nomicer is the Troll. All Nomicers may vote on an Accusation; if the number of FOR votes exceed the number of AGAINST votes on the Accusation after 48 hours, or if the number of FOR votes on the Accusation exceed Quorum at any time, then it is Enacted, may be marked as Enacted by any Admin, and the named Nomicer, if they were the Troll, ceases so to be so without their Equity being adjusted as per the second paragraph of this rule. If an Accusation has been open for 48 hours and has not been Enacted then it is Failed and may be marked as such by any Admin.

Proposal: [Appendix] False Until Proven True

Reached quorum, 5-0. Josh

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:32:02 UTC

In the rule “Numbers and Variables” in the Appendix section, after the text “blank (for a text string or list that may be blank),” insert the following text:

false (for variables or states that may only be either true or false),

Addressing a Laundry List item that’s marked High.

Proposal: Your Call Is Very Important To Us [Building Blocks]

Reached quorum and enacted, 5-1. Josh

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:29:25 UTC

Reword “Precondition Unidling” (both in the ruleset and in Building Blocks) to:-

Idle Nomicers may submit Calls for Judgement as if they were not idle; such CfJs are known as Precondition Calls, and should suggest terms (in the form of amendments to the ruleset and/or gamestate) on which the proposer would be willing to join the current dynasty. The proposer of a Precondition Call is not considered to have a vote on that CfJ while they remain idle.

If a Precondition Call enacts, the enacting admin must unidle its raiser before applying the Call’s effects. As an exception, this requirement does not apply where such an unidling would be impossible.

Changing these from proposals to CfJs means that they can be made during Hiatus, can be processed at a speed closer to regular unidle requests, and - perhaps most importantly - can’t be confused with Recusant Proposals. As things stand, the ruleset will interpret all Recusant Proposals as also being Precondition Unidling proposals.

Proposal: The Big Short

Arrow-Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 15:55:37 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called The Troll:

At any time, up to one Nomicer may be a Troll. If there is no Troll then the Imperator may randomly select a Nomicer to be the Troll and commuicate that fact privately to the selected Nomicer.

The Troll’s objective is to generate negative Equity. Whenever a Nomicer ceases to be the Troll through any means other than an Accusation, any negative Equity they earned while they were the Troll is both reverted and then added to their Equity.

As a Daily Communal Action, provided that they have not done so within the preceding 72 hours, any Nomicer who is not the Troll may post an Accusation, which is a post with a title comprised of the [Accusation] tag and the name of a single other Nomicer, and optionally body text setting out their reasons for believing that the named Nomicer is the Troll. All Nomicers may vote on an Accusation; if the number of FOR votes exceed the number of AGAINST votes on the Accusation after 48 hours, or if the number of FOR votes on the Accusation exceed Quorum at any time, then it is Enacted, may be marked as Enacted by any Admin, and the named Nomicer, if they were the Troll, ceases so to be so without their Equity being adjusted as per the second paragraph of this rule. If an Accusation has been open for 48 hours and has not been Enacted then it is Failed and may be marked as such by any Admin.

To do:
* How to stop being the Troll
* More ways of generating negative Equity
* Probably making it so that the Troll can’t cash in during a Lacuna

Story Post: Bounty Notice: Equity Laundering

Adminned at 02 Apr 2025 09:40:11 UTC

I will pay out bounties for proposals that successfully resolve any High Priority matters on the Laundry List, as it stands at 08h42 on 1 April 2025.

Call for Judgment: A Page Is Not A List

Popular, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 20:01:38 UTC

For each attempt to claim a Ladder Combo this dynasty whose target did not appear on the EFF Wordlist wiki page with 5 digits preceding it on the same line of that page, revert any gain of Equity and any addition to the list of Sins that resulted from the claim, and revert the reduction in Discs that occurred when spending a Disc to make that claim attempt.

The “Ladder Combo” rule requires the target to be a Ladder Word, and one of the conditions to be a Ladder Word is that it must be “on the EFF Word List”. This wording seems to refer to the list itself – not to the page containing it. (The text of the rule has “list” as a separate word, implying that it’s the list itself that matters, not anything that might be around it – further evidence that it refers to the list, not the page, is that the name of the page (“EFF Wordlist”) is slightly different. The text in the rule is not a link to the page, and if it were formatted as a link, it would be a broken link; if not for the fact that the page is mentioned in other rules, it would not appear from the rule’s current wording that it even could refer to a wiki page rather than a list.)

This is worded like it is to ensure that it doesn’t revert the proposals which were made as part of the claim attempt.

Proposal: A moodier proposal queue

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 23:41:49 UTC

Create a new dynastic rule, “The Tally”:

The Enactment Tally and Failure Tally are each publicly tracked numbers defaulting to 0.

Whenever a proposal is enacted, the Enactment Tally is increased by 1. Whenever a legal proposal is failed, the Failure Tally is increased by 1, unless the proposal was withdrawn using an arrow AGAINST icon.

The Nomicer Count is a number equal to the number of Nomicers (not including the Imperator), which is continuously calculated (rather than being publicly tracked).
Whenever the Enactment Tally is equal to or greater than the Nomicer Count, any Nomicer can reduce the Enactment Tally by the Nomicer Count and increase every Nomicer’s Equity by 1.
Whenever the Failure Tally is equal to or greater than the Nomicer Count, any Nomicer can reduce the Failure Tally by the Nomicer Count and reduce every Nomicer’s Equity by 1.

Reorder the ruleset by moving “Wording Fixes” to a location immediately after “The Tally”.

Another idea for global variables – it’s designed as a self-contained mechanic but I’m hoping that other things will start hooking into it, eventually. This also moves Wording Fixes to the end of the dynastic ruleset, because it feels like it belongs there (perhaps the normal Edit Window rule normally goes there), but it doesn’t feel like it’s worth using an entire proposal to move it.

