🍀

Thank you Brendan

Any complex core amendment really needs a mocked-up side-by-side diff so we can see exactly what the new ruleset will look like. A line like “change the words ‘can and should’ to ‘may’, change the second ‘should’ to ‘may’, the third to ‘must’, and the fourth to ‘is encouraged to’” here requires a lot of cross-referencing to check whether it’s a suitable phrasing or not. (Checking one at random, saying that an ascension address “must specify the Computer’s chosen theme for the new Dynasty” seems wrong; a dramatic but mysterious ascension address, clarified in the first proposal, should not be flatly illegal and keep us in hiatus.)

Saying that “must/shall” means “required to carry out this Action at their earliest opportunity” is one of the big guns here, but how far is it going? Does it mean that a player can take no other game actions at all (except CfJs, as stated) until they’ve taken the required action? Or if a rule said “the Cartographer shall update the map” and they explained that they needed to be at a laptop to edit that file, would they be allowed to take other game actions on their phone in the meantime? (Also, what happens if I “must” eat two different piles of grain, each of them at my earliest opportunity? I feel like an earlier draft of this covered that issue, but this doesn’t seem to.)

If you’re replacing shoulds with mays, I think some of them need an “is recommended to” added, so that we don’t lose context. If we originally wrote a rule with the understanding that we were saying to future players “and we won’t go into the details of why this is useful, but we’d really like you to actually do this” (like the vote tallies), that should stay in.

I’m not sure how I feel about the fair play stuff. It feels optimistically omniscient to say “A Pathfinder who has achieved Victory through breaking a Fair Play rule has not achieved Victory”, when we might not realise until months later. Part of the point of the DoV system (which only asks that the DoVer “believes” something, and for others’ opinions on that belief) is that it ratifies the game reset even if we later realise that the victory claim was flawed. Maybe there’s not a lot of difference between a CfJ of “wow, Cuddlebeam was a sockpuppet of Kevan all along, ban them both and retcon the dynastic history” under the current ruleset and “...therefore Dynasty 148 never ended, ban them and retcon the dynastic history” under your version. I suppose the former is easier to tidy up, as we don’t have to work out what the current ruleset would actually legally look like.

I think we need to continue whack-a-moleing the issues over on a wiki page. I’m feeling more optimistic, though.

Thanks for the detailed comments, Kevan. A side-by-side dif is here.

I think that ‘earliest opporutnity’ is quite soft - you could reasonably argue that the earliest opportunity requires opportunity, and that (in your example) needing to wait until you were on a laptop constitues a permissable deferal on that basis that will still allow you to vote. It’s true that it doesn’t allow for situations where there are competing musts, especially around how you prioritise them when sequencing carries gamestate implications. If this passes then that will be a worthwhile amendment.

AGreed on vote tallies, although I do anticipate this being less of a factor post-switch.

The thing about DoVs is that they flick the ‘has achieved Victory’ switch back to off, so the proposed wording here doesn’t actually threaten the principle that a successful DoV settles all issues. The issue that you raise is already an issue; it’s already possible to have a DoV passed and find that the win wasn’t strictly legal after the wash-up. We also have the new shiny ‘uphold’ keyword, which is an implicit tool that we can always use to avoid rolling back the last 75 dynasties. But as I said on the wiki draft page, I don’t buy the ‘Fair Play should use shoulds’ argument. In some ways the Fair Play rules are the hardest in the ruleset; if someone, say, spams the blog, or controls a sockpuppet account, then they shouldn’t be able to say ‘oh, those are should rules and the glossary says that that means they’re just recommendations’. We can build in disclaimers around intentionality but ultimately they have to be illegal in the same way that anything else in the ruleset is illegal, in a way that allows us to simply revert the impacts and treat them like they didn’t happen, or vote against an ensuing DOV without having to be given weirdly non-specific (and also potentially problematic, given the priority for dynastic rules) permission by the Fair Play rule. It’s weird that this area of the rules, which is probably the most important, is so equivocal. We don’t worry about illegality breaking the game anywhere else, so why here?

I think “earliest opportunity” really needs clarifying so that players know what’s expected of them, and whether someone’s broken it.

* If a required action is complex and I’m really not in the mood, am I allowed to put it off and take some simpler ones first?
* If an action is creative (“after moving, a player must describe the city they arrive at”) am I allowed to spend ten minutes writing a nice piece of prose, or am I compelled to post the quickest possible one-liner?
* If it’s late at night and someone triggers an action which requires me to perform a complex action in response “at my earliest opportunity”, am I allowed to sleep even though I could technically do it right now?
* What happens if a player finds themselves burdened with an action that they are capable of performing, but which they would rather resign from the game than undertake (like “post your credit card details to the wiki” or “delete the BlogNomic website”)?

Reading the rules again I’m getting fuzzier on the DoV issue and what you’re changing it to. What happens under your rules if someone removes their rubber mask after their DoV passes, and reveals they were a sockpuppet all along? Your rule says that such a player cannot have achieved victory. Does their DoV stand (having gotten through the usual floaty “believes they have” framework of the DoV), or retroactively fall (because they cannot have “believed” they had achieved it, knowing the Fair Play rules)?

This proposal defines actions, which is pretty extreme. I think the definition is solid, but its worth looking at those consequences pretty in depth.

I don’t like “earliest opportunity” and “intentionally delaying such an action”. I’m pretty sure I’ve delayed intentionally a few different times. I don’t think I’ve done so for more than 48 hours, and in most cases the delay was driven by a proposal or cfj being processed, or a time limit on someone else. I didn’t do it to intentionally delay the game. Was that tactic unfair?

