I considered having the perpetrator be able to vote on behalf of the victim (and have that vote be unchangeable), but figured that that would make it too easy to get a “win instantly” proposal over the line.

I love the flavour, but suspect that this should probably be more difficult than in the current proposal – as is, there isn’t much reason not to just steal someone else’s action rather than using your own, if the timer is low.

Also, this causes a mechanism problem (Heist Actions normally require a dice roll – with the action specified in the dice roller – and take effect if the roll is good, whereas this requires a blog post as well). I’d just get rid of the “The perpetrator does so” sentence, relying on the existing definition of Heist Actions to provide the mechanism.

So my current opinion is: great basic idea, but I don’t like the implementation much and will probably vote against it in its current form. It might make sense to revisit this later in the dynasty, when we have more statistics.

I’ve removed the blogpost requirement, and I’ve also made the action clearly uncompletable (with the idea that someone will propose an improvement to the conditions later once we have more gamestate and open the action up, or someone will find a way to modify the rule to take out the “not” and make the action permissible).

I’m also alright with this just failing, but I do enjoy this concept, think it’s very on-theme, and will probably repropose it later once the game has a bit more meat to it and I can put some better conditions on than “you can do it once per week”.

I like it and will probably vote for it, on the basis that it can use some refinement.

I’d want to see some protection so a player can’t get stun-locked by repeated mindjackings but I think this is super fun.

OK, I love this version (and as an {M} rule, it’s potentially not too far away from being amended via dynastic mechanics into something that works).

I think the current text of this proposed rule would allow me to declare myself a perpetrator and any other player the victim at any time. Nothing makes taking dynastic actions dependent on a successful consciousness theft.

I’ve (hopefully) cleared that up.

I think there’s still a problem with the “absolutely not” here, because of De Morgan’s laws. “I cannot do this if A and B and C are true” logically resolves to “I can do this if A or B or C are true.”

Well, not quite, if you want to go by pure propositional logic here (with A B C being the three conditions, and D being “you can do a consciousness theft”):
~((A and B and C) implies D) would be logically equivalent to
~(~(A and B and C) or D) which is logically equivalent to
(A and B and C and ~D)
so you clearly can’t do the theft.

Even if you interpret it as ((A and B and C) implies ~D) (which is pretty unreasonable but I guess barely arguable), it still doesn’t follow that you can perform the action. I think the “if” might’ve messed you up, DeMorgan’s would only straight apply like that if the rule said “none of A or B or C are true”.

Either way, if you think it is readable in that way you can suggest a clarification and I’ll be happy to add it in. It’s easy enough to make changes now and I’d really rather not squibble over minute details like this

But your A/B/C conditions are already phrased as negatives in the proposed ruletext. Not a Mastermind. Not performed for someone else. Even more than is not less than. And the resulting implication is a may not.

I read the proposal as (!A && !B && !C) => !D. So if we negate the whole implication, !(!A && !B && !C) => !!D becomes A || B || C => D.

While thinking about this away from my computer, I realised that this is only one letter away from working: “absolutely not” → “absolutely now”. You need a longer word to prevent it working, along the lines of “is prohibited from”.

The De Morgan’s argument is tricky and, based on rulings from other nomics, would fail (but I don’t know how it would be ruled at BlogNomic) – the issue is that the rule prevents you doing something under certain conditions, but doesn’t actually permit it under any conditions, so it just turns into a prohibition on something that’s already impossible.

I don’t have a good clarification to offer; I think I’ll vote against this, and the above is my reasoning.

You can’t negate an implication like that, that isn’t how implication works. If I say “if it’s raining outside, then I will bring an umbrella”, it doesn’t follow that “if it’s not raining outside, then I will not bring an umbrella”: I could very well decide to bring an umbrella on a non-rainy day just because it looks nice.

Anyway, despite thinking very strongly that it works as it stands (I’m interested in propositional logic outside of the game), I’ve done my best to render things unambiguous. Does this work better?

OK, this works better from my point of view, at least (and is much harder to activate by negating a single word).

It might still be really easy to exploit, you can easily go all -> al (which is a word, at least according to the scrabble dictionary) -> an -> any in a group of 3 (easy to get as a team) and take over everyone else. I think this ‘one letter at a time’ thing probably needs a blacklist attached to it to prevent not -> now and other really easy minimum-effort substitutions which blow any mutable rule open

Three changes, plus one more Heist Action to actually make use of the action, is probably a reasonable cost, at least (especially because either you’re a pool of four players or other players may see what you’re doing and either interfere or steal the scam).

Good enough for now. It’s Mutable anyway, so will likely change. No sense in hand-wringing over the logic for too long.