It’s bad, but it’s just dynastically bad, isn’t it? If Popular/Unpopular are normally neatly exclusive states, adding a “when both are true” clarification to the Core rule seems needlessly puzzling to anyone reading that rule in a future dynasty.

Appendix at most, for this, I think.

As a somewhat recent new player, trust me, they’ll be confused anyway. /j

I think it’s worth adding, but I’m not sure of the best spot. Core or appendix would work equally well.

The appendix needs LESS game-critical information, not more. And it may be “just dynastically bad”, but future dynasties may well have this same problem. If we want popularity and unpopularity to in all cases be mutually exclusive, then the rules on popularity and unpopularity should do so.

This wouldn’t be game-critical in 95% of dynasties, though, it’s only an issue if the dynastic rules monkey around with definitions of Popular and Unpopular. In the dynasties where it didn’t matter, it would just look redundant, like clarifying that a vote can’t be both FOR and AGAINST at the same time.

In fairness, we do make clear three times that contradictory votes are not possible, because there can only be one vote per player, but we don’t specify that a matter can only have one value for popularity. But at the same time it’s not worth quibbling about. Happy to see where the votes fall.

Not really against this. I think preferring popular would be the way I would have gone but whatever.

Strongly believe that Core should be limited to what a player needs to know to understand the Nomic, and that this clarification specifically (defining X versus Y in a neatly mutually-exclusive way, but then saying “and when they’re both true…”) would be actively confusing to someone trying to understand the already slightly oblique proposal-passing system.

OK Kevan you’ve convinced me. I still think this should be fixed but there’s probably a better way to do it.