BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

This proposal can’t change the Core, Special Case, or Appendix sections because it doesn’t have any tags.

Actually on closer reading of the Tags rule I think I was wrong, should be ok.

My one-man campaign against Tags continues

Something struck me when you mentioned that titles are flavour text. There’s this statement in the Appendix:

The names of rules and wiki pages (other than the Ruleset) are flavour text.

Remember your simulation dynasty, Josh? The core mechanic was around the rule titles and how they applied to the players. If the rule title (a.k.a its name) is flavour text, does that mean the entire dynasty was invalid? It can’t be covered by Prioritisation because that only says that dynastic rules have precedence over Core rules, but explicitly says that Appendix rules always have precedence:

1. The Appendix has precedence over any other Rule;
2. If a Core Rule explicitly says it cannot be overruled by a Dynastic Rule, that Core Rule has precedence over a Dynastic Rule, otherwise a Dynastic Rule has precedence over that Core Rule;

Yep! Skated by on that one, hey.

(Actually it’s debatable - flavour text is ‘is not considered to have any meaning beyond being a string of characters’, and the tags in the titles in both my dynasty and the current Special Case rules are reading them as a string of characters, not really imparting meaning into them - but it’s all very iffy imo.)

Very good call, Special Case has always been a bit of a heap of different things, with its constant presence in every ruleset probably making it feel too precious to ever become a genuinely useful toolbox of potentially recurring mechanics.

“The current Recommended Building Blocks rules are: Dormancy, Dynastic Distance and Mantle Limitations.” shouldn’t include Dynastic Distance because you’re repealing it later in the proposal. It would also be easy to drop Mantle - the current “core: you can pass mantles” and “special case default: actually you can’t pass mantles” setup has always seemed unnecessarily backwards when it could just be a default-off special case rule of “you can pass mantles”, with no mention of them in core. If that just leaves us with Dormancy in the Recommended list, we could boil that down to a core rule that’s phrased in a way that’s easy to override when a small group want to play on.

Imperial Deferentials should maybe go into the core voting rule if it’s now a common default, rather than deep in an appendix; new players definitely tend to assume that an Emperor DEF is an abstention. And Seasonal Downtime probably could stand to be buried in the appendix, as it comes but once a year and somebody will always point it out.

“any rules not so named must be removed” might need a little more duct tape to clarify its implied Building Blocks scope, that it’s not going to knock out the rest of core.

And the page you’ve created and hyperlinked to here is typo’d as “Bulding” Blocks - I think that’s going to give us an initially blank “Building Blocks” page per “becomes gamestate as a result of a Votable Matter enacting”, irrespective of any subsequent typo correction.

as this all seems patchable before the next ascension.

This breaks several existing special case rules that refer to other special case rules. While in theory they can be fixed before the next dynasty starts, as one of those broken areas is a part of the rule set saying “this is because this combo is too strong” I think its better to not risk leaving that combo in there.

I also would prefer to keep dynastic distance as a special case rule (or at the very least, flip it so you have a special case rule to turn it off which could easily be done if we also redo this with a fix for the broken special case rules))

There is also a subtle change to Imperial Deferentials done by this—by moving it out of the special case rules the “If there are six or fewer Necromancers” clause now will include the Grim Reaper even with Dynastic Distance turned on. This wound up being a point of concern last dynasty. So I think its worth pointing out that it would change the behavior.

https://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?search=“Dynastic+Distance+[Inactive]”&title=Special:Search&profile=default&fulltext=1

Dynastic Distance was last set to be inactive in Ruleset 208 and has been switched off 11 times since it was added in Ruleset 159.

Seems like a popular enough building block to keep around

meanwhile some other special case rules can probably get the boot due to never being used:

Bounties has never been used (Added in 214)

Malign Emperors has been used exactly once (196)

also… am I just missing how the building block page gets updated to include the new player/emperor terms or is that also broken?

Synonyms mentions the words “to be replaced by the new value everywhere in the ruleset”. But the building blocks page is not explicitly not the ruleset

There’s definitely stuff to be patched. Josh seems to be committed to working the issues out and spending his slots during this dynasty to cover this. If he doesn’t, we can simply just write a Proposal to revert the ruleset revision from the enactment.

my view is that you can just as easily write a proposal that adds the rule changes and patches stuff at the same time as you can write a proposal that patches stuff

but as there is not guarantee the patches pass…