BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Default values tend to be used as starting values a lot, so this could mean that, for example, a proposal of “Sheep cannot exceed 500” would reset someone’s Sheep back down to the starting value of 2, when it might make more sense to just bring it down to 500 if they have too many.

Yeah I think resetting to the default instead of voting the proposal down, or CfJing, would not often be what we want.

yeah I don’t think “this is invalid, set it to default” is the right approach. Leaving it invalid, but clarifying you can pass the proposal (as its only dynastic actions that leave stuff in invalid states which can’t be performed) is probably better.

Will change my opinion based on others thoughts

I’d support a follow-up clarifying minimum or maximum limit scenarios. But this isn’t just about numeric variables—the original argument arose from a proposed limitation on memberships, where eg “set to the closest legal value” would have been a very arbitrary instruction.

Capping invalid values makes sense (and should really be extended to how we handle unidling players), as it’d be surprising for a “-10 to every player’s HP” proposal to heal a 7HP player back to 100.

Let God Sort Them Out looks more like a ruletext paradox - where you have a rule that flatly says “The Gostak is red and not green. Also: the Gostak is green and not red.” - which we should probably try to handle while we’re at it.

We should be failing proposals that cause this kind of a problem, but if one passes then the ruleset should know how to handle it, and if that’s strategically inconvenient to some player then too bad - don’t let those proposals pass.

Isn’t that a reason why this shouldn’t pass Josh?

It allows someone to pass a bad proposal because it’ll reset their gamestate values and get them out of a hole. Instead of just voting down the proposal.

Yeah but my point is

In that situation everybody else should be voting against it

And if they don’t, they deserve what they get: a ruleset that can cope with the ambiguity of the situation, to their disadvantage