Proposal: [Core] [Appendix] Who will mind the Masterminds?
Add a subrule “Imperial Tracking” to the Appendix rule “Gamestate Tracking”, positioning it after “Orphan Variables”, with the following text:
The identity of the current dynasty’s Mastermind is tracked in the last sentence of the Core Rule “Dynasties”. Whenever a Participant becomes the Mastermind, that sentence changes to “The following Participant is the Mastermind: ” followed by that Participant’s name in quotes. Whenever a Metadynasty starts, that sentence changes to “There is no Mastermind this Dynasty.”.
All names after the colon in the last sentence of “Dynasties” are considered to be references to Participants, and are flavour text for all purposes other than referencing Participants. If the Mastermind changes their name by proposal, the sentence in question is updated to reflect the new name of the Mastermind.
The identity of the Mastermind is considered to be a gamestate variable that belongs to the game of BlogNomic as a whole, rather than belonging to the Mastermind personally.
Append the following sentence to the core rule “Dynasties”:
The following Participants are the Masterminds: “ais523”, “Josh”.
In the core rule “Idle Participants”, change
excluding the core and appendix Rules “Ruleset and Gamestate”, “ Participants ”, “Dynasties”, “Fair Play”, “Mentors”
to
excluding the core and appendix Rules “Ruleset and Gamestate”, “Participants”, “Dynasties”, “Fair Play”, “Imperial Tracking”, “Mentors”
In the core rule “Victory and Ascension”, after
When a DoV is Enacted, all other pending DoVs are Failed, the Participant who posted the DoV becomes Mastermind, and the game enters an Interregnum.
add
The player who Enacted it updates the rule “Dynasties” as specified in “Imperial Tracking”.
In the subrule “Other” in the Appendix rule “Keywords”, add the following definition in the correctly alphabetised location:
Dynastic Variable
A gamestate variable that exists only due to a dynastic rule and is not mentioned in a non-dynastic rule. (In particular, the identity of the Mastermind is not a dynastic variable.)
A fix for a very long-standing Core rules bug: the identity of the Mastermind is (in most dynasties) an orphan variable. (It isn’t in this dynasty because it’s defined in a dynastic rule, but most dynasties, it doesn’t work properly).
This proposal gives a means to track it (it’s in the core rule “Dynasties”, next to the dynasty number) and fixes a number of corner cases (e.g. it clarifies what happens if a Mastermind Reinitialises – previously this may have caused them to no longer be the Mastermind) as well as one potential major side effect of the Mastermind being orphaned (“the identity of the Mastermind” was arguably a dynastic variable because it changes with every dynasty, which would mean that dynastic actions that cared about who the Mastermind was would fail).
JonathanDark: he/him
So most of the past dynasties were illegal because no one could legally perform actions as the Emperor (upheld by DoV of course).