Although I think this wording works, it’s overly complicated; instead of writing it in “If X would happen, instead X doesn’t happen” form, you can write it directly as “X cannot happen”:

“A Meeple cannot be rendered idle by an Admin due to not posting an entry or comment in the past 168 hours if that Meeple has edited the gamestate tracking page within that timeframe.”

This could theoretically matter if a dynasty had side effects for idling due to inactivity – with your wording, an admin could apply the side effects without applying the actual idling.

I’ll vote against this; we should not be encouraging people to engage with the proposal side of the game less, and in any case it’s a tracking nightmare.

Seconding that encouragement. I wouldn’t say it ever helped BlogNomic to have some players at the table who don’t actually want to play Nomic. Why would it be useful to allow it in some dynasties?

I feel like Low-Player Mode is another one of those potentially controversial Building Blocks. We have Dormancy as an indication that in general, most dynasties that have fewer than X players shouldn’t be active, yet we do have that Building Block in case there are such dynasties where it makes sense.

I’m thinking that if there’s a case where there’s a large number of players and a constant flurry of Proposals (beyond the initial week or two of typical flurry of activity), some players may just be overwhelmed and would rather just play the game being crafted in front of them than participate in the crafting itself.

Is it good for BlogNomic most of the time? Probably not. Neither is fewer players. But, for the times that it might be appropriate, we have this optional Building Blocks.

You can play a game of nomic with three players; it’s not ideal but you can. You can’t play a game of nomic when no-one is proposing.

Low Player Mode is a squalid compromise that I would prefer to never use. This isn’t; if you don’t want to play nomic then go idle and play something else, I would literally rather shut the game down than play with people who only want to move their counters around on the wiki page.

@Kevan: I guess you can flip it around – one of the goals in most dynasties is to build a fun game, and if we’re doing that it shouldn’t be surprising that some players want to play it, even if they either a) aren’t interested in the proposal side of things or b) don’t feel confident in rule-writing or judging whether rules are correct. If you don’t have players who are participating in the dynastic gameplay but not in the core gameplay, then that’s a sign that maybe there’s something wrong with the dynastic gameplay that dynasty. So this boils down to a discussion about whether it makes sense to exclude players who want to play just because they aren’t playing all aspects of the game.

It’s also the case in most dynasties that the proposal-based gameplay takes a backseat towards the end of the dynasty (partially because it becomes almost impossible to get a proposal to pass at that point). Players often stop bothering to write proposals at that point on the basis that they won’t pass anyway. (I usually fill the time by writing proposals for which I don’t care whether or not they pass, or which I actively want to fail, for the purpose of confusing players about my intentions and/or creating a distraction – but that isn’t a commonly used strategy in general.) As such, it isn’t unknown for highly invested players to idle out by accident. The most infamous example is https://blognomic.com/2011/12/ (at the end of December 2011 there were no proposals for over 7 days and Bucky, who was leading for most of the dynasty, ended up idling by accident – I would have idled too if I hadn’t intentionally posted a comment to avoid it). This probably wasn’t helped by our annual late-December Hiatus, but further changes to the dynastic ruleset were unlikely at that point.

For what it’s worth, the quote from Suber at the bottom of the sidebar is instructive about what Nomic gameplay is – proposing, debating, voting, deciding what can and can’t be done, and doing it.

Some players are most interested in the “doing it” part of the game – the dynastic gameplay is a part of nomic. Some, like me, are most interested in the “deciding what can and can’t be done” part of the game (e.g. earlier today, Habanero reverted an action in order to avoid conflict, even though he thought it was legal – but of course the revert itself would be illegal in that case, and in some nomics a major source of fun is the discussions about what to do after that sort of situation). Neither Habanero nor I have started that debate, but under Josh’s “if you don’t want to play nomic”, maybe we should? Avoiding it is, in a way, ignoring a part of nomic.

So it isn’t obvious to me that the “proposing and voting” part of the game is/should be more important than the other parts (the debating, and the dispute resolution, and the dynastic gameplay).

Largely agree with Josh here. Proposals are the primary distinguishing feature of Nomic, if you aren’t interacting with the proposal side of things you aren’t playing the game IMO. Of course I’m not the arbiter of fun, it’s alright if some people simply enjoy playing the game others are building, but I won’t support things which cater to this behaviour because I feel it has a negative impact on the game

After thinking about this for a while, I think it’s probably better to avoid the problem by finding ways to encourage players to vote, thus meaning that the accident never happens.

It is worth thinking of ways to handle times when players aren’t proposing, though (e.g. by encouraging core rules changes so that there is something to vote on – normally the situation arises in gamestates where dynastic proposals are obviously not going to pass, so we’d need something else to vote on).