Proposal: Variable Rewards

Popular, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 19:53:06 UTC

Add the following text to the (currently empty) dynastic rule “Actions”:

The Standard Reward is a publicly tracked number that can only be 1, 2, 3 or 4, and defaults to 2.

Add a new subrule, “Reward Manipulation”, to the dynastic rule “Actions”:

As a weekly action, a Nomicer can spend 1 Joker to increase or decrease the Standard Reward by 1.

In each of the dynastic rules “Golden Rule”, “Heightened Mill” and “Bounties”, replace all uses of the number “2” with “the Standard Reward”.

The dynasty disallows Nomicer-specific variables, but it’s quite light on mechanics at the moment, so I decided to add a global variable instead. “Dynastic rule” is specified explicitly because there are two rules named “bounties” (in case you were wondering, “dynastic” is not an EFF word).

Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Proposal: Careful Word Choice

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 16:40:55 UTC

In the rule Sins, replace the text

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins, being a list of words from the EFF Wordlist. The names of Sins are flavour text.

with

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins. The names of Sins are flavour text, and must be chosen from the possible roll results of the EFF Wordlist.

To prevent pulling from anything but the list itself when making Sins.

Proposal: [Core] Building Blocks are Non-Dynastic

Popular, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 16:38:14 UTC

In the rule Dynasties, replace the text “provided that they only have the effect of amending the non-dynastic ruleset” with

provided that they only have the effect of amending the non-dynastic ruleset and/or the Building Blocks page.

Proposal: Careful Word Choice

Popular, 6-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 16:35:15 UTC

In the rule Sins, replace the text

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins, being a list of words from the EFF Wordlist. The names of Sins are flavour text.

with the text

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins. The names of Sins are flavour text, and must be chosen from the possible roll results of the EFF Wordlist.

A quick fix to prevent pulling words from the page, instead of the list itself.

Proposal: No Freebies

Popular, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 16:31:50 UTC

In the rule Golden Rule after the third bullet point, add a new bullet point:

* if the proposal was withdrawn, less than 6 hours have passed since it was posted, and the Imperator has not commented on it, that Equity stays unchanged; otherwise

I suspect I’m not the only person to see this since it feels like a blatant hole in the Golden Rule. If the queue is empty, you can create a proposal, immediately withdraw it, then repeat twice more for a free 6 equity. Sure your next proposals could be trashed as a penalty, but if you do it in the final minutes of the dynasty, it’s a free six equity. This way, even if Josh doesn’t get around to seeing it, you at least need to slow it down significantly.

Proposal: Sinfighting

Popular, 6-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 15:26:27 UTC

In the rule “Ladder Combo”, remove the text “For each EVC on this proposal that includes a single word, add that word as a Sin.”

I don’t think it should be quite so easy to add blocking Sin entries, and this was unintentional anyway to include it in the rule. The original intention was as an instruction in the proposal enactment.

Raven1207, You Need to Mill Correctly

To Mill correctly, you need to put the actual Sin word itself in the edit comment when you Mill.

Proposal: Know the Odds

Found unpopular with 1-5 and fails -SingularByte

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 05:51:10 UTC

After the first paragraph of “Announcements of Attainment”, add a new paragraph:

When the game enters Lacuna, the Equity of each Nomicer is set to the value specified for that Nomicer’s Equity on the public Equity tracker. If a Nomicer believes that any of those values are incorrect, a Call for Judgement should be called to correct its value (and Calls for Judgement for this purpose can legally be made even if there is no dispute as to what the correct value is).

It’s quite probable that there are mistakes on the Equity tracker, or will be in the future – there have already been at least three incidents that cause them to be uncertain (SingularByte Laddering the flavor text field, the “is Milling legal?” discussion, and the mess-up with midnight last night). This is a problem because Roll Off requires the probabilities to be exactly correct – so if you use incorrect probabilities, e.g. because the tracker is wrong, the win isn’t actually awarded – and thus if the winner of the roll isn’t confident that the correct probabilities were used (and it seems hard to be confident of that), they can’t legally post a DoV and thus we will need a CFJ to fix the matter (or possibly the dynasty will fail to end correctly if the winner posts the DoV regardless).

Instead, let’s save time by doing an auto-“uphold” of the tracker as Lacuna is entered. That will give us 48 hours to do any corrections, which is enough time to pass a CFJ, and should hopefully ensure that the roll-off is uncontroversial.

What happened last night?

So, it turns out that the clock on my computer was wrong.

What I was attempting to do last night was – very early on Monday morning, mill Kevan at 00:00:01, then immediately after do a disc refresh (still early on Monday morning).

However, my actions instead occurred late on Sunday evening, because the clock was wrong. (A time server I contacted just recently said that my computer was set to 17:02:28 but the actual time was 17:01:45 – so my clock was 43 seconds fast.) The wiki’s clock appears to be accurate (I just tested it against a known-good time source), meaning that both my actions definitely happened on Sunday (even if the timestamp of 23:59:51 for the second action is slightly wrong, it won’t be out by 9 seconds).

As such, this means that some illegal actions were accidentally performed last night, but in order to revert-correct them, we need to work out exactly which actions were legal and which were illegal, and I am not confident that I have the right sequence, so I’d like someone to double-check before reverting. Here’s what I think happened:

- My Mill at 23:59:20 was illegal because Milling is a daily action, and I had already performed a Mill earlier that day at 13:50:30;
- My Disc Refresh at 23:59:51 was legal, even though it didn’t happen in the intended week – there was not a Disc Refresh earlier that week (as far as I can tell) and “Six Shots or Only Five” did not prevent Disc Refreshes being performed the week that it was enacted. (We really need a Warning List or the like – that particular breakage has been repeated numerous times in BlogNomic’s history, both accidentally and intentionally.)
- Kevan’s Mill at 07:55:58 was therefore an action that could legally be performed. Kevan set his Discs from 3 to 2 as part of the action, which were the correct numbers.
- Kevan’s Disc Refresh at 07:56:02‎ was, due to a core rules bug, legally performed. You cannot perform a weekly action within 24 hours of taking the same action (Appendix: “If a game action is a Weekly Action, each Nomicer able to perform it may take that action once each week, but not more than once every twenty-four hours.”) However, the same restriction does not apply to weekly communal actions, as long as the two uses of the action are performed by different players (Appendix: “A Weekly Communal action is a Weekly Action that can only be performed by one Nomicer per week.”, with no restriction on two different players teaming up to perform it both sides of midnight.)

