Thursday, January 16, 2025

Proposal: If It Isn’t Nailed Down…

Reaches quorum 7-0 and is enacted -SingularByte

Adminned at 17 Jan 2025 07:46:35 UTC

If any of the Proposals “How To Heist”, “Security”, or “Get Cracking” did not pass, then this Proposal has no effect.

Add a new dynastic rule, titled “Bolted to the Ground {M}”:

{{{Any attempt by a Heist Action to modify text that lies between a matching pair of {curly brackets} instead does nothing.}}}

A curly bracket may not match with any other curly bracket outside of its rule.

In the rule “Tools of the Trade {M}”, replace the list of valid characters for the Heist Action defined therein with:

one of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, its 10 numerals, commas, spaces, hyphens, apostrophes, curly brackets, and full stops

Append the following paragraph to the rule “Security {I}”:

The title of a rule may not be modified through the application of a Heist action.

A way to have there be some tenuous protection behind rulestext that can be chipped away at through successively removing curly brackets, instead of a plain binary “either you can change the rule or you can’t”.

Writing this made me look at the titles of the rules and realize that you could arguably modify the mutable rules’ titles to prevent proposals from doing their thing (or even make rules immutable), which is a boring scam and so this also includes an unrelated fix for that.

Comments

ais523: Mastermind

16-01-2025 02:26:32 UTC

You probably want to restrict the “if any of the proposals” condition to the current dynasty. I’m pretty sure I’ve made failing proposals in the past.

I am in favour of this sort of protection (especially the intentionally imperfect nature of it). As for the side fix, “Dynastic actions amend rules to stop proposals working” is something that I was aware of as a problem and was very likely to need a fix, and this is a good step in that direction.

ais523: Mastermind

16-01-2025 02:27:24 UTC

Oh, the restriction should also be written to ensure that the proposal doesn’t fail due to a future Mastermind proposal not having enacted yet.

Habanero:

16-01-2025 02:29:44 UTC

For the sake of clarity, I’ve just named all the proposals this relies on.

Habanero:

16-01-2025 02:35:07 UTC

I’ve also tried to rewrite things in such a way that edits to the rule through dynastic actions are unlikely to mess it up; preventing that in the general case seems like a pretty hard problem to solve without ruining the game.

I noticed that the title thing is unnecessary, as it’s already covered under “For the purposes of this dynasty’s dynastic rules, “ruletext” is the entire contents of the Ruleset, except flavour text and rule titles.”

Habanero:

16-01-2025 02:49:56 UTC

Eh, I guess Get Cracking refers to “a character in a rule” instead of “ruletext”, which is ambiguous enough a straight ban on modifying titles might be useful anyway.

ais523: Mastermind

16-01-2025 03:20:55 UTC

I guess that in general, we probably shouldn’t rely on protections in mutable rules, in case someone changes them. They can be there, but they’ll never be fully reliable.

JonathanDark: he/him

16-01-2025 03:35:43 UTC

^ this

SingularByte: he/him

16-01-2025 07:00:02 UTC

for

Josh: Mastermind he/they

16-01-2025 07:39:31 UTC

for

ais523: Mastermind

16-01-2025 16:34:55 UTC

for

Brendan: he/him

16-01-2025 16:39:22 UTC

for

Habanero:

16-01-2025 16:52:15 UTC

Whoops, it just occurred to me that the rule “Security” doesn’t exist in the ruleset (it’s called “The Vault”) so the last provision does nothing. Ah well

Habanero:

16-01-2025 16:54:56 UTC

Whoops, it just occurred to me that the rule “Security” doesn’t exist in the ruleset (it’s called “The Vault”) so the last provision does nothing. Ah well

JonathanDark: he/him

16-01-2025 17:02:38 UTC

for

ais523: Mastermind

16-01-2025 18:00:26 UTC

I went and added the same requirement into “More security”, so we’ll have the same change in a future proposal if that passes.

Raven1207: he/they

16-01-2025 20:37:36 UTC

for