Sunday, May 21, 2017

Call for Judgment: Atomic Actions 2: Reloaded

Timed out 2-1. Enacted by card.

Adminned at 23 May 2017 17:52:21 UTC

Change “Atomic Actions” to

When a Manager performs an Atomic Action, they must complete all its steps; they must complete them in order; and they may not take any other action defined in the Ruleset until all such steps are complete. In addition, the Manager performing an Atomic Action performs its steps as quickly as they are able.

If one or more steps of an Atomic Action were done incorrectly, the Manager must redo the Atomic Action. In redoing an Atomic Action, the Manager uses any legal steps that were already completed in the illegal Atomic Action and only redoes the illegal ones.

For instance if an Atomic Action consists of rolling a die in the GNDT and then doing steps based upon it’s result the Manager would have to reroll the die if they rolled the wrong one if the first place and any steps that depended upon the result of that die; however if all they did was take an illegal action later on, the die is still used in the redone action.

If the Atomic Action was illegal due to a die that was wrong in the GNDT (for example, rolling a 1 on a DICE6 gives that Manager a point and the rest do nothing and the Manager rolls a DICE5 in the first one) and in redoing the Atomic Action they get the same effect as before (i.e. rolling an incorrect die and getting result X but then rolling the correct die and still getting result X) then the steps that depended upon that result are valid and don’t need to be redone. Steps that depend upon multipul dice which were done incorrectly must have each incorrect die have the same effect to be considered valid.

For the purposes of determining the ordering or legality of game actions the time of an Atomic Action shall be the time that it is completed. For Atomic Actions that are redone, the time of completion is the last redone step.

In the example, Manager Bob does Atomic Action X, which involves rolling a DICE6 and on a 1 they get a point. Bob mistakenly rolls a DICE5 and gets a 1 and does the rest of the Atomic Action depending upon that point. When Bob has to redo the atomic action, in the 1 to 30 chance that they roll 1 on both dice, then Bob doesn’t have to redo steps that depended upon only that point, saving paper work and time that at that point isn’t necessary to do since what Bob was going to do was already written down.

Comments

Oracular rufio:

21-05-2017 17:40:21 UTC

This looks fine, but, you know, I don’t get why we need atomic actions at all.  Maybe we should just repeal the rule.

card:

22-05-2017 04:58:22 UTC

Say you need someone to do a series of actions in sequence and have them completed as fast as possible or in a reasonable amount of time.

Try rewriting a few of the actions in the ruleset that are atomic without using the atomic actions and you’ll probably have something similar to the atomic action rule in there or something that can be scammed by doing stuff out of sequence, waiting in between steps or doing a bunch of things in between steps.

Oracular rufio:

22-05-2017 17:36:32 UTC

Ok, but under what circumstances would a series of actiona described in the ruleset not be required to be in order?  As fast as possible does nothing, we’ve seen that.  Without those things, there’s nothing left that makes atomic actions atomic actions.

card:

22-05-2017 18:10:04 UTC

The “they may not take any other action defined in the Ruleset until all such steps are complete.” clause still makes atomic actions atomic actions.

Oracular rufio:

22-05-2017 18:17:54 UTC

Ok, I see.

for

Sphinx:

22-05-2017 20:41:04 UTC

Isn’t the stuff about redoing things somewhat redundant? If it was left out, any illegal steps basically didn’t happen in the eyes of the rules, so they would have to be redone anyway.

The only difference as far as I can tell is that you wouldn’t have to redo some actions, e.g. if you get the same diceroll. But that seems like a minor convenience (Most Atomic Actions probably don’t have so many steps that redoing them would be a big nuisance), and seems like one more thing that could be exploited.

Oracular rufio:

22-05-2017 20:52:24 UTC

If that was true then what Cuddle beam did wouldn’t have been legal.

Sphinx:

22-05-2017 20:53:34 UTC

What Cuddlebeam did was exploit “If an hour has passed since an Explorer began an Atomic Action, but they have not completed it, all its steps are considered illegal and may be reverted by any Explorer.”

Oracular rufio:

22-05-2017 21:04:26 UTC

Right.  But I still like having it explicitly stated that correctly rolled dice can’t be redone.

card:

23-05-2017 04:36:57 UTC

[Sphinx] It is a minor convenience; however I can’t think of a way to exploit the rerolling since rolling the values needed for not redoing those actions on both dice becomes less and less likely. Rolling a 1 on DICE5 and then a 1 on DICE6 is the same chance as getting a 1 on a DICE30.

pokes:

23-05-2017 10:36:19 UTC

against

Sphinx:

23-05-2017 11:29:09 UTC

Yeah, but I feel like it’s a minor convenience that opens up potential for scams.