BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

plot is important.

plot is fun.

sorry, that was suppose to be one comment (cursing at heart)

I (yes, I realize this was proposed by the Arbiter)

So the only way to create time bombs is to have the permission of the arbiter, and the only way to remove them is to… (2.5) redescribe as a side effect, working from a non-related keyword, of course.  The rules do not say what redescribe means, so there are three possible interpretations:

1) Redescribe, no changing keywords allowed,
2) Redescribe with the possibility of changing keywords but with restrictions on such, and
3) Redescribe with no restrictions on changing keywords; complete change.

The rules strongly imply (or possibly even state, if I’ve missed it), that there are restrictions on simply removing unrelated keywords.

So time bombs are difficult to create, impossible to uncreate using normal redescribe and side effect redescribe directly aside from the ability to start a game within range of one, and not including time bombs created already within range of other travellers.  Furthermore, a time bomb could prevent influence from being ‘voluntarily’ increased, but the interpretation of this is troublesome; what if the traveller’s influence is 30 and moves 35 away from a time bomb, but is awarded the influential beacon bonus as a side effect of the move?  Is this bonus caused by the traveller?  If so, is it voluntary? 

The ‘caused by’ question may be more important.  ‘caused by’ may refer to cause and effect within two contexts: game time, or real time.  Under game time, the ‘caused by’ is questionable, but under real time, the cause, of course, is the player.  Phrases such as ‘current temporal location’ in the ruleset implies that the player is the same thing as the traveller even in real time—this refers to some sort of ‘conscious time flow’ which exists independent of the traveller’s game time, and would seem to be most congruent to real time.

There are no restrictions on simply moving unrelated keywords, apart from the Arbiter being able to undo them “if he feels their causality to be discordant” (so a lazy “I eat an apple in 1491 to stop a Time Bomb in 3900” might expect to be reverted).

I’d say that triggering the Influential Beacon would count as voluntary - something can be voluntary without it being intentional.

(And I think Rule 2.1 covers all the possible ambiguities of one timeline being misread as the other.)

I also point out that this is a proposed subrule to “The Laws of time”, so the restrictions it imposes on time bomb access are… more like guidelines, you might say.  Of course, it will be considered a heinous Chronocrime to fuss around with time bombs.

Instead of “voluntarily cause”, suppose I had been extremely specific and used “choose to take any game action which will (with 100% probability) immediately result in”.  In any cases which are likely to arise, this interpretation will suffice for answering questions concerning whether Traveller X caused Y (and in the case of this particular rule, it’s what I intended).  The beacon bonus is an automatic, immediate, and guaranteed Influence boost; so if choosing to move triggers the bonus, and the bonus puts you in bomb range, I would consider you to have voluntarily caused your range to include the bomb’s date.  Something similar might be said for choosing to join the PRC, or to abandon your companion in certain circumstances.  I suppose that choosing to use the Influence Drip to (possibly) extend your Range doesn’t meet my “100%” criterion, even if it does seem as though it would also be an example of a voluntary cause.  May I suggest that we cross that bridge if/when the situation actually arises?  That, or we’ll plug up the ambiguity before then.

no body is forcing a traveller to influence drip, so it’s voluntary. influence drip = trying to increase influance, with a possibility to fail.

That is a biased viewpoint based on the assumption that more influence is better (okay, sure, the rules will probably always be consistant with that assumption).  It is, of course, possible that the drip could be used in an attempt to lose influence (say for a modus ponens requirement of having a prime influence).