Is all that correct, and if so, is the only action that needs reverting my Mill of Kevan? (And if so, how is the revert done? I think it should probably be done under “In the event that the Gamestate and its representations are different, any Nomicer may correct the representations to comply with the Gamestate.” because the other mechanism, “Undo the effects of any alteration that led to it, if that alteration did not follow the rules at the time it was made.”, would as far as I can tell leave me with 4 Discs.)

Proposal: Three Discs Per Week

Found unpopular with 1-6 and fails -SingularByte

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 05:50:21 UTC

Change the text of “Discs and Jokers” to read as follows:

Each Nomicer has a number of white perspex Discs, and a number of red perspex Jokers. These are publicly tracked and both default to 3.

As a weekly communal action named Disc Refresh, any Nomicer or the Imperator may set every Nomicer’s Discs to 3. Actions that spend or reduce a Nomicer’s Discs cannot be performed unless a Disc Refresh has happened earlier in the same week.

Change the history of the gamestate such that the first action (other than tracker corrections) performed this week that increased any Nomicer’s Discs is considered to have been a Disc Refresh action.

An alternative to “Trouble at Mill” and “Set your Watch” – this ensures that the Disc Refresh must be performed before Discs can be spent, effectively making it automatically happen at midnight, and restoring the original intention of the “three days a week” mechanic.

Proposal: [Building Blocks] Driving Engagement

Withdrawn, with 5 arrows to 3 crosses. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 03:27:03 UTC

On the wiki page Building Blocks add a new rule named “Official Posts Required” with the following text:

An Admin may render a Nomicer Idle if that Nomicer has not posted an Official Post in the past 168 Hours (7 days).

Copy the rule “Official Posts Required” from the Building Blocks wiki page to a subrule of the same name under the Building Blocks section.

Per the discussion in the #blognomic-general channel on Discord, there may be times where active players should be determined not only by comments and votes, but also by engagement via Proposals and CfJs as a sign that those active players are actually paying attention and not just following the crowd with their votes. Might as well just lump in any Official Post as the minimum bar. Want to try that in this dynasty?

Proposal: Set Your Watch

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 03:18:26 UTC

If “Trouble at Mill” was not enacted, the rest of this Proposal has no effect.

In “Discs and Jokers”, before the text “the Imperator may set every Nomicer’s Discs to 3”, replace “As a weekly action” with “As an action named Disc Refresh”.

In the same rule, add the following text:

There is a Refresh Time which is a number privately tracked by the Imperator that defaults to 168. As a Weekly Action, the Imperator should privately roll DICE48, subtract the result of that roll from 168, set the Refresh Time to that roll. If Disc Refresh has never been performed by the Imperator, or it has been at least Refresh Time hours since the Imperator has last done so, the Imperator should perform Disc Refresh, subject to any other restrictions already mentioned.

I like Kevan’s idea, and this adds some randomness to the Imperator’s refresh of the Discs, to avoid Nomicers simply guessing the pattern of when the refresh will happen.

Proposal: Trouble at Mill

Popular, 5-1. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 01 Apr 2025 03:16:22 UTC

In “Mill”, change “As a Daily Action, a Nomicer may spend a Disc” to:-

At any time, a Nomicer may spend a Disc

In “Discs and Jokers”, replace “As a weekly communal action, any Nomicer may set every Nomicer’s Discs to 3.” with:-

As a weekly action, the Imperator may set every Nomicer’s Discs to 3. (This action may not be performed before 7 April 2025. The Imperator may repeal this bracketed text if it is after that date.)

We’re already at the stage of Ais523 performing both of these actions at 23:59 in the hope that others wouldn’t have time to react to them. Maybe we should move towards allowing Discs to be spent freely, and giving the Imperator the bag so that players can’t control when they refresh.

Does 24 hours cross between weeks?

I know that a Week ends on a Sunday, but doesn’t Weekly’s prohibition on “not more than once every twenty-four hours” still count if the first instance was near the end of Sunday night and the next instance is less than 24 hours later Monday morning?

ais did the Weekly refresh of discs on 23:59, March 30, 2025 and then Kevan did it 07:56, March 31, 2025. I’m just trying to determine if I misunderstood the rules or not before attempting to revert Kevan’s refresh.

Proposal: No Self-Laddering

Popular, 7-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 22:38:51 UTC

In the rule Ladder Combo, reword the second paragraph to:

As a daily action, a Nomicer may claim a Ladder Combo by spending a Disc and then (within an hour) posting a Proposal, here referred to as a Claim Proposal, that contains a Ladder Word. In the comments to that proposal they should highlight the specific word that they are claiming as the target of their Ladder Combo. They then gain the value of the claimed Ladder Word as Equity and make the claimed Ladder Word a Sin. A Claim Proposal cannot be posted by a Nomicer if the proposal immediately prior to it is also authored by that Nomicer.

I know that Josh has said he’ll trash any proposal that’s blatantly attempting to score ladder combos, but this adds some extra insurance to it.
EDIT: Typo fix as discussed in the comments. If anyone objects, let me know and I’ll re-propose.

