Proposal: Items
Reached quorum, 5-0. Enacted by JonathanDark. Copied as a subrule to Rule Amendments per the text of that rule.
Adminned at 03 Dec 2024 02:03:32 UTC
Add the following new rule, titled “Items”:
Each Snail has a publicly tracked list of Items, defaulting to an empty list. Each Item has a name, and optionally an effect that is applied when the Item is Discarded. Items may also have Passive effects, which apply to all Snails who have that Item in their Items.
The following Items have effects:
* Magnet: choose to either move all Snails 5 cm towards you or move all Snails 5 cm away from you.
* Magic Mirror: if your Position is negative, set it to the corresponding positive value.
* Crystal of Moderateness: remove all Items from a single Snail (if such a Snail exists) who has at least as many Items than every other Snail, and then remove all Crystals of Moderateness from every Snail’s Items. (Passive effect: the only Move you may make is Discard)
* Shield: (Passive) Other Snails may not change your Position by more than 11-N cm at a time (where N is the number of Shields in your Items). If they would, your Position changes by only 11-N cm instead (to the same direction as the original change)
* Huge Club: if a Snail (other than you) has the same positive Position as you, move that Snail 30 cm backward.At any time, a Snail may Order an Item by privately sending to the Jury the name of that Item. The name must appear in the above list or be an English language concrete noun.
In the rule “Races”, replace “may perform the following atomic action” with
may perform Preparations, which is an atomic action with the following steps
Add a new step to the beginning of Preparations:
* Set all Snails’ Items to empty. Then, for each Item that was Ordered since the last Race was created, add that Item to its orderer’s Items. (If a Snail made more than 10 Orders, only consider the 10 most recent ones for that Snail)
Add the following new action to the list of possible Moves in the rule Moving:
Discard: remove one Item from your Items and apply its non-Passive effects (If any Snail(s) have the Crystal of Moderateness in their Items, no other Snail may perform this action.)
If a quorum of Snails included the text “confusing terminology” in a comment on this proposal, rename the rule “Equipment” to “Upgrades”, and replace its contents with:
Each Snail has a publicly tracked Upgrades, which is a list of names of Upgrades, and defaults to blank.
An Upgrade has a name, a cost and an effect which is applied to a Snail that has that Upgrade’s name in their Upgrades. A Snail may, at any time, spend the amount of Fame equal to the cost of an Upgrade to add that Upgrade’s name to their Upgrades (if it isn’t already there).
An Upgrade is defined as a subrule of this rule, with the name of the subrule being the name of the equipment.
The intention here is that you have to predict what your opponents are planning to do; how many items is it safe to order, should you order the crystal or will someone else do it anyway, etc.
This doesn’t necessarily conflict with lendun’s idea of Equipment, because Equipments seem to be intended as permanent one-time purchase upgrades, whereas Items would be Race-specific and discardable. (to be clear, I had sketched this already earlier, so this is not a direct “answer” to lendun’s proposal)
The renaming part is because having both “Equipment” and “Items” seems like it might be confusing
Habanero:
A few things:
- With the Huge Club, whoever happens to see the new Race first can just bash everyone else before the Slug of Death and win the Race. (Unless, I suppose, the other Snails have Shields, but even then you can just have some Magnets as well and push them further back after bashing them.)
- If I cooperate with someone else, we could both order 9 million Items and then only one of us could have them all discarded. I’d limit the number of Items that can be Ordered to like 10 per Snail, and also maybe make it so that all snails above the median number of Items held by non-Slug Snails get hit by the Crystal to prevent this collusion.
- I can hit myself with the Club (my position is the same as my position).
- You can still use Items if you are behind the Slug of Death. Is this intentional? If so, I can hit myself with the Club over and over until my position is less than -100, then use the Magic Mirror to win the Race.
- In general, I’d make every Item need to be Discarded to be Used (maybe except Shield), as a sanity check to fix any of these “I use an Item infinity times and win” scams, encourage ordering multiple of an item, and prevent people from using Items when they can’t Move.