Partly because I find my interpretation to be more interesting in terms of future gameplay.

But more importantly, this soft-keywording of the term “generation” is lousy precedent. The term isn’t defined in the ruleset, and declaring an action to be illegal on the basis of an un- or poorly-defined term opens up a huge can of worms. Author intentionality is irrelevant; the ruleset needs to be a precise document, and if it is not then the way around it is not to handwave the problem away with “this is what I subjectively reckon it should mean”.

In short, I disagree with the fixes, think that this should be a proposal not a cfj, and do not think that reverting an action that was a reasonable reading of the ruleset as it was written is anything other than punative.

Ah, precision varies from dynasty to dynasty and group to group, which I think is okay. Some groups scrupulously spell out relatively obvious things like “a Lizard is said to be ‘carrying’ a Parcel if it is listed in their inventory”, others write their rules more casually. This dynasty has worded some things a little on the casual side, and nobody has minded enough to object during voting.

I think the rules are solid enough in implying what a “Generation” is - we have “The first time each generation that an Ape Investigates strangely glowing pond” ... “You cannot use the Push Action on the same Target multiple times in one generation.” ... “the same Gene slot as it was last Generation”, plus a periodic action called a “New Generation Event”. A Generation looks a lot like being the period between two NGEs.

“Passed down” is the sticking point here. You’re reading it with the common-language “inherited from your genetic parents” interpretation, I’m reading it as the equally common “inherited in any way from someone older”. You’re (I assume) reading it as a simple reiteration of the NGE explicitly saying to “ignore all Apes’ non-inherited traits” when splicing Genes together; I’m reading it as a broader, additional restriction to that rule