Proposal: Frequent Sinners

Unpopular due to less than a quorum not voting against, 1-5. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 22:38:19 UTC

Reword the rule Sins to:

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins, being a list of words from the EFF Wordlist. The names of Sins are flavour text. Each Sin has a Prevalance which is an integer, defaulting to 1.

If a Nomicer is required to Record a Sin when making a gamestate change, they must indicate in the edit summary of that wiki edit a word from the EFF Wordlist; if that word does not already appear in the Sins list, they may add it to that list at the same time. Whenever a Sin is Recorded, if it was already on the list of Sins, its prevalance is increased by 1.

If a Sin would ever be added to the list of Sins when it is already a member of that list, the prevalance is instead increased by 1. If the Prevalance of a Sin is 0, that Sin may be removed by the Imperator or by any Nomicer.

 

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Proposal: Tabula Rasa

Enacted popular, 5-0. Josh

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 14:30:04 UTC

Decrease each Nomicer’s Equity by 5.

Maybe we should have started these at zero, so that a baseline player who has not attempted to gain any Equity at all should have a 0% chance of winning the Roll Off rather than (at time of writing) 7.8%.

Call for Judgment: Missing a Rung

Found unpopular with 1-5 and failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 05:17:52 UTC

Remove 2 Equity from the Nomicer named SingularByte and add 1 Disc to the Spendables of the Nomicer named SingularByte.

Remove “Target” from the list of Sins.

From the Appendix:

Commentary

When posting a blog entry, a Nomicer may use the “Commentary or flavour text” field of the blog publishing form to add their own comments or description of their post. For the purposes of all other rules, such text is not considered to be part of the post.

Thus, the “Commentary or flavour text” field is not part of the post and cannot be used in a Ladder Combo.

Proposal: Edit the Edits

Withdrawn. Josh

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 14:28:42 UTC

In the rule Wording Fixes, replace the phrase

arrow AGAINST icon

with

arrow REVISE icon

wherever it appears in the rule. Also, replace the phrase

(the “arrow” AGAINST icon)

with

(the “arrow” REVISE icon)

in the first sentence.

Suggested in a comment by Josh.

Edit the Edits

In the rule Wording Fixes, replace the phrase

arrow AGAINST icon

with

arrow REVISE icon

wherever it appears in the rule. Also, replace the phrase

(the “arrow” AGAINST icon)

with

(the “arrow” REVISE icon)

in the first sentence.

Suggested in a comment by Josh.

Proposal: [Core] Objective CFJs and DoVs

Cannot be enacted with five AGAINST votes. Josh
Proposal mistakenly marked with the Enacted status, so I’ve altered it -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 14:31:35 UTC

In the core rule “Fair Play”, change

A Nomicer should not make a DoV primarily to delay the game by putting it into Hiatus.

to

A Nomicer should not make a DoV unless they believe that they have achieved victory in the current Dynasty or that other Nomicers generally believe them to have achieved victory in the current Dynasty.

In the core rule “Victory and Ascension”, change

If a Nomicer (other than the Imperator) believes that they have achieved victory in the current Dynasty, they may make a Declaration of Victory (abbreviated “DoV”) detailing this, by posting an entry in the “Declaration of Victory” category.

to

A Nomicer other than the Imperator may make a Declaration of Victory (abbreviated “DoV”) by posting an entry in the “Declaration of Victory” category. Nomicers should not do this unless they believe they have achived victory in the current dynasty; making a DoV in other situations does not invalidate the DoV, but may be a violation of the “Fair Play” rule.

In the core rule “Calls for Judgement”, change

If two or more Nomicers actively disagree as to the interpretation of the Ruleset, or if a Nomicer feels that an aspect of the game needs urgent attention, then any Nomicer may raise a Call for Judgement (abbreviated “CfJ”) by posting an entry in the “Call for Judgement” category.

to

Any Nomicer may raise a Call for Judgement (abbreviated “CfJ”) by posting an entry in the “Call for Judgement” category. The intended uses for CfJs are resolving disputes, fixing gamestate errors, and addressing matters that need urgent attention; posting a CfJ in other situations does not invalidate the CfJ, but Nomicers are encouraged to vote AGAINST.

The current rules for CfJs and DoVs can cause an attempt to make them to fail based on subjective requirements (whether the player believes they have won, whether a matter needs urgent attention), and that can make it uncertain whether or not a CfJ or DoV is valid. This proposal fixes the issue via allowing the CfJ or DoV to be valid regardless (and moves the requirement to DoV only if you think you’ve won to Fair Play).

Proposal: Correctly mistaken

Reaches quorum 5-0 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 05:22:53 UTC

Change the text of “Golden Rule” to read as follows (where “*” represents the start of a list item):

Whenever a proposal is resolved, the Equity of the Nomicer who posted it changes as follows:
* if the Imperator’s EVC on that proposal contained the word “trash”, that Equity reduces by 2; otherwise
* if the Imperator’s EVC on that proposal contained the word “self-fix”, that Equity stays unchanged; otherwise
* if the proposal was withdrawn with an arrow AGAINST icon, that Equity stays unchanged; otherwise
* that Equity increases by 2.

Currently, making a mistake in a proposal and then fixing it yourself gains 4 Equity, whereas getting it right first time gains 2 Equity, which is something of a perverse incentive to make mistakes in proposals – that shouldn’t be rewarded more highly than getting it right first time. As such, this gives the Imperator an option to deny Equity for a proposal that is fixing another proposal by the same Nomicer.

Proposal: C-C-C-Combo Breaker

Reaches quorum 6-2 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 05:20:25 UTC

At the end of the rule Ladder Combo, append the text:

For that Ladder Word to be considered to be in a given proposal, it must appear in the body of the proposal rather than the proposal’s “Flavour text” field.

It’s easy to hit a ladder combo target if you can just snipe it in the flavour text. Let’s make it harder.

