For context the full rule is “For the purposes of The Break-In, if an Agent is Sidelined they are not considered to be a Guard or a Burglar unless explicitly stated otherwise.”

My reading of that was that an action step of “For each Sidelined Burglar, set their Infamy to be the average Infamy of all Burglars” isn’t making an explicit statement to consider Sidelined Agents who were previously Burglars to be Burglars again, it’s just checking for a class of player that can’t exist.

(The definition of idle players, which I checked this against when considering how to process it, is more precise about this kind of situation, saying that we can directly refer to them as Idle Agents “even in Proposals or rules that do not treat them as Agents”.)

Ah! I forgot about the edit window- My apologies.

trying to claim that a “Sidelined Burglar” isn’t an explicit reference to Sidelined Burglars feels completely ridiculous to me

It is when expressed that way, but the question is whether it’s an explicit reference to “Sidelined Agents who would be Burglars if they were not Sidelined”.

Kevan, does that extend to this step as well?

If any Burglar who Encountered no Guards during this atomic action is holding at least one Artifact, increase the Successes of all Burglars by one, including Sidelined Burglars; otherwise, increase the Successes of all Guards by 1, including Sidelined Guards.

So the Successes of anyone sidelined from the winning team would not be increased, under the logic you mentioned, because there’s no such thing as a Sidelined Burglar or Sidelined Guard.

If that’s the case, this definitely goes against the intention, so I’d support a CfJ that not only awards Clucky the Infamy but also patches this issue up.

Yes, my reading was that the phrase “Sidelined Burglar” is never an explicit statement of “Sidelined Agent who would be a Burglar if not Sidelined”.

I’d agree that it’s probably not how the rule was intended to work, and that this needs patching. Whether the patch is retroactively applied to the previous Break-In is up to the group.

Ok, I’ll propose a different CfJ that fixes the problem and awards Clucky the Infamy as intended.

to me its not really a problem that needs to be fixed. To me, if I’m talking about a Green Cat, that is explicit enough to counter act “Cats aren’t green unless you explicitly state otherwise”

(or I guess rather, green things aren’t cats unless explicitly state otherwise)

Not to be dismissive, but in this case, since Kevan is the one processing the Breaking In, it’s his interpretation that matters.

Unless you think you’ll be successful at changing Kevan’s mind, I’d rather just make the ruleset more explicit AND correct the gamestate retroactively.

The group’s interpretation matters more than mine, if we’re voting on how I should have processed a past action (or whether we should be generous and allow an outcome that goes against how the group would interpret it). I assume Clucky and I are both talking to the group as much as the other person.

[Clucky] I’m reading “stating” as making a statement about the Agent or Green thing. A ruleset sentence of “Tiddles is a Green Cat” would be stating that a particular Cat was Green, successfully overriding “green things aren’t cats unless explicitly stated otherwise”. But a rule of “if there are any Green Cats, score a point” doesn’t seem like it’s stating anything, it’s performing an action dependent on things which (if Tiddles the Blue Cat temporarily became Tiddles the Green Statue earlier in the action) don’t exist.

I think that Kevan’s interpretation is technically correct here, but I’m not sure. (One of the main factors that makes me lean towards Kevan’s point of view is that, e.g., “Sidelined Burglar” is meaningful in rules other than The Break-In, and I’d expect a rule like “Sidelined Burglars are not considered to be Burglars on Fridays” to be meaningful. That reasoning is consistent with Kevan’s point of view but not Clucky’s. Another factor is that “Sidelined Burglar” is implying that Sidelined Agents count as Burglars for the purpose of the rule, but “The Sideline” says “explicitly stated otherwise” and I don’t think this is explicit; in general I am in favour of implying meaning into rules, but we can’t do that in cases where the ruleset says we can’t.)

In general, I wouldn’t want to negate what looks like a clever wording scam, although in this case it’s somewhat unclear who came up with the scam (Kevan?) and what they were planning to gain from it, if anything. If this were just a wording mistake happenstance that nobody was expecting, I would vote in favour of giving Clucky the Infamy (as a gamestate-change-by-CFJ, not because I think Clucky already has it). If someone intentionally brought this situation about (e.g. by tipping Kevan off to the wording error) because they thought they would benefit from Clucky having lower Infamy, I would vote in favour of leaving it at zero. But I don’t have enough information to determine which of these circumstances apply, so I’m not sure how to vote.

(Note that this problem doesn’t affect Idle Agents: the core rules say “The combined term “Idle Agents” can be used to refer to Agents who are Idle even in Proposals or rules that do not treat them as Agents” which doesn’t fall foul of the same wording problem.)

@Kevan “if there are any Green Cats, score a point” does to me seem to be referring to cats and allowing them to be green. You shouldn’t have to go “Cats that are Green even though Cats can’t normally be Green”—that is all implied by the reference to Green Cats

The fact that “Idle Players” specifically calls out that it can refer players who are idle I guess highlights the dangers of clarifying something like that in the rules.

Does that statement ultimately serve to function “Normally it would not work this way, but in this specific circumstance it does and were this not in the rules it wouldn’t work” or “This is a clarification of something that is already true, just spelled out to be clear, and so other things should work this way as well”

To me, its the later.

in favor of “Even More Explicit”