Sunday, February 21, 2021

Proposal: Ex Post Facto [Appendix]

Cannot be enacted, 2 votes to 5. Josh

Adminned at 23 Feb 2021 09:53:48 UTC

Append to the rule “Representations of the Gamestate” the following:

If the passage of a Votable Matter that enacts a new rule, or updates an existing rule, would cause any of an Elector’s previously-legal personal Gamestate variables to be illegal under the updated Ruleset, then those variables for that Elector are set to their default values at the time the Votable Matter is passed.

Clucky and I contended a bit about this in the comments of “Let God Sort Them Out” last week—might as well take a referendum on it.

Comments

Vovix: he/him

22-02-2021 00:24:02 UTC

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.

pokes:

22-02-2021 00:25:56 UTC

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

Clucky: he/him

22-02-2021 02:17:01 UTC

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.

Raven1207: he/they

22-02-2021 03:59:03 UTC

imperial

Raven1207: he/they

22-02-2021 03:59:41 UTC

Will change my opinion based on others thoughts

Brendan: he/him

22-02-2021 04:36:05 UTC

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.

Kevan: he/him

22-02-2021 09:58:25 UTC

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.

against

Josh: Observer he/they

22-02-2021 10:02:58 UTC

for 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.

pokes:

22-02-2021 11:45:53 UTC

against

Clucky: he/him

22-02-2021 14:37:11 UTC

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.

against

Josh: Observer he/they

22-02-2021 15:27:07 UTC

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

Darknight: he/him

22-02-2021 15:27:51 UTC

against

Raven1207: he/they

23-02-2021 05:37:09 UTC

against