Weak against. Not convinced that we need to explicitly define the term “Break-In” as referring to “Breaking In”, any more than we’d need to clarify that a clause checking “if the Patrols have been Assessed” was referring to the Patrol Assessment action. We certainly don’t need it for the hyphens.

I don’t see the harm in making it explicit.

Although I agree with Kevan that it shouldn’t be necessary, BlogNomic’s current culture is (unfortunately) overwhelmingly on the side of requiring this sort of change.

Per Kevan. Overly prescripive to the detrement of plain langauge reading.

Doesn’t seem warranted

[qenya] The harm in making this kind of thing explicit is it suggests that verb forms and hyphens have to be explicit in the ruleset, and when they aren’t in other places (if a rule mentions a “Camera-Trap” or “Assessing Patrols”) there may be grounds for a breakdown or a scam based on those terms having absolutely no meaning.

... which is a valid way to play Nomic, if we want to play it that way! We should be careful about drifting into that without meaning to, though, if some players’ takeaway from this enacting would be “meaningless, does no harm” while others start working on their hyphen scams.

We should probably have an Appendix rule to settle this one way or the other, rather than having the debate every time.

It’s generally been interpreted very inconsistently in the past, even from one dynasty to the next, and it can make it very hard to (e.g.) determine whether you’ve won or not, because you can’t tell whether or not the normal gameplay mechanics worked as intended or whether they failed on wording precision.

It seems okay to me to leave that as a cultural thing that changes from group to group - sometimes dynasties are happy with “players carry items, players can pick up items”, sometimes they want to spell out “to ‘pick up’ or ‘take’ an item means to start carrying it, a player can also be said to ‘hold’ the items they are carrying”. The rare debates are mostly a matter of reading the room, and are a part of playing the game.

@ais On the role of Argumentation in Nomic

@Kevan: the problem is that if you lose such a debate, you can’t then declare victory, because the rules require you to believe you have won (which you generally can’t do if the gamestate is wrong).

This is why I wanted to add a rule to allow players to declare victory if the other players believed they had won – “you think the dynasty is functional but I don’t” means that I can’t declare victory even though I’ve been playing your way. For example, I think Clucky won’t legally be able to declare victory if this proposal fails and anyone performs two Preparation Actions; under Clucky’s interpretation, most of the dynasty wouldn’t happen, thus preventing the victory condition being reached.