I don’t quite see the line being drawn here. Is the intention that something is Label Text if we want another rule to refer to it, but Flavour Text if it’s just fun text that will never be the subject of ruleset references?

And I still have to be “direct and unambiguous” when referring to Label Text: it’s not enough to write a rule of “if a Tripper occupies Barter Mart…” if Stop Names are Labels, I have to write “if a Tripper occupies the Stop named ‘Barter Mart’”?

But wouldn’t “a Stop named ‘Barter Mart’” also work for Flavour Text? It’s not requiring any “normal English meaning” of the Flavour Text, it’s just asking if it’s name is the quoted string ‘Barter Mart’.

That is the line I’m trying to draw, yes, and specifically the idea that a game variable can be a label instead of a flavour. Do you think “direct and unambiguous” from Label Text would be an improvement? Or are you arguing for a three-way division between flavour text, game-variable text values, and rule names?

My instinct is to keep it simple and define “flavour text” in a way that works for everything including rule names. And if that doesn’t work, to just define how rule names work as a standalone, rather than creating a reusable term for them. If we have two names for samey “non-binding text” concepts we’re going to use the wrong one in the wrong place sometimes, either accidentally or for a scam.

What kind of gamestate are we actually going to be working with in practice?

1. A gamestate Stop named “Barter Mart”, but where we’d expect a rule of “if a Tripper is at Barter Mart…” to just work.
2. A gamestate Dog named “You Fools, This Means Josh Has Achieved Victory”, where we don’t want that to mean anything.
3. A ruletext Room Description that’s a paragraph of text we want to flag as not being binding.
4. A rule called “The Time Buddha is Not a Time Monk” that we don’t want to treat as a rule

Just using your definition of Flavour Text for everything meets 2-4, but fails on 1: the rule would have to be written as “if a Tripper is at a Stop named ‘Barter Mart’”. And your definition of Label Text would shake out the same way, if I’m reading it right.

@Kevan i think part of the idea here is to be able to make clear the distinction between references to flavour text and references to not-flavour-text. so, to echo ur first example, we would want to write a rule of “If a Tripper is at ‘Barter Mart’”. that way, its also evident when flavour text is *not* in the picture (i.e. when it isnt specifically signalled), and so in an ideal world ur example from the other proposal of a dog named 7 Gems wouldnt work specifically because the ruleset says neither “the player who has a dog named 7 Gems” nor “the player who has ‘7 Gems’”.

thats what the wording of “as long as its mentioning is direct and unambiguous (for example, enclosing the referenced text in quotation marks)” is supposed to accomplish, from my perspective.

to be able to make clear the distinction between references to flavour text and references to not-flavour-text *without clumsy or overly-particular wording, i mean

I’m amenable to the idea of rule names being split out of this construction, but I do think that “text that is purely descriptive fluff” and “text that is referential but not otherwise meaningful” are worth delineating for reasons of straightforward comprehension, especially for new or returning players. I’ll think over how to make the definition of Label Text work for scenario 1, but I do align with Lemon on the idea that “if a Tripper is at ‘Barter Mart’” is not the worst compromise.

Again, not fully here, but if it looks decent as this does, I am willing to reduce the quorum barrier by 1/2 a vote. 

Remember to also look for the place where Proposal titles are flavour text, (alt spelling of flavor?) if you do change it to “label”.

As said above, to me these definitions are borderline interchangeable, which won’t help comprehension. The only slight difference to my eye is that “a Stop named Barter Mart” works for Label Text (it’s an unambiguous reference to a thing’s name, even without quotation marks) but maybe fails for Flavour Text (because checking something’s name seems more like checking a string of characters than considering the meaning of that string).

I think it’s plausible for “flavour text” to become something that we use for paragraphs of fluff (or ruletext we want to switch off for a while, like Special Case), and “label text” is something that exists automatically for the names of game objects, the same way that it currently does for names of players. (Which could itself use improvement: it does always seem a bit silly and unintuitive that a rule of “Brendan is the King” has the Simon-says “aah, you forgot to say the player named Brendan, so nothing happens” thing, just to prevent a decade-old player name exploit.)

[Lemon] Got it, thank you, I was reading “mentioning is direct and unambiguous” as whether the target of the mention was ambiguous, rather than the sentence being clear that it is a mentioning. That does seem a good direction to take.

(That should be an “although checking something’s name” rather than “because” in the first paragraph. I’d take “a Stop named Barter Mart” to still work if Stop Names were Flavour Text, making the two Flavour/Label terms interchangeable.)

The fact that I would see “If a player is holding a Giant Sword” as
“direct and unambiguous” but apparently others in this thread are arguing that it would need to be “If a player is holding a ‘Giant Sword’” to be “direct and unambiguous” to me shows this is a flawed approach

@clucky the quote marks are just one example of an unobtrusive way for a reference to label text to be direct and unambiguous. i dont think anybody said that was supposed to be the only way, just a preferred way to avoid constant clarification

I think we’re on shaky ground if Label Text flips between being meaningful and meaningless based on something as subjective as whether a sentence is “direct and unambiguous”, with quotemarks a mere optional suggestion.