Proposal: [Core] Making Failure Less Painful

Reaches quorum 7-1 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 05:18:42 UTC

In the rule Victory and Ascension, replace “120 hours (5 days)” with “72 hours (3 days)”.

As discussed in ReDoVery, instead of changing the criteria for hitting the 5 day lockout, we could instead make the duration of the lockout the target of the change.

Proposal: The Middle Way

Found unpopular and failed with 2-4 and 1 unresolved def -SingularByte

Adminned at 31 Mar 2025 05:16:15 UTC

In the rule “Actions”, add a subrule named “Balance” with the following text:

As a Daily Action, a Nomicer may spend a Disc to reduce the Equity of another Nomicer by 2 provided that Nomicer had more Equity than themselves before the reduction; if they do so they may then immediately increase their own Equity by 1 and must then immediately increase the Equity of another Nomicer who has less Equity than themselves by 1.

Semi-cooperative Milling, in which you not only need to target someone doing better than you (as opposed to regular Milling in which the leaders can further push down those who are behind), but you also help out someone else who’s behind.

I intentionally did not add Record the Sin to this one. If you want to make use of that to construct a Ladder Word, you have to use the regular Mill action.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Proposal: I Rung Back

Reaches quorum with 6-0 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:31:17 UTC

If Proposal: You Rung was not enacted then this proposal has no effect.

In the rule Ladder Combo, immediately before the text “and which is not a Sin”, add:

which is on the EFF Word List,

Proposal: You Rung

Reaches quorum with 7-0 and is enacted -SingularByte
Edit: Put the wrong vote score. This is now corrected. -SB

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:32:48 UTC

If Proposal: Thou Shalt Not Zipfile was not enacted then this proposal has no further effect.

Add the following as a new subrule under the rule Actions, called Ladder Combo:

A Ladder Word is a word that appears in a proposal, that also appears in the proposal immediately preceding it in the queue, and which is not a Sin. The value of a Ladder Word is the number of consecutive proposals that have included the word immediately prior to the Proposal in which it was claimed for a Ladder Combo, not including said Proposal itself.

As a daily action, a Nomicer may claim a Ladder Combo by spending a Disc and then (within an hour) posting a Proposal that contains a Ladder Word. In the comments to that proposal they should highlight the specific word that they are claiming as the target of their Ladder Combo. They then gain the value of the claimed Ladder Word as Equity and make the claimed Ladder Word a Sin.

For each EVC on this proposal that includes a single word, add that word as a Sin.

Proposal: None Shall Pass

Reaches quorum with 7-0 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:25:46 UTC

In “Equity”, replace “No other publicly tracked dynastic variables held by individual Nomicers may be proposed in this dynasty.” with:-

Nomicers should not make proposals which do any of the following:

* Create any new publicly tracked dynastic variable held by individual Nomicers.
* Add any way to gain or remove Chips or Jokers, outside of Nomicers spending them to perform game actions.

Other Nomicers are encouraged to vote against such proposals, and the Imperator may freely veto them.

Per earlier comments on this, making new-variable proposals possible but doomed, rather than platonically invalid. (I had to squint at How Not To Write Proposals to decide whether “the author of the earliest-created Warning that that proposal matches” counted as a kind of publicly-tracked Nomicer variable, and whether I should mark it as an invalid proposal. I’m still not 100% sure.)

Rolling in Jonathan’s suggestion on Six Shots or Only Five, although allowing them to be spent on other actions seems okay.

Proposal: Thou Shalt Not Zipfile

Reaches quorum 6-1 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:22:43 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Sins”:-

There is a publicly-tracked list of Sins, being a list of words from the [[EFF Wordlist]]. The names of Sins are flavour text.

If a Nomicer is required to Record a Sin when making a gamestate change, they must indicate in the edit summary of that wiki edit a word from the EFF Wordlist; if that word does not already appear in the Sins list, they may add it to that list at the same time.

In “Mill”, replace “reduce the Equity of another Nomicer by 1” with:-

reduce the Equity of another Nomicer by 1 and Record the Sin that they view this Nomicer as having performed

Requiring a word of context for each Mill action.

Proposal: How not to write proposals

Withdrawn and therefore failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:20:47 UTC

Create a new rule, “Warnings”:

The wiki page [[Warning List]] is gamestate (but the contents of that page are not rules and have no effect on gameplay except as detailed in this rule), and may only be updated as permitted by the ruleset. The Warning List is intended to contain a list of common mistakes in proposal-writing, and Nomicers are encouraged to review it prior to submitting proposals.

As a daily action, a Nomicer may create a new section at the end of the Warning List wiki page, including the following details:
* a section heading of that Nomicer’s choice, which does not duplicate the heading of any existing section on that page; and
* a truthful statement that specifies which Nomicer created the section; and
* a description of a property that a proposal might have, that the Nomicer creating the section sees as undesirable; and
* an explanation of why the Nomicer creating the section sees that property as undesirable.

Such a section is known as a Warning. A proposal “matches” a Warning if it has the property described in that Warning.

To encourage Nomicers to avoid writing proposals that match Warnings: if a proposal that matches at least one Warning is resolved as Failed or Illegal, the author of that proposal loses 4 Equity, the author of the earliest-created Warning that that proposal matches gains 3 Equity, and (unless the proposal was failed by the Imperator) the admin who failed the proposal gains 1 Equity.

To encourage Nomicers to avoid writing Warnings that match desirable proposals: if a proposal that matches at least one Warning is resolved as Enacted, all those matched Warnings are deleted from the Warning List, and each Nomicer who created at least one of those matched Warnings loses 3 Equity.

If there is a wiki page Warning List, blank it (or leave it alone if it is already blank); if there isn’t, create it as a blank page.

