BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Is there any danger of this revealing private player stats, if we declare them carelessly, or if other variables which are calculated from them aren’t declared as private?

Looking at the ruleset, a player’s Hand may actually be an orphan variable right now - under the current Orphan rule we’d be forced to fix that; under the public-by-default, I’d instead be required to reveal all active players’ current Hands.

all something needs to keep from being an orphan variable is to have a place where it’s tracked, right? i’d say that player’s hands are tracked in PMs– but i guess the ruleset doesn’t *specify* that’s where they’re tracked, does it, and that’s also a stipulation

huh

I think that neither outcome is ideal, but that no solution is fully ideal, as they’re all catches for an imperfect set of circumstances; this deals with the issue in a neater way than the status quo.

I’m not sure that the Hands example is ideal as I don’t think that they’re an orphan variable, on the grounds that they are privately tracked (“Privately inform both Participants of their Hand” establishes that there is a documentary record of the hands being generated and distributed). But I do take the point that privately tracked info can be improperly set out in the ruleset, and this creates a risk. The mitigation to it is that, because such info would be privately held, it can’t just be spilled by fiat; the entity holding it can chose to hold onto it until a CfJ passes, if they wish.

Where’s that choice coming from - that it “may be considered to be publicly tracked”, and that if the information holder personally declines that consideration (even if some players would very much want “identity of the Werewolf” to be considered to be publicly tracked), it isn’t?

CfJs.

There’s a reason why this bolts on to Orphan Variables - because that language is currently in place, has been tested, and hasn’t caused any major controversies.

The rule change here doesn’t really change anything - your “Werewolf identities are public!” litigant is just a “Werewolves can’t do anything as their status is an orphan variable!” litigant under the status quo.

Werewolves wanting to do something when they can’t is easily CfJable; Werewolves wanting to be anonymous when the ruleset requires their identities to be tracked publicly is not.

I think that’s the only problem here: secret information can’t go back in the bottle, so we should be careful about automatically requiring anything to be publicly tracked. If auto-tracked Orphan Variables are boring basically-public stuff (“the order that the Emperor received private messages”) then we can yawn and wave it through on a CfJ; if they include secret information (“the order that the Emperor received attack messages from Werewolves”), then an invested, late-game, by-the-book-scam player has a strong cause for insisting that the Emperor reveal that information.

As above: shouldn’t default to publicly tracking all poorly-described game data, when that will sometimes be privately-tracked information like Werewolf identities or hands of cards.

cov