Okay. You’re arguing that if rule says that a player “must” do something but fails to, then they can’t take any other game actions until they’ve done it?

Yes. Or you’re allowed to procrastinate obligations indefinitely, which would be bizarre, but if that’s just how things are, we have to accept it.

But yeah, a corollary to the obligation procrastination thing is that “Core Rules”, “Ruleset and Gamestate” says that “This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Villagers shall obey it”

If I can just procrastinate having to obey the entire Ruleset, I can just choose to obey certain rules now, and have the obedience of other rules done later. So I can choose to procrastinate obedience of any rule that prevents me from just editting in and making legal Rules at my whims, and I’d be legally adding them in because would be legal to ignore and procrastinate certain obligations. Of course the procrastinated rule could eventually “reach” me and make it illegal, but then I can just procrastinate more.

So, either you cant perform any action according to the rulestate because Ive given you an impossible task, or I can add any rule I want with the same procrastination trick that you could be using.

We did start work on a definition of “must” that made other actions illegal in the mean time, but it was never enacted - the nearest we got was the recent atomic actions rule.

Will delete the CfJ you’re referring to here, since nobody has commented on it yet (for reference it was just a fix to reword a bunch of “may"s in the ruleset) and have a think.

(My CfJ is here, if anybody wants to repost it as their own CfJ and tack on a change from “the Doctor must privately inform them” to “the Doctor should privately inform them”, which I assume would allow the issue to be resolved either way.)

“This is the Ruleset for BlogNomic; all Villagers shall obey it”. “Shall”, not “must”. “Must” is not defined at all. So I oppose the analogy between the Doctor’s failure to perform a “must” action and procrastinating the “shall” requirement.

I don’t see what happens if a Villager cannot perform an action he is required to perform. The ruleset does not impose any punishment :) If a Villager does some illegal action, it can be reverted. If a Villager does not do any action when required to, and it leads to corrupted GNDT, anyone can correct it. So I’m inclined to think that if the Doctor doesn’t (can’t!) perform his duties, you should be able to update the gamestate so that it becomes correct. Or anyone can make a CfJ to resolve any such contradictions.

as per quirck.

Must IS defined, as per the English language, or else I can put up proposals in Cuddle-English or any made-up language that looks identical to English except for the content of the proposal, which means “The Villager named Cuddlebeam wins”.

For example, my proposal here: https://blognomic.com/archive/aaahahhhahahahhhahaha could’ve been writen in Cuddle-English and it actually means that “The Villager named Cuddlebeam wins” instead of whatever the content of the proposal is in real English.

Therefore I assume that “must” (as well as “is required to” as per shall) implies some kind of obligation, or I can write proposals in Cuddle-English and pass whatever I want.

The GNDT thing is very interesting.

The common-sense boardgame view would be that if a player neglected to do something compulsory, we’d retroactively assume that they did it and decide whether to play on or to adjust the intervening gamestate to compensate for the effects of the omission. Since the neglected action here is “whenever Cuddlebeam secretly decides to do something, the Doctor privately informs Cuddlebeam that this happened”, my failing to perform it has no meaningful effect.

in the absence of any rule (outside of an Atomic, which this isn’t) saying that actions are performed in sequence and that failing to perform a compulsory one blocks that player from taking any others.

Not going to magically turn around at this point. Ty everyone for the insights and discussion, I appreciate it a lot.