“Intended” is a tough one to quantify. As someone who has done time in the secret information emperor mines, I have to tell you that it can be lonely and challenging: you have to make decisions that never get audited, that you can’t speak to anyone about, and which can wreck a month-long dynasty if you get it wrong. Making these things interpretable and subjective superficially appears generous as it gives the emperor ruleset cover for a flexible approach, but in practice, you want decisions to be as rigorous, precise and defined as possible. “The ruleset made me do it” is a much better defence than “I made a call” when people are arguing over the victory scam you accidentally let slip through the net.

Would you say it would be better to just make this the full list instead of an open ended one in that case? People can likely propose more as they come up with them.

Or would you say the third item is too vague too and should be removed/rewritten?

We’ve already got the Great Machine volunteering to make the call on whether an Agenda is “unfairly easy or difficult to Fulfill”, so adding “unfairly beneficial to the writer” doesn’t seem much of a leap.

“all Agendas that break the spirit of what Agendas are intended to be, including but not limited to” is very broad and unspecified, though. (“but not limited to”!) Even assuming that “intended” means “intended by the Emperor when they started this dynasty”, I don’t have much of an idea of what those spirit intentions are.

Okay, that’s tightened up a fair bit now.

Deferring to the Machine, since this requires them to make additional calls.

yes, the bit about /intent/ is what i’m the most unsure about here. my interpretation of that would be that it refers to the “intent” behind the Agenda itself; for example, if it mentions a mechanic like Valves but doesn’t actually require you to interact with that mechanic in any way to fulfill the condition. which is a fair principle, if we eventually want it to be possible to figure out, like, which Initialisation Keys are in a given Machinist’s Agendas, and not have that be terribly misleading.

that one’s a bit vague, but i’m straightforwardly in favour of the other conditions, so i think i can safely give this a .

That final intent restriction is just to stop you from saying stuff like “Facilities are an initialisation key. Have 200 coal.” The key has to actually be used in the agenda, not just mentioned.

Something like “Flea Market is an initialisation key. Have 20 times more coal than baubles” would be valid though since baubles are a flea market mechanic. (There is of course much better wording that could be used.)

aye, seems like my interpretation was pretty sound, then!