Friday, July 28, 2023

Proposal: Key Punch

Withdrawn -SingularByte

Adminned at 30 Jul 2023 10:28:22 UTC

Remove the bullet point “Initialisation Keys may not be edited or removed from the dynastic rules by any Proposal, though they may be moved to other rules and subrules, and the text surrounding them may be edited, added to, or removed.” from the rule “Machinist Agendas”.

Cold Start attempted to streamline a paragraph by shortening it, and was flagged for removing an Initialisation Key in the process. (Not the bolded definition of the Key, just a usage of it.)

If that’s what this means, it seems excessively restrictive and only likely to trip us up by mistake. If a quorum really wanted to erase an Initialisation Key from the game or weaken usages of it, a rule of “you can’t change or remove individual mentions of the key by proposal” wouldn’t slow them down at all.

Comments

Bucky:

28-07-2023 14:31:34 UTC

I would only vote for this if the GM committed to vetoing any attempt to eliminate a key entirely.

Kevan: he/him

28-07-2023 15:11:10 UTC

What do you see this rule as currently doing? Stopping players from eliminating Keys from the ruleset, even if they really want to?

Or just stopping accidental eliminations, at the cost of having to be vigilant that no amendment would reduce the number of Keys in the text?

Bucky:

28-07-2023 15:17:22 UTC

It’s perhaps stricter than necessary, but it keeps the author of a proposal from deliberately invalidating agendas by removing their keys.

JonathanDark: he/him

28-07-2023 15:24:33 UTC

I agree with Bucky on this. It’s all too easy to make a Proposal saying “remove the first sentence and replace with” without any explicit acknowledgment of the text being replaced, and thus slip in a removal of a Key.

JonathanDark: he/him

28-07-2023 15:25:40 UTC

In short, I’d rather see a tweak of the existing prohibition on editing Keys than a wholesale removal of the protections.

Kevan: he/him

28-07-2023 15:41:22 UTC

You think? Sneakily removing a whole resource from the ruleset by repealing a crucial sentence, and without voters realising, sounds enormously difficult! And if you’re having to trick some players to get quorum, because they’d object otherwise, that means there’s quorum for immediately undoing it.

That kind of thing could happen in any dynasty to vapourise a leading player’s resources or action plan, but we don’t try to legislate against it in advance.

Bucky:

28-07-2023 17:23:14 UTC

against

SingularByte: he/him

28-07-2023 19:31:41 UTC

against  in favour of my own proposal.
While an intentional repeal of an initialisation key is likely to be noticed, I’ve spotted far too many accidental unboldings to want to remove this rule entirely.

Kevan: he/him

28-07-2023 21:22:25 UTC

Ah, okay, I hadn’t been thinking in terms of unbolding a term invalidating its Agendas, if that’s the angle Bucky and Jonathan were taking here. I was reading Initialisation Keys as something that we didn’t even need any more, now that we’d initialised.

Yes, we should probably just take out the rule about Agendas automatically imploding if we change a font.

Kevan: he/him

28-07-2023 21:31:45 UTC

against Withdrawn on that basis.