I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be good to have a list of common mistakes in proposal-writing available (some mistakes seem to come up again and again), and because this is something of a “pure-nomic” dynasty I thought it might be fun to gamify it.

The 1 Equity for the enacting admin is meant as compensation for the extra work that admins may have to do – in previous dynasties with a similar mechanic, we’ve found that such a reward is helpful.

Proposal: Divide and Conquer

Withdrawn and therefore failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:19:40 UTC

Add a new rule named “Challenges” with the following text:

A Challenge is a Story Post with a title that begins with the text “Challenge” in the title. A Challenge may be Open or Closed and is Open by default. While a Challenge is Open, no other Challenges may be submitted.

As a Weekly Communal Action, any Nomicer or the Imperator may submit a Challenge by performing the following steps as an atomic action:
* Roll 2DICEN, where N is the current Float. The result is the Reward for that Challenge.
* Create a Story Post with a title that begins with the text “Challenge” and a body indicating the amount of the Reward from the preceding step.

Each Nomicer has an Attack Commit and a Defense Commit, which are both numbers privately tracked by the Imperator that default to 0. While a Challenge is Open, any Nomicer may Attack any number of times by privately informing the Imperator of their Attack Commit, which is a number between 1 and their Equity, and then posting a comment on that Challenge that contains only a single instance of the text “I Commit my Attack”. Similarly, any Nomicer may Defend any number of times by privately informing the Imperator of their Defense Commit, which is a number between 1 and their Equity, and posting a comment on that Challenge that contains only a single instance of the text “I Commit my Defense”.

If there have been no Nomicers who Attacked or Defended an Open Challenge for the past 48 hours, the Imperator may perform a Tally on that Challenge. A Tally is an atomic action with the following steps:
* Post a comment to that Challenge with the text “This Challenge is Closed”.
* For each Nomicer that Attacked or Defended that Challenge, if their Equity is less than their Attack Commit plus their Defense Commit, set both their Attack Commit and Defense Commit to 0, and consider them as not having Attacked or Defended that Challenge.
* For each Nomicer that Attacked that Challenge, subtract their Attack Commit from their Equity.
* For each Nomicer that Defended that Challenge, subtract their Defense Commit from their Equity.
* Calculate the Offense, which is the sum of all Attack Commits of all Nomicers who Attacked that Challenge.
* Calculate the Defense, which is the sum of all Defense Commits of all Nomicers who Defended that Challenge.
* If the Offense is greater than the Defense of that Challenge, add the Reward to the Offense, then divide the result by the number of Nomicers who Attacked in that Challenge, rounding down to the nearest integer, then add this result to the Equity of each of the Nomicers who Attacked in that Challenge.
* If the Defense is greater than the Offense of that Challenge, add the Reward to the Defense, then divide the result by the number of Nomicers who Defended in that Challenge, rounding down to the nearest integer, then add this result to the Equity of each of the Nomicers who Defended in that Challenge.
* Post a comment to that Challenge detailing the Attack and Defense Commits of all Nomicers who Attacked and Defended that Challenge, respectively, as well as the Equity increases for each Nomicer from the previous steps.

A Challenge is Closed once a Tally has been performed on it.

You can either join Nomicers on one side of the Attack or Defend and split the Reward, or you can attempt to compete with Nomicers for the Reward by joining the other side, but you may also find that the refund of your Attack or Defense Commits gets diminished by a Nomicer on your side who committed less to Attack or Defense than you did.

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Vote Counter Live on the Blog!

Hi everyone! I’ve been working hard on the successor to the BlogNomic Utility Script, which includes a new and improved design for the vote counter. It’s now integrated into the blog, so you should start seeing the vote counter on Proposals and DoVs.

If for some reason you want to disable it, you can toggle it off/on from the sidebar, or move it above the post content instead of below. These settings are tied to your browser, not your account, so for instance you can have it below the post on desktop but above the post on mobile.

In addition to the vote counter, it also highlights EVCs on posts for your convenience. If anyone has any feedback or suggestions, please let me know!

Proposal: [Core] ReDoVery

Found unpopular with 3-5 and failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:18:05 UTC

In the core rule “Victory and Ascension”, change

If a DoV is Failed and it had at least one AGAINST vote

to

If a DoV is Failed and it had more AGAINST votes than FOR votes

We’ve had occasional issues in the past in which a DoV failed despite a generally acknowledged win. This can either happen due to the DoV becoming illegal (e.g. because it was illegally edited) or because it didn’t receive enough votes (e.g. under the current rules, if some players fail to vote on a DoV, it can fail despite having mostly FOR votes; under some past rulesets the requirement was higher, making that more ilkely). Meanwhile, the 5-day lockout on consecutive DoVs is a fairly large punishment for a failing DoV (and the scam that it’s trying to solve is nowadays addressed in the Fair Play rules), which is disproportionate to how easy it is to trigger accidentally – it’s also fairly bad for the game if it does trigger, because 5 days is often enough time to win some other way when we’re late enough in the dynasty for serious DoV attempts to be made, and then a CFJ would be needed to remove the lockout in order to avoid having to wait the timer out. As such, this proposal changes the lockout to only happen if the DoV received a meaningful level of opposition.

Proposal: Six Shots or Only Five

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 13:12:23 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Discs and Jokers”:-

Each Nomicer has a number of white perspex Discs, and a number of red perspex Jokers. These are publicly tracked and both default to 3.

As a weekly communal action, any Nomicer may set every Nomicer’s Discs to 3.

In “Mill”, replace “but no more than three times a week, a Nomicer may reduce the Equity” with:-

a Nomicer may spend a Disc to reduce the Equity

In “Heightened Mill”, replace “but no more than three times in the dynasty, a Nomicer may reduce the Equity” with:-

a Nomicer may spend a Joker to reduce the Equity

Getting in under the wire of Stepping In To Assist’s ban on “publicly tracked dynastic variables”, to make these two “no more than three times” limits visibly trackable, so that we (and later arrivals) can easily see who has and hasn’t used them yet.

