This isn’t really an “as how we use it” update at all though, is it? Because it tries to enshrine in the ruleset an instruction that ‘you should not use the imperative “should” in most case’, when ‘should’ is the imperative that we use most often in the ruleset, and for good reason.

as the implication of this change is that a lot of rules text would have to be shifted from ‘should’ to an alternative, and none of the other listed alternatives are appropriate for general use.

No-one is going to get anywhere on reworking imperatives if they do not engage with the question of why ‘should’ is the default choice and why all route-one attempts to shift to alternatives have floundered. It has not developed in that way without a reason; the past twenty years of the game have not occurred in a vacuum, without smart people considering their choices of words. I admit to having given up on fixing this but I don’t believe a fix is impossible - but it does require engaging with the prior work in this area.

The choice of putting that in the ruleset reflects our common postmortem of “we shouldn’t have used should there”.

I’d say - the issue is how we use English, because our common verbiage does put should in such a way that it reflects a social “obligation” to do that.

It is a signal to future users that “we have stumbled here; see if you can use anything better than a should.”

“May” was previously defined as “is permitted to”, but we repealed it a few years ago because it was being exploited for perverse readings when rules used it in the other plain English sense of possibility: “Players may be on fire, and this is tracked publicly? Then I choose not to be on fire.”

The most difficult thing with imperatives in a slow, ambient game like BlogNomic is what to do when the rules say that a player is “required” to do something, but (whether tactically or carelessly) they don’t do it. Josh’s past imperative work has grappled with this.

I think that from my perspective of the game; I sorta discarded the double meaning part because I think that the modern meta have switched away from a legalistic read of the ruleset as reflected by many before us.

This is sorta intended to just be a soft patch of what we agree in play instead of what we think is the most ideal.

I think you may be discovering that you are assuming a consensus that doesn’t exist.

Or rather: you have identified a problem for which the solution is non-obvious.

I know there is absolutely zero consensus on this (looking back at our dynastic history) but then I feel previous attempts have been hyperfocused at arriving at the solution in one step.

as I think we are going in circles and I think we’re still holding on a hope that one singular proposal will fix it.