Thursday, December 21, 2017

I say, therefore I do?

I have some doubts about how to do things which you are allowed to do, but that there is no explicit method via the which you do - you just can. For example, Group Spirit isn’t tracked anywhere.

If I wanted to make my Group gain 1 Spirit, would having just made a post saying that I did, be enough? Or a comment somewhere? Is this applicable for the general case? You just need to mention somewhere clearly that you do something, to perform something that has no explicit method via the which you do it?

Note that anything tracked already has a way to be performed, via:

For gamestate which is tracked in a specific place (such as the GNDT or a wiki page), any alteration of that gamestate as a result of a Failed Experiment’s action is (and can only be) applied by editing that data in that place.

(Which makes me wonder how this interacts with Combos, because Combos skip that part and allow you to do things en masse, but when was the timing of the actions then? When the Combo says you did as per the one-second-per-action thing or when you editted in the thing?)

But stuff that isn’t tracked, doesn’t, hence my doubts.

You can just say that you do it, therefore, you do? (or rather, you did do it, and you’re just letting everyone know with that message)

posted by Madrid at 21 Dec 2017 13:42:31 UTC Comments (5)

Comments

Kevan: he/him

21-12-2017 14:20:30 UTC

Sadly haven’t got the time to comb through all the rules right now, but offhand I’d have thought that if a game variable wasn’t tracked anywhere specific and the action of changing it didn’t require anything to be posted anywhere, then it would be legal to just change it in your hand. (And conversely, you could announce “My group gains 1 Spirit!” but be lying, and not actually gain any Spirit.)

Ultimately, when you eventually took a Spirit action and altered ome visible gamestate, you’d have to convince other players that your secret Spirit actions were legal at the time, and weren’t contradicted by any other secret Spirit actions which you didn’t know had happened.

We should definitely rewrite the Spirit rule.

Kevan: he/him

21-12-2017 14:21:18 UTC

(Er, change it in your head, not your hand.)

Madrid:

21-12-2017 17:28:57 UTC

Gotcha.

I’ll try to propose some default way to do actions so that we don’t have the issue of those non-tracked “ghost actions” things. Probably combine it all with Combos too, as a generic action clarification thing.

Kevan: he/him

21-12-2017 19:04:37 UTC

Would forcing all gamestate to be tracked somewhere be enough - that if no tracking method is specified, it defaults to somewhere? (Maybe a wiki page named “Untracked data”, since it would really only ever end up there by mistake, and should be fixed.)

Once it’s tracked, then ghost actions become covered by “editing that data in that place”.

Madrid:

21-12-2017 19:14:51 UTC

That works too. If I can’t think of a way to combine it and Combos in an elegant way, I’ll most likely go for that (because I prefer to keep the amount of non-dynastic ruletext at a minimum if I’m able to)