Proposal: Equity Guard

Reached quorum 6 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 11:00:11 UTC

In “Equity”, replace

A Nomicer’s Equity can have any integer value between -10 and twice their Liability, inclusive.

with:-

A Nomicer’s Equity can have any integer value between -10 and 200 inclusive. If a Nomicer’s Equity would be increased above twice their Liability, it is instead set to twice their Liability.

Something strange is going to happen once a player’s Equity is at twice their Liability and we try to decrease the Equity of (or just idle) another player, because doing so will mean that first player’s Equity now holds an invalid value.

And the ruleset doesn’t seem to say how to handle that situation - it falls outside of both “the action would change one or more of those values to an illegal value” and “the rules that define a game variable are amended, and some previously valid values become invalid as a consequence”.

Proposal: Mood swings

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 05:33:00 UTC

Create a dynastic rule called Tempers:

There exists three Tempers: Ruminative, Restless and Gregarious.

Each Nomicer has their Temper publicly tracked, which may be one of these three or it may be blank. It defaults to blank.

As a daily acion, a Nomicer may change their Temper to a value which they have not held at any point in the preceding 12 hours. When they do so, if they have changed it to a Temper value that is shared between more Nomicers than any other Temper, they must change the Temper of one of those Nomicers to a valid non-blank value.

I’m not sure how deep the pure nomic theming goes, but I figure we need something to work off of. Since a lot of us can be quite contrarian, you can’t have too many people holding a given temper at once.

Proposal: Lending a Hand

Withdrawn. Failed by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 05:31:32 UTC

If “First steps” was not enacted, the rest of this Proposal has no effect.

Add a subrule to the rule “Actions” named “Assist” with the following text:

As a Daily Action, but no more than three times a week, a Nomicer may increase the Equity of another Nomicer by 1, provided the Nomicer performing this increase has not reduced the Equity of that other Nomicer within the past 72 hours; if they do so they may then immediately increase their own Equity by 2.

In the rule “Mill”, after the text “a Nomicer may reduce the Equity of another Nomicer by 1” add the following text:

, provided the Nomicer performing this reduction has not increased the Equity of that other Nomicer within the past 72 hours

Proposal: Connecting Strings

Popular, 8-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 05:28:11 UTC

If “First steps” was not enacted, the rest of this Proposal has no effect.

In the rule “Lacunaic Actions”, add the following text:

Any actions described in subrules to this rule are considered Lacunaic Actions.

Tying up a loose end

Mentorship Announcement

DoomedIdeas will be mentored by JonathanDark.

Proposal: Stepping in to assist

Enacted 8-0, unanimous vote. -Zack

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 02:37:26 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule above all other dynastic rules called Equity:

Each Nomicer has a publicly-tracked score called Equity. Each Nomicer also has a derived statistic called Liability, which is the sum of all Equity held by Nomicers other than themselves, and which is not tracked but is calculated when needed. The median amount of Equity in the game, rounded down, is called the Float.

A Nomicer’s Equity can have any integer value between -10 and twice their Liability, inclusive. The default starting Equity for a new Nomicer is their Libaility, divided by the number of Nomicers including themselves, rounded up to the nearest integer.

No other publicly tracked dynastic variables held by individual Nomicers may be proposed in this dynasty.

Add a new dynastic rule, Announcements of Attainment, above all other dynastic rules except Equity:

At any time, provided that they have an Equity that is at least 5 times greater than the Float, any Nomicer may make a post with a title that starts with “Announcement of Attainment” in the story post category. When a Nomicer has made such a post in this way, the game is placed into a state of Lacuna, in which the only dynastic actions that can be taken are Lacunaic Actions.

When the game has been in Lacuna for 48 consecutive hours, as a Lacunaic Action, any Nomicer or the Imperator may perform the Roll Off atomic action, which has the following steps:
* Make a post summarising the Equity held by each Nomicer. Include in the post description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer, such that each Nomicer has a chance of being selected equal to their Equity as a proportion of all Equity in the game.
* Make the dice roll as described in the post made in the first step of this action;
* Make a comment to that post announcing the Nomicer selected by the dice roll as determined by the heuristic described in the post. The Nomicer so selected has Achieved Victory.

As a Weekly Communal Action, any Nomicer or the Imperator may reduce the numeral between the words “least” and “times” in the first sentence of this rule by one.

Set the Equity of all players to 5.

Re-proposing Josh’s first proposal, since everything will likely hinge off of it. Hopefully that’s all the faults in it fixed.

Proposal: Instead of Edits

Enacted 8-0 with 3 resolved DEFs. -Zack

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 02:04:25 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule, “Wording Fixes”:

This dynasty, the voting icons https://blognomic.com/images/vote/against.gif (the “cross” AGAINST icon) and https://blognomic.com/images/vote/arrow.gif (the “arrow” AGAINST icon) are both considered to be AGAINST voting icons. Nomicers are encouraged to use a cross AGAINST icon when voting against a proposal due to disagreement with the general idea behind the proposal; and to use an arrow AGAINST icon when voting against a proposal for which they agree with the general idea behind the proposal, but disagree with the details or with the exact wording.

If a proposal’s author withdraws it using an arrow AGAINST icon, and there were at least as many arrow AGAINST icons as cross AGAINST icons among the other (non-author) Nomicers’ Votes on that proposal at the time, then the proposal ceases to count against that author’s limit of 2 pending proposals and can be failed by any Admin, even if it is not the oldest pending proposal. The author should submit a corrected version. (If a proposal’s author is planning to withdraw a proposal, but not to submit a corrected version, they should withdraw it using a cross rather than arrow AGAINST icon.) Proposal authors are encouraged to wait at least 8 hours before withdrawing them and submitting a corrected version, in case more mistakes that need correction are discovered (although this is not a requirement).

