BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

You didn’t actually spend the AP, so the moves were illegal without a GNDT log entry to back them up.

I had a wiki entry. That’s enough.

Remember that the GNDT is not itself gamestate and is merely a reflection of it. If my actions cost AP, then I simply failed to update the GNDT; that doesn’t mean I didn’t perform the actions.

Kevan’s adjustment was reasonable.

It was still illegal.

“Main Actions are actions that have a Cost in AP (which must be spent in order to perform the Main Action)”, and you hadn’t spent any AP on your Follow-Through Actions.

If the rule said “immediately after taking an action, the player loses 1 AP” then sure, you could take the action with no prerequisite, neglect to apply the aftereffect, and another player could fix that for you later. But “must be spent in order to perform the Main Action” means that you have to do it first.

Kevan: I always read the Follow through rule in that it was still a Main Action, but its cost was 0 AP.

I always assumed that too, as the action is useless otherwise, but reading the rule closely there isn’t actually anything that says it costs 0AP.

CoV - I guess that spending nothing is the same as not spending. Therefore, I guess that the only way to legally follow through is to declare that you’re spending your 0 AP to step or shove (which I don’t know whether or not he did), and if you fail to do this, then your illegal action is actually incorrect logging of what you’re doing. Either way, coppro did *something* illegal, even if it’s not entirely clear what it was.

The only way to legally follow through is to spend 1AP to perform the Follow-Through Main Action and then spend 0AP to perform the reduced-cost Step Main Action. The second half should be fine however you declare it, but Coppro didn’t do the first half.

I said I was following through. This costs an AP. The fact that I failed to reduce the AP does not mean that I failed to follow through.

In every other circumstance, if I had taken a step but failed to update the GNDT with my new AP value, players would simply have gone and updated the GNDT for me. Why is this different?

I don’t think we would have updated the GNDT for you, if it was a “spend”. If we had mechanics of “a player may burn a house down announcing this in the GNDT” and “if all of a player’s houses are burnt down, they gain an insurance docket” and you just posted a GNDT update of “I gain an insurance docket” with no explanation, the typical and proper player reaction would be “no you don’t, you haven’t done anything that would let you gain that” and to revert the docket, not “clearly you chose to burn all your houses down but forgot to tell us, let me just do that for you”.

To repeat some thoughts I’ve just thrown into silence on IRC: “you clearly meant to spend 1AP, let me do that for you” seems just as wrong as “hmm, the only way you could have legally ended up at that square is if you’d killed Bucky with the Harpoon, and then leapt into two Traps in sequence and spent two Fouls to force them both to be Crazy Ivans, let me do that for you”.

If you fail to make a spend, then the action fails; the spend isn’t retroactively forced. If someone accidentally makes an illegal action, I’d say we’d always revert it rather than presumptuously cramming in some extra actions they could have taken to get themselves to that point. The only times we should step in to fix the GNDT are when there are unambiguous knock-on effects which a player forgot to include.

I’d welcome counterexamples from past dynasties, though.

per Kevan’s last argument

Sure, if it wasn’t clear that I was going to be taking an action that cost AP. But if I’d gone and deducted 1 AP for a shove, would people have reverted the shove or just gone and deducted the extra AP? In this case, making the shove is legal and if the evidence is clear that was the intention, that should be taken as the actual occurrence.

If I’d made a blog post saying “I follow through three times”, surely we would take that as costing however much AP it actually cost, rather than how much I thought it cost. Likewise, if I only had two AP at the time, the first two would be taken as valid, rather than the third.

Does anyone disagree with these hypotheticals? If you would argue differently, where and why? If you agree, why is this situation different?

Incidentally, this same issue happened at the end of the fourth of Purplebeard (Yoda only performed half an action, and someone else finished it for him), but most people voted in favour of the resulting DoV. I still think that that was wrong (probably partly because it was me who lost out on it, but that was what was making me look carefully for mistakes), and I think that it’s wrong here (and that Kevan is correct).

The rules say that actions can generally be taken by updating the GNDT/gamestate tracking pages accordingly. As a result, if you make an incorrect update, the whole action never happened, and we should be consistent about enforcing that.

Making a blog post saying “I follow through three times” would do nothing at all, as that isn’t a defined way to perform actions. Making it and performing an incorrect GNDT update at the same time would likewise do nothing at all.

I just noticed something: We don’t allow actions to be taken by updating the Wiki. This probably invalidates most of this dynasty (not to mention prevoius ones).

An action is an action surely? The updating and logging of which is just for clarity, isn’t it?

Where are you getting that from Coppro? Because if it’s 3.3.1 then *both* the conditions need to be true i.e. the action has to be illegal as well.

No rule generally authorizes taking of actions except for 3.2. Thus, except for actions (such as posting proposals and voting, thankfully) which specify alternate ways of taking them, the only ones that can actually be taken are actions “that change gamestate directly” and they can only be taken “simply by applying their effects to the GNDT”.

In particular, there is no rule that says you can take an action by updating the Wiki.

Yeah, 3.2 also says “unless another rule specifies some other method of performing them”, referring to actions, so any rule which describes an action and specifies that it takes place on the Arena wiki page is covered by that.