Doesn’t this patch just make the scam easier - i.e. you start the AA, get bad rolls, and then just stop for 24 hours knowing that it will all go away?

I don’t think this does anything to alter Pokes’ angle, which was about having an accomplice interrupt an atomic action. That still works if the action is taken at regular speed, with a sidekick poised to hit the sprinklers immediately the moment that they see you roll a double six.

And doesn’t the existing “A Vampire Lord should not deliberately and unreasonably prolong the performance of a game action once they have started it.” already cover the first part? Atomic actions are just a type of game action.

that would quite clearly be deliberately delaying the completion of the atomic action and thus be a violation of fair play, right?

if the sidekick hits the sprinklers right when they see you roll a double six, good on them for timing it right? But now you can’t wait around for them to hit the sprinklers. You gotta continue with their action.

If you really want to avoid pokes scam, you could word your actions in a way that puts the gamestate into a mini hiatus while the action is happening. But I don’t think we need or want that for all actions.

As far as the other rule goes… I guess that covers it? Although “unreasonably” does make things a bit more grey. I think you could make the case that waiting five minutes for someone to hit the sprinklers was a very reasonable course of action, even if it was deliberate.

Maybe we just need better wording on “deliberately or unreasonably” that makes it clear “unreasonably” only applies to stuff like “Someone came to do the door and I had to go deal with that” rather than “it was all part of my gameplan”?

So does “the entire action is canceled” address Pokes’ scam in some way, or are you suggesting this as a better way to handle what just happened with Raven’s illegal but (unwittingly) unfinished action?

“A Vampire Lord should not deliberately delay completion of an atomic action once they begin it.” was intended to address pokes scam

“time out actions after 24 hours” was intended to be a way to deal with problems of actions that accidentally never got completed for some reason.

Maybe you should remove the second block of text entirely from the proposal.  I don’t see why we need that if we already have Fair Play rules.

I like the second block of text, not as an anti-scam, but as an anti-breakage: if someone gets halfway through an atomic action and fails to complete it, and nobody notices, then technically they shouldn’t be able to perform any more actions ever. Having them automatically cancel helps to prevent that sort of breakage.

An alternative would be to cancel all atomic actions at the end of a Dynasty, which is probably sensible anyway. (Perhaps we should also allow CFJs and DoVs to be enacted by an admin who’s currently in the middle of an atomic action, again as an anti-breakage thing.)

I think I agree with Jumble - although “deliberate delay” causes some anxiety… One of the things I’m tussling with here is, like, to what extent to we actually want to make scams impossible? Because a co-ordination scam with an AA kinda feels like a reasonable, pretty niche but essentially yeah-okay avenue for a scam, and just slamming the door on it before anyone’s even done one feels not good…

I guess if BN is drifting in an increasingly scam-averse direction then fair enough, but at that point why don’t we just put “no scams” in fair play and stop beating around the bush?

“time out actions after 24 hours” was intended to be a way to deal with problems of actions that accidentally never got completed for some reason—if this is the main intent of this proposal, that sounds more like a matter for a CfJ on a case by case basis. Is this something common enough that it needs a specific rule provision?

To me, the cat and mouse games of scams is part of the fun of blognomic.

If you don’t patch scams when they are encountered, you lose some of that fun of pulling off the scam. If you ban scams, you also lose the fun of finding new scams and pulling them off.

Main intent of the proposal was to make sure we clarify you can’t weasel your way out of an atomic action by having your friend do stuff to invalidate the action before it completes. Which I feel matches the spirit of atomic actions.

The 24 hours thing is just I feel a useful side effect that like ais said, prevents issues from arising when you realize you failed to complete an action from three days ago.

[ais523] Atomic actions deliberately only block the performer from carrying out other dynastic actions, so unless we’ve painted the admins into a weird corner where they have to spend a coin to enact a CfJ, we’re alright. A timeout certainly makes sense, the permanent lockout has always seemed a bit harsh to me.

[Josh] My take on scams is always that they’re fun when they operate within the realm of the game that players have just built for themselves, and tiring when they rely on something more fundamental that everybody else thought they could take for granted (whether that’s a core rule working as described, or the fact that players always write sentences in a language that goes left-to-right). A coordination scam that exploits a brand new dynastic “Vampiric Action” process that we all voted for is fun and fair game; a scam that exploits a flaw in the years-old Atomic Actions system feels unsporting, especially to new players who would have expected an old “to perform a complex action, do it like this” rule to do its job properly.

[Clucky] “make sure we clarify you can’t weasel your way out of an atomic action by having your friend do stuff to invalidate the action before it completes” - I don’t think you’re achieving this, though. Pokes’ hypothetical scam doesn’t require lengthy breaks, if the scammer and accomplice are online at the same time and the main atomic is complex enough to take a minute or so to complete, with a die roll (or whatever it is) near the start. And I don’t see why you’re adding a new bullet point about atomics instead of knocking out the “and unreasonably” from the existing Fair Play about delaying any game action, if you’re concerned that “unreasonably” allows a scammer to delay an atomic by 24 hours for “reasons” of a scam.

Kevan - I don’t buy that at all, as all of the decades-old stuff is infrastructure that the dynastic stuff needs to operate, so saying “anything that touches the non-dynastic ruleset is out of bounds” is still tantamount to saying “no scams”, or at least constraining the range of them so narrowly that they’re effectively pointless. But also, most of the non-dynastic ruleset is reactive defences against scams!

[Josh] The dynastic scam vista still looks majestic and sweeping from here, I’ve deliberately voted at least three potentially useful loopholes into the ruleset this dynasty (all of which I think have been closed off now).

since adding a don’t-delay-atomic-actions bullet seems unnecessary when we already have a don’t-delay-any-actions one, and I’m not convinced that an automatic undo is the best default response to all inadvertently incomplete atomics.

@Kevan I’ll believe that when more than one in the last twenty dynasties have ended in a scam.

I’m undecided about this, but it isn’t going to pass, and I want to keep the queue moving.