If there is a rule “Golden Rule”, append the following sentence to the end of its only paragraph: “This Equity gain does not occur for proposals that were withdrawn with an arrow AGAINST icon (this does not prevent an Equity loss occurring).”

An edit window alternative I found lying around on my hard drive, and adapted to this dynasty – players can vote AGAINST proposals either on the principle or on the wording, and if the principle is popular but there are wording issues, the proposal can have its slot refunded and be resubmitted.

This might be a good Building Block if it works well, but I think it’s probably better to try it as a dynastic rule first.

Proposal: First steps

Enacted 8-0, unanimous vote. -Zac

Adminned at 29 Mar 2025 02:01:17 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called Actions, with no text. Add a subrule to it called Mill:

As a Daily Action, but no more than three times a week, a Nomicer may reduce the Equity of another Nomicer by 1; if they do so they may then immediately increase their own Equity by 1.

Add another subrule to the rule Actions, called Golden Rule:

Whenever a proposal is resolved the Nomicer who posted it gains 2 Equity, unless the Imperator’s EVC on that proposal contained the word ‘trash’, in which case the proposer loses 2 Equity.

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called Lacunaic Actions, with no text. Add a subrule to it called Heightened Mill:

As a Daily Action, but no more than three times in the dynasty, a Nomicer may reduce the Equity of another Nomicer other than the Nomicer who posted the Announcement of Attainment by 2; if they do so they may then immediately increase their own Equity by 2.

Add a new dynastic rule to the ruleset, called Bounties:

The Bounty Payout action for all Bounties is to increase the Equity of the Nomicer to whom it is applied by 2.

Proposal: You will have a number that tells you exactly how much you are winning

Withdrawn and failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 28 Mar 2025 12:27:09 UTC

Add a new dynastic rule, called Equity:

Each Nomicer has a publicly-tracked score called Equity. Each Nomicer also has a derived statistic called Liability, which is the sum of all Equity held by Nomicers other than themselves, and which is not tracked but is calculated when needed. The median amount of Equity in the game, rounded down, is called the Float.

A Nomicer’s Equity can have any integer value between -10 and twice their Liability, inclusive. The default starting Equity for a new Nomicer is one their Libaility, divided by the number of Nomicers including themselves, rounded up to the nearest integer.

No other publicly tracked dynastic variables held by individual Nomicers may be proposed in this dynasty.

Add a new dynastic rule, called Announcements of Attainment:

At any time, provided that they have an Equity that is at least 5 times greater than the Float, any Nomicer may make an Announcement of Attainment. When a Nomicer has made an Announcement of Attainment the game is placed into a state of Lacuna, in which the only dynastic actions that can be taken are Lacunaic Actions.

When the game has been in Lacuna for 48 consecutive hours, as a Lacunaic Action, any Nomicer or the Imperator may perform the Roll Off atomic action, which has the following steps:
* Make a post summarising the Equity held by each Nomicer. Include in the post description or table that plainly maps how the result of a dice roll will select a single Nomicer, such that each Nomicer has a chance of being selected equal to their Equity as a proportion of all Equity in the game.
* Make the dice roll as described in the post made in the first step of this action;
* Make a comment to that post announcing the Nomicer selected by the dice roll as determined by the heuristic described in the post. The Nomicer so selected has Achieved Victory.

As a Weekly Communal Action, any Nomicer or the Imperator may reduce the numeral between the words “least” and “times” in the first sentence of this rule by one.

Ascension Address: Unequal Rights

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
—Plutarch

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
—Benjamin Franklin

“The only thing that makes life unfair is the delusion that it should be fair.”
—Steve Maraboli

“Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.”
—Peter Suber

Change the term Seeker to Nomicer and the term Custodian to Imperator, wherever they appear in the ruleset. Repeal all dynastic rules. Activate the following Building Blocks: Bounties, Reinitialisation, Precondition Unidling. Change the Gamestate Tracking page to the SNDT page in the wiki.

Imperial styles… Provocateur. Libertarian. Powerhouse. Scam-Neutral. Oblivious. Wildcard. Very happy to take on private tracking and mechanically important roles as needed.

Unidle Request

Hello! I officially request to be unidled. Thank you!

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Proposal: [Appendix] Stop Being So Negative

With 1-4, this is Unpopular and therefore fails -SingularByte

Adminned at 28 Mar 2025 12:26:34 UTC

In the Appendix, in the rule “Numbers and Variables”, add the following bullet point:

* If a variable is defined as an integer, it may not be set to a negative number unless explicitly allowed by the ruleset

 

Addressing an item in the Laundry List regarding the use of integer variables. Full discussion in Zero as a Limit for reference.

Proposal: Louche Recusants

Oh dang, this is actually illegal, as it changes the Building Blocks page which is not part of “the non-dynastic ruleset”. Well, we’re trying something new! Josh

Adminned at 27 Mar 2025 22:56:36 UTC

In the Precondition Unidling rule in both the Building Blocks section of the Ruleset and the Building Blocks wiki page, change the term “Proposal” wherever it appears to “CfJ”.

What Is Victory, Really?

In Josh’s DoV, ais suggested that achieving victory is not gamestate and thus not actionable via a Proposal enactment. If that were true, how could any dynastic rule specify a way for a player to achieve victory that would be regulated by the ruleset? Is the achievement of victory a special non-gamestate “condition”?

I’d like to understand this more and determine the nature of achieving victory as currently defined by the ruleset.

Reflecting on Life

Comments on the dynasty here

Declaration of Victory: A walking shadow, a poor player

Unanimous, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark.

Adminned at 27 Mar 2025 19:12:35 UTC

Through the passage of Here comes a candle to light you to bed, I have achieved Victory.