I don’t think that the appendix entry or the tag are necessary - the words added to the rule Proposals do enough to establish what a slotless proposal is.

I included that because otherwise the concept of a proposal being Slotless is untracked – it’d be unclear whether a proposal is being submitted slotlessly or not, and untracked gamestate generally leads to trouble. (With the appendix entry, slotlessness always gets tracked in the proposal’s title.)

I think the appendix entry is preferable to making one of the main core rules permanently harder to read - if this enacted as written, I’d expect every new player to frown and ask “how do I tell if my proposal is slotless?”

Is there a problem with the usual route of saying something like “If a proposal is Slotless, it neither counts towards nor is restricted by the limit on proposal frequency in Rule 1.5”, and putting that all in the keyword definition?

“Slotless” also doesn’t seem the best name to use, given that proposal slots aren’t a term that the ruleset actually uses, and (if we decide to put this in Core) “non-Slotless” is quite the double-negative.

Would it be inaccurate to categorise this kind of proposal as something like “Minor” or “Low”? (The only term I can remember us using for this in occasional past dynasties is “Trivial”.)

Sometimes dynasties want proposals to be slotless because they’re important to a dynastic mechanic, rather than because they’re trivial. (Also, “[Trivial]” has been used for “no rewards” more commonly than for “no slot”, I think.)

As for putting the whole thing in the appendix, you’d still need a prohibition on submitting slotless proposals without permission from a rule, and it’s unclear where you’d put that. It seems weird to say “you can do X” in the core rules, but have an appendix entry saying “actually, under these circumstances, you can’t do X”.

If you want an alternative term, it’d probably be best to work along the lines of “Free”, but that doesn’t seem ideal either.

Where’s the prohibition issue in:

Core: “You can make 2 proposals at a time, 3 per day.”
Appendix: “If something is defined as a Free Proposal then it’s a proposal, but one that doesn’t obey or count towards the Core proposal limits.”
Dynastic: “Once per day, the Emperor may make a Cartographical Edict, this is a Free Proposal.”

A player’s prohibition against being able to make Free Proposals at will seems like it’s covered by good old “Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset”.

(“Free” sounds pretty good to me, for simultaneously evoking both its freedom to ignore the queue limit, and its lack of a slot cost.)

There’s no prohibition issue there, I don’t think, but there’s still untracked/undefined gamestate in that it’s unclear how to tell whether a proposal has been made Free or not.

Sure, not suggesting getting rid of the Tag aspect, I was just focusing on what each section had to say about the others.

I’m having trouble wording the Appendix rule in a way that won’t break when the Core rule changes, and isn’t really ugly. It looks something like this if you try to write it robustly: “Free Proposals do not count as Proposals, and the submission of a Free Proposal does not count as the submission of a Proposal, for the purpose of determining whether a Proposal submission is illegal due to exceeding a limit on the number of Pending Proposals by the same author or on the number of Proposals submitted by the author that day”. Can you find a simpler way to word it that doesn’t require effectively duplicating the contents of the Proposals rule introduction (thus breaking if one gets amended and not the other), and doesn’t impose any subjectivity about what a proposal limit is?

(Note that it’s vitally important that there’s no subjectivity in whether a Proposal submission is legal or not; if a Proposal submission gets marked as illegal incorrectly, all future activity at Blognomic ceases until the queue’s been empty for a week, due to a rolling knock-on effect in which each illegal enactment/failing makes the next enactment/failing illegal. Probably we should CFJ to fix that, too, but I’m pretty tired right now and don’t want to try to word a fix to that right now.)

I moved the “you can’t submit a Free Proposal unless a dynastic or special case rule lets you” restriction to the Appendix; that bit was easy enough. The core changes now are pretty minor, and both a lot less surprising and a lot less wordy than trying to fit an exception into the appendix, so probably this is the clearest way to do it.

The appendix can take some wordiness, it’s an appendix! I’d be fine with any amount of extra text in the appendices, my game-writing brain is just pained at a player having to scroll down sixteen pages to find out what “However, non-Free Proposals cannot…” actually means (and that they’ll have to read around even more to understand that we maybe aren’t even using Free Proposals that dynasty).

OK, I’ve gone with the wordy version (especially as I need to go to bed and we’re nearing the end of the edit window). It’s pretty horrible though.

I’ll need to think about how to word a CFJ to fix the possibility of “maybe an admin marks a proposal as illegal by mistake, we don’t notice, and nothing happens for months”. This version of the proposal is rather increasing the odds of that.

im confused– what here actually says that ppl can’t just put the text “[Free]” in all their proposals?

titles, that is

s/k Looks like the text that says that submitting Free proposals without permission from a dynastic or special case rule is illegal got deleted from the Glossary entry by mistake (as lemonfanta points out), and it was so complex that I didn’t notice.

@Kevan: I guess that’s a good reason to put the individual parts of a rule in the places where it’s most readable, rather than trying to stick everything into a big wordy appendix entry.