The choice of term was deliberate and, I think, better.

I don’t see what advantage there is in allowing people to get an undeclarable win, especially when they don’t meet what are intended to be the prerequisites for it.

I get the impression it’s so that if you lose Rude, you can then declare victory later on without having to re-earn it.

per Josh

If this were changed to “achieve victory”, then you’ve just defined the win condition: have the Retired Characteristic. I don’t think that was the intention of the rule when it was first proposed. We have yet to actually define what it takes to achieve victory.

@ais I’m not sure that achieving Victory, as a keyword, has ever been consistently synonymous with either declaring Victory or the abstract concept of “winning” in blognomic.

I just realised why this correction is massively important – a ban on declaring victory would make DoVs illegal, and thus get round our normal protection in which DoVs uphold everything that lead up to them (because if we are confused about the gamestate and someone accidentally posts a DoV while Rude or while not Retired, its enactment wouldn’t work, meaning that we don’t get a dynastic reset, don’t change to the next dynasty, and the “can’t achieve victory unless Retired” rule would stay in place through all future dynasties and prevent all future wins).

@JonathanDark: the rule doesn’t allow achieving victory, it just prevents it under certain circumstances.

@Josh: they are clearly different because a core rule allows players to declare victory whenever they believe they have won. If that were synonymous with achieving victory, any DoV would automatically be a victory even if it were made under a misapprehension. Likewise, a DoV requires players to believe they have achieved victory in order to post the DoV – if declaring and achieving victory were the same thing, this would create a chicken-and-egg problem which prevent anyone ever correctly believing they had won.

@SingularByte: I don’t think it’s sensible to have undeclared victories floating around – it would further erode the link between “number of dynasties” and “number of wins”, and it’d be somewhat of a mess to write all the “player (undeclared)” onto the History of Victories page.

Like, which of the following outcomes is preferable:

a) someone posts a DoV because they think they’ve won, but we notice a mistake in it and vote it down:

b) someone posts a DoV because they think they’ve won, but because they haven’t actually fulfilled all the requirements, the DoV is illegal and the votes on it don’t actually matter.

From my point of view, a) is massively preferable here; part of the function of a DoV is to determine whether a player has won or not. What the current wording of the rule is doing is to override the core rules, such that DoVs are no longer the determiner of whether a player has won or not (because they’re banned under certain circumstances), and we don’t have any alternative method for figuring it out in place.

FWIW, we should probably have a “dynastic rules cannot prevent players posting DoVs” in the core rules, in order to prevent this sort of breakage.

@ais Your proposed rewrite of “Reputations” would read like this if enacted:

If a Participant has the Rude Characteristic within their Reputation then they may not achieve Victory$$$$$. A Participant may only achieve Victory, when otherwise permitted, if they have the Retired Characteristic $$$$$.

“otherwise permitted” could be seen as referring to all of the places in the ruleset (dynastic and core) that state when achieving victory is not permitted, and meaning that if those conditions aren’t in play, then achieving victory is permitted, thus a Participant need only have the Retired Characteristic and not be under any of the prohibited conditions to achieve victory.

By the way, the term “achieve victory” comes from the core rules: “If a Participant (other than the Mastermind) believes that they have achieved victory in the current Dynasty, they may make a Declaration of Victory (abbreviated “DoV”) detailing this” and “A Participant’s vote on a DoV is encouraged to reflect whether or not they agree with the proposition that the poster has achieved victory in the current Dynasty.”. In other words, the state of “achieving victory” is the status that is supposed to guide DoV creation and voting.

@JonathanDark: I don’t think that’s a possible reading of the sentence. “May only X if Y” means you cannot do X if Y is true, and is silent about whether or not you can do X if Y is false – it’s the converse of “May X if Y”.

Think about what would happen if the rule didn’t exist at all – that situation wouldn’t cause every player to achieve victory immediately. But the rule is purely restrictive, and doesn’t allow players to declare or achieve victory in any situation where we can’t already.

(It’s also worth noting that The Vault {I} explicitly prevents mutable rules allowing anyone to achieve victory, so there wouldn’t be a problem even under your reading.)

Meanwhile, we have a core rule that explicitly allows players to declare victory if they think that they’ve won. That also doesn’t mean that players automatically win, just because declaring victory is legal.

I’m a bit lost by the argument to be honest.

If a player earns a victory but is blocked so that they can’t declare it as a victory, then they’ll be little more than a footnote in the dynastic history, pretty much sitting at the same level of importance as someone who tried a scam but failed on a technicality. They won’t need a special section on the history of winners because by all current convention, they wouldn’t have meaningfully won.

As for the comment on DoVs being rendered illegal, if such a DoV passes when it’s not legitimate to pass, then that is literally the very thing that the auto-uphold is designed to support. Its purpose is so that you can’t just suddenly be yanked back to a previous dynasty due to illegality, and I’m not understanding how this one would be any different.

Yeah, it’s a non-argument. There are plenty of examples of people who achieved victory but either didin’t declare victory or had their DoV fail.

“As for the comment on DoVs being rendered illegal, if such a DoV passes when it’s not legitimate to pass, then that is literally the very thing that the auto-uphold is designed to support.” – this only works for legally enacted DoVs (thus legally posted)? Otherwise, you could just illegally post and enact a DoV and it’d cause you to have won, which would be a really trivial core rules scam.

The last paragraph of “Official Posts” automatically makes illegally posted DoVs Unpopular and prevents them having any effect on the gamestate; presumably, that also prevents the uphold doing anything. That prevents the scam I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but also means that if someone posts a DoV when they’re not allowed to, you can’t legally pass the DoV and thus don’t get an auto-uphold.

Let’s take an example that was discussed recently: https://blognomic.com/archive/dominion

By the comments on that DoV, Josh had not achieved victory and acknowledged that it was not achieved (even if an hour beforehand, he did believe it), and therefore the DoV was illegal to post by the dynastic rules. Using the logic above, this means that the DoV was automatically unpopular, unable to be legally passed, and therefore unable to be auto-upheld.

We are, by that logic, still in that dynasty as we never had a successful DoV (or in another other dynasty with an illegal end. There’s going to be tons). Since that clearly isn’t true, illegal DoVs must have some level of auto-upholding.

I think if someone where to post and enact a DoV themselves without any votes or justification, then it quite simply wouldn’t be allowed to pass at the social level. It would be challenged by the fair play guidelines because it would be a player just refusing to play in good faith.

@SingularByte: FWIW, I think that the game does indeed have lots of brokennesses like that in its history, but also that there’s no hurry to fix them – whether we fix them now, next year, or in ten years, we’re very likely to just uphold and end up in the gamestate we thought we were in all along anyway. In many cases, the following dynasty’s DoV will have cleaned things up regardless (because even if the dynasty never changed, a player who believes it did can still legally post a DoV, unless they happen to be Emperor) – it’s the specific case of a dynastic rule that prevents DoVs that is extra-problematic because it unexpectedly persists between dynasties.

It’s also possible, with the DoV you linked, that Josh thought he had won at the time of posting the DoV, and then changed his mind later (which also doesn’t invalidate the DoV).

I am beginning to think that the best fix would be a core rule fix that both safeguards the DoV system so that DoVs can always be posted, and interprets the dynastic ruleset such that if a dynastic rule tries to prevent a player declaring victory, it instead prevents them achieving victory. (This situation seems likely to arise in future dynasties too.)

I would vote against that core rule amendment. The distinction is clear and important.

@Josh: What distinction are you talking about? I’ve been arguing that there is a distinction between achieving victory and declaring victory, but I thought you have mostly been arguing the opposite?

I do think it’s a big problem if dynastic rules prevent the posting of DoVs, for much the same reason it’s a big problem if dynastic rules prevent the posting of CFJs. In both cases, we want players’ votes to do the talking, rather than having rules make the votes irrelevant.

Another example of the sort of thing that could go wrong with the current wording: suppose we use a CFJ to give victory to a random player; if that player cannot declare victory, they still can’t post a DoV to end the dynasty after the CFJ has selected them as a winner; but if a dynastic rule tries to prevent them achieving victory, everything works because CFJs override dynastic rules.

I do agree with Josh that the distinction isn’t one we should legislate away and serves a meaningful function in this rule (and as far as I understand that’s always been his position). I don’t see the things ais is pointing out as issues worth losing sleep over. Sure we might unknowingly let through an illegally posted DoV and cripple future dynasties, but unless anyone has some concrete evidence to point to of this happening it’s all a bunch of speculation without basis. Even if it did happen, as ais points out a fix is a single CfJ away. Reducing the expressive power of dynastic rules just to protect us from ourselves won’t do us any good.

I’m just really confused as to why people are treating a rule that blocks DoVs, while allowing victory, as preferable to a rule that blocks victory. I can’t think of any good reason why we wouldn’t want DoVs to work correctly for determining whether someone had won or not, nor can I think of a good reason why we’d want to put players into “has won, but cannot DoV” status.

From my point of view, the existing rule is similar to a rule that, instead of preventing Heist Actions from working if the dice roll too high, instead makes CFJs to uphold the action illegal. It a) prevents our mechanism for solving disputes about the gamestate from working, whilst b) not actually solving the problem it purports to solve – it’s just a pure negative, and I can’t see any reason to prefer the existing wording.

Josh seems to have an argument as to why the “declare” wording is better, but I don’t understand what it is. @Josh: could you try explaining again with different wording, in case that helps me understand?

I don’t know about everyone else but I wouldn’t consider someone to have ‘won’ in the abstract sense unless they both achieve victory and successfully declare it. SB at least seems to share this viewpoint, and ais themself has said as much last dynasty (“even if two players tie, only one of them can declare victory and thus I will only be considering one of them to have won”).

This change does affect how the rule plays. Right now, if I’m Rude, achieve victory for a brief moment, and then become unRude, I ‘have achieved victory in the current dynasty’ and can rightfully declare victory. Under the change, if I’m Rude, fulfill the victory conditions without achieving victory for a brief moment, then become unRude, I can’t do that. Of course it’d be easy enough to word the victory conditions in such a way that doesn’t rely on the declare/achieve difference (ex. ‘if a player has ever had the Retired Characteristic, then they have achieved victory’), but that just feels kind of ugly to me. Saying ‘declare’ instead of ‘achieve’ is a very simple way to get this effect that we don’t need to write our victory conditions around.

I’d also disagree about the scope of a DoV. I don’t think it should be the be-all end-all place for disputes on whether a player has won, and doing so in a CfJ if we disagree on whether the DoV was even legal to post is perfectly fine (CfJs often show up along with DoVs anyway).

@Habanero: I realised that I’d made a mistake in understanding the rule – I was thinking “only one player wins but it forms a two-player coregency”, but that wasn’t actually how it works; it was two players win, one declares, then they form a coregency. Under that understanding, intentionally aiming for a coregency would be fine and not a Fair Play violation.

I do agree with you that it affects how the rule plays, but I’m not particularly sure why we want to keep a “has achieved victory but was blocked from declaring” piece of untracked gamestate around. (To be honest, I’m still not particularly sure that there’s any gain from the Rude flag in the first place – it’s mostly leading to overblown and sarcastic congratulation messages.)

I would agree with you about the Rude flag - it seems like everyone is more or less active at this point so there’s little to be gained from it. I do find the sarcastic compliments quite funny though, and look forward to receiving some myself when I triumph. I’d support either more ways to become Rude or a repeal of Rudeness