Saturday, March 29, 2025

Proposal: How not to write proposals

Withdrawn and therefore failed -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Mar 2025 08:20:47 UTC

Create a new rule, “Warnings”:

The wiki page [[Warning List]] is gamestate (but the contents of that page are not rules and have no effect on gameplay except as detailed in this rule), and may only be updated as permitted by the ruleset. The Warning List is intended to contain a list of common mistakes in proposal-writing, and Nomicers are encouraged to review it prior to submitting proposals.

As a daily action, a Nomicer may create a new section at the end of the Warning List wiki page, including the following details:
* a section heading of that Nomicer’s choice, which does not duplicate the heading of any existing section on that page; and
* a truthful statement that specifies which Nomicer created the section; and
* a description of a property that a proposal might have, that the Nomicer creating the section sees as undesirable; and
* an explanation of why the Nomicer creating the section sees that property as undesirable.

Such a section is known as a Warning. A proposal “matches” a Warning if it has the property described in that Warning.

To encourage Nomicers to avoid writing proposals that match Warnings: if a proposal that matches at least one Warning is resolved as Failed or Illegal, the author of that proposal loses 4 Equity, the author of the earliest-created Warning that that proposal matches gains 3 Equity, and (unless the proposal was failed by the Imperator) the admin who failed the proposal gains 1 Equity.

To encourage Nomicers to avoid writing Warnings that match desirable proposals: if a proposal that matches at least one Warning is resolved as Enacted, all those matched Warnings are deleted from the Warning List, and each Nomicer who created at least one of those matched Warnings loses 3 Equity.

If there is a wiki page Warning List, blank it (or leave it alone if it is already blank); if there isn’t, create it as a blank page.

I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be good to have a list of common mistakes in proposal-writing available (some mistakes seem to come up again and again), and because this is something of a “pure-nomic” dynasty I thought it might be fun to gamify it.

The 1 Equity for the enacting admin is meant as compensation for the extra work that admins may have to do – in previous dynasties with a similar mechanic, we’ve found that such a reward is helpful.

Comments

Josh: Imperator he/they

29-03-2025 13:38:57 UTC

Against-leaning imperial ; if this looks close I might switch it.

JonathanDark: he/him

29-03-2025 14:30:59 UTC

So this is trying to bypass new publicly tracked variables by tracking it on a Wiki page other than the gamestate page?

against

JonathanDark: he/him

29-03-2025 14:32:49 UTC

To follow up: I get that the Warning List itself isn’t “held by individual Nomicers”, but one could argue that a Warning entry in the list is, at least in spirit.

Raven1207: he/they

29-03-2025 15:06:42 UTC

against

SingularByte: he/him

29-03-2025 16:59:30 UTC

imperial

DoomedIdeas: he/him

29-03-2025 18:22:13 UTC

against

ais523:

29-03-2025 18:47:32 UTC

For what it’s worth, I thought that this sort of thing was what the dynasty was trying to encourage when it banned individually tracked variables (i.e. track stats of the gamestate not of the players), but may have misinterpreted the goal.

Kevan: he/him

29-03-2025 18:52:03 UTC

Publicly tracking a “truthful statement that specifies which Nomicer created the section” that links Warnings to Nomicers on a 1-to-1 basis seems very close to the “publicly tracked dynastic variables held by individual Nomicers” which the ruleset currently says will invalidate a proposal.

I’d err on the side of letting this fail, so that someone can’t argue later that it was never a proposal.

arrow

ais523:

29-03-2025 22:48:15 UTC

against Withdrawn – I wasn’t seeing this as a Nomicer-specific variable, but apparently other players are, in which case it’s inappropriate for the dynasty.

There are plenty of other similar variables, though – “who made a section of the Warning List” is not meaningfully different from “who made a proposal” and may not be meaningfully different from “who performed an action”. In particular, creating new weekly/daily actions may be illegal until “None Shall Pass” passes because those create a conceptual variable that tracks when the action was most recently performed by a given Nomicer.