Yes, I agree with you with that a formal solution like this would be good, definitely.

However, this could be scammed by sabotaging another player’s Atomic Action midway, or worse, someone could just just ...forget a step. Or do a step wrong. And not notice it until later, in which case, they wouldn’t have finished their Atomic Action and get extremely penalized.

The penalty angle is good though, as a deterrent, this just seems a bit too extreme on possible innocents though imo.

If you do a step wrong or skip a step it counts as an illegal atomic action, is reverted, and can be redone.  It doesn’t count as timed out.  I made it very specific what timed out meant.

This enters a bit into a super interesting topic of the nature of illegal/legal and invalid/valid and what their formal power/abilities/traits are.

-If I make a post in the Proposal category, with the intent of it being a Proposal, does that make it a Proposal? Of course.

-Now, if I make a post in the DoV category with the intent of it being a Proposal, does that make it a Proposal? Or a DoV? Or have I made both a Proposal of a sort which counts towards my slots of Proposals and a DoV?

Alright. With that in mind, imagine we have an Atomic Action with a step in the middle that says “Step 3: Make a comment in the GNDT with your favorite Color”.

-If I make a comment with “Potato” (in error/accident), but with the intent for it to be Step 3, does that count as me having performed Step 3 or have I just made a bogus comment with no consideration from the Ruleset?

—-

That aside, with “If you do a step wrong or skip a step it counts as an illegal atomic action, is reverted, and can be redone”, I can then just intentionally do a step wrong and have it “count as an illegal atomic action” and then have it “be redone”, and reset atomic actions that way even faster than Timeouts.

“However, despite this, official posts can never be changed from one category to another, or changed to be a different sort of official post, if they have been posted for more than fifteen minutes.”

If you post a DoV, it’s a DoV, regardless of what you meant to do.  If you change it to a proposal before 15 minutes are up, it’s a proposal, regardless of what you meant to do.  If you change it after 15 minutes are up, it is still a DoV.  What does this have to do with this post?

“If I make a comment with “Potato” (in error/accident), but with the intent for it to be Step 3, does that count as me having performed Step 3 or have I just made a bogus comment with no consideration from the Ruleset?”

You’ve declared your favorite color to be “Potato”.  “Potato” is conceivably a color, c.f. “Orange”.

“That aside, with “If you do a step wrong or skip a step it counts as an illegal atomic action, is reverted, and can be redone”, I can then just intentionally do a step wrong and have it “count as an illegal atomic action” and then have it “be redone”, and reset atomic actions that way even faster than Timeouts.”

That’s actually relevant.  I think it should be part of the rule that you cannot redo dice rolls but must use previously rolled values if you are redoing them because of an illegal action elsewhere in the action.

Do we even need atomic actions to timeout? What about forcing them to complete?

Yeah, that might be a good idea - if it times out anyone can complete the action, but not redo any previously taken steps.  Then it would only have to be redone if someone messed up.

If the dice were the incorrect step, such as getting a teams power wrong, then you can’t reroll it using correct ones.

Also I dislike the week-long punishment if they time out for some legitimate reason.