This makes Triumphs irrelevant – it is much easier to remove this restriction, and the Retired restriction, from the ruleset than it would be to score enough Triumphs to retire.

I reckon it would probably take about 6-7 Heist Actions to break both anti-victory conditions, which is a very small amount given that many Triumph points have taken 5.

(Note that the “achieve victory, or confer victory upon anyone” restriction is entirely bypassable at the moment using only Heist actions – it’s just that it takes quite a lot more Heist actions to bypass it than this would, which is why nobody has tried yet. On a previous round, my team were considering it – it would only have taken around four days of realtime.)

My favoured approach to this is something along the lines of “Breaching the vault”, i.e. where you can remove the restriction by scoring Triumphs. What you’re doing here is removing the restriction without scoring Triumphs, and thus making them entirely irrelevant.

As my team (currently consisting of one person) has four times as many Triumphs as your team does, then in this current form, I will veto this.

By comparison, I think the existing “achieve victory, or confer victory upon anyone (if a Mutable rule attempts to do so, it instead does not, and may be repealed by any Participant);” restriction takes 9 Heist Actions to disable – yes, I know it’s an immutable rule, but there’s a path to disabling it anyway. 9 is quite a lot to merely remove a single protection (in order to actually win, you’d also have to break the Retired condition and add a rule giving you victory), so I’m not surprised that nobody has tried yet, but the pathway is there.

If you want to see people achieve victory via rule mutation, I suggest allowing Triumphs to give them an advantage in doing so – meaning that scoring Triumphs is a good way to achieve it – rather than making it easier, meaning that Triumphs don’t help in achieving it.

You don’t currently have a Team, ais. Teams only exist when there are Targets.

I will withdraw this though - the public disclosure that players are already trying to circumnavigate existing blocks was what I was mostly looking for, although I didn’t think it would be that easy to elicit.

That’s a starting gun, friends

@Josh “I didn’t think it would be that easy to elicit”:

You could just have asked me! It’s my dynasty too, and keeping track of this sort of thing is one of a Mastermind’s jobs – if I’m going to be fixing loopholes, I need to know how tight the existing holes are.

I wasn’t just curious - I assumed everyone was thinking about it - I wanted it publicly said, and to have some clarity over how well developed the thought process is. It’s useful rhetorically for it not to just be in peoples’ heads, or in PM conversations to which not everyone is party.

Here’s another thread that I assume everyone else is tugging on in their heads:

If there’s a way to vandalise {I} rules, that can include the rule Coregency. Is it possible to make myself or ais not-Mastermind through that vandalism? Does ais have a higher level of protection, and if so, where does that come from? How is Emperor status endowed in a normal ruleset - is it just an implicit quality of having posted a DoV under the preceding ruleset? Could a third player force their way into the co-regency and require three teams?

So “the Emperor is an untracked variable, and may be a dynastic variable” is a core rules bug I’ve been meaning to fix for a while, but haven’t had the opportunity because my slots have been continuously busy. (We should probably make core rules fixes not count towards the slot limit – at present you have to sacrifice your chances to win the dynasty in order to fix the core rules, by using up a slot.) The “may be a dynastic variable” is a problem because that would cause dynastic actions that depended on who the Emperor was to fail. (The reason it might be dynastic is that “dynastic variable” is undefined, meaning that we fall back to the standard English usage of the word, and you can’t get much more dynastic than something that changes every dynasty but is the same throughout a single dynasty.)

“Victory and Ascension” says “When a DoV is Enacted, all other pending DoVs are Failed, the Participant who posted the DoV becomes Mastermind” – this is what sets the Mastermind variable in the majority of dynasties.

In this dynasty, the identity of the Masterminds is not an untracked variable because it is tracked in the ruleset, in the rule “Coregency”. I worked around the core rules issue by a) ensuring that Coregency was fixed to unambiguously define the Masterminds as soon as possible, and b) matching Josh’s vote on every proposal until it was fixed, so that there would be no core rules breakage in how to define DEFERENTIAL votes (I’m not sure whether anyone noticed I was doing that, but it seemed like a prudent precaution). So, oddly, this is something that worried me in most dynasties but hasn’t worried me much in this one.

There may be a problem at the end of the dynasty, though: “Coregency” disables itself when a DoV is enacted, but the Mastermind variable is also set when a DoV is enacted, and the relevant timing matters. I assumed we would just sort things out by CFJ, though.

:D