I actually preferred the ban on actions other than the must over “earliest opportunity”

I think the ability to retroactively take away victory for violating the fair play rules is extreme but justified. For me, the Fair play rules are special. They aren’t just about playing the game, but about safeguarding the game. violations of other rules are mistakes, violation of fair play is cheating. Which why I might feel the way I do about the timing clauses in it.

I feel like voting should be included in the protective clause around CFJ.

The frequency rules look nice.

The frequency stuff seems very standalone, unless I’m missing some connection? I’m not sure what I think about it (the idea of an apparently untracked “7-Usage Weekly Action” fills me with some dread), but it could go up as its own proposal.

@Kevan - It’s worked out that Stamina in this dynasty is effectively a 7-usage weekly action, funnily enough.

So I think one of the things that’s consistent between you both, Kevan and derrick, is a reluctance around ‘must’ being too forceful - although in Kevan’s case it’s more about the ability or desirability of compliance and in derrick’s case it’s more about gradations of choice.

This is a tricky one as I also sort of think that there should be more granularity. I do think that the ruleset needs something in the ‘must’ position that I have described, if only to be the rarely-used maximalist imperative, but I see a need for something a step down, something that does compel players but which carries some implicit flexibility around how that compulsion is effected. For me, that was always what ‘should’ was for: actions that the player really had to perform, but which the gamestate could encompass some variation around how they were done. In earlier drafts that was clear but it was resisted even then; as with more recent actions it’s clear that that’s not how ‘should’ is used more generally in this game. I wonder if that gradation could be applied to different terms - ‘shall’ vs ‘must’, perhaps?

@Kevan - I think that once a DoV has passed any issues leading up to it are resolved once and for all, but I think that that position could use codifying. It’s outside of the scope of this piece but it’s a core amendment that I could vote for. I see that derrick disagrees - but I think that the situation where we get halfway through a dynasty before discovering that the new emperor is a sockpuppet calls for that dynasty being halted, perhaps, but not fully reverted. (I ascribe to a time-travel view of gamestate legality: something having turned out to be illegal doesn’t make it un-happen, the illegal things still happened, and you have to move forward from a world that includes the illegal things in its history, rather than trying to go back in time and erase them.)

The frequency stuff is standalone but has always been uncontroversial, and to an extent fits in nicely with imperatives on a conceptual level, so until anything in there gets controversial I’d rather keep them together.

The weight and tense of “A Pathfinder who has achieved Victory through breaking a Fair Play rule has not achieved Victory” reads like it’s trying to say something major about victory events which appear to have occurred. If your position is that a Fair Play breaker hasn’t legally achieved victory but that we’d respect it (for now) if they got a DoV through before we noticed, it doesn’t sound that different from the current and laissez-faire “you shouldn’t do that and we should retcon it into oblivion if you do”.

The big difference between Stamina and a 7-Usage Weekly Action is that the latter wouldn’t be tracked anywhere. I think every time we’ve done a “three times per week, a player may…” mechanic in the past, we’ve eventually gotten fed up of not knowing who still has actions left, and have started tracking it somewhere instead.

it doesn’t sound that different from the current

It’s really not intended to be different from the current set up at all. It feels like we’re going round in circles here a bit - you keep saying “but what’s the difference?” and I keep saying “I don’t think that there is one” - this whole effort is just about trying to ensure that there’s consistency and clarity, not about substantially changing the way anything works, especially when it comes to victory and ascension. The clause you’re stuck on speicifcally singles out “achieving Victory” as that is, as a keyword, manifestly different from winning (which is achieved with the passage of a DoV) or being Emperor (which is achieved with the passage of an ascension address and which is, in any case, already divorced from any concept of Victory in the previous dynasty by the possibility of a mantle pass). “Has not achieved Victory” is, in my view, a complete synonym for the current wording of “players should vote against a DoV”. I don’t think anything changes except that the rule has more rhetorical weight than the current light and flighty list of ‘should’s.

The circle we’re in is that I appreciate that you’re talking as if there’s no big difference, but the rule you’ve written sounds very different.

To my eye, it goes beyond mere rhetorical weight: right now if I announced I’d been faking dice rolls last dynasty, the consequence would be “you broke Fair Play, we will propose to boot you out and probably strip you of that dynasty win”. If I announced it under your rule, the starting point would be “you knowingly broke Fair Play, therefore you didn’t achieve victory last dynasty” (the same way we’d try to tidy up a situation where “players cannot create spoons” and I created a spoon last week without anybody noticing) and it seems logical that the next step would be “therefore the DoV post was illegal and you didn’t ascend”.

We may need to weaken the “believes that they have achieved victory” of DoVs to just “if you feel like it”, if you’re trying to marry the rhetorical weight of “cheaters literally cannot win and they know this” with the current “if you believe you’ve won, DoV”.

I mean, yes, I think that the real solution here is: if we agree that DoVs should settle all issues (and I think we do?) then that’s the thing that should be explicit in the ruleset, and then this wrangling about interpetation and implication can be set aside.

That’s an entirely separate proposal though.

for needing more work, anyway, particularly pinning down what “at their earliest opportunity” actually is and isn’t saying. Happy to continue moving this forward in the background, on the wiki.

The problem with the wiki is that getting engagement is tricky, so there will come a point where it will need to be good enough rather than perfect. But yes, this is probably it for this pass, will try again another time

X-usage could get some default built-in tracking. That might help it. 

I think if time matters, “must immediately” is available, and we could define that with a few caveats

This will continue to be discussed here - I’ve made some amends per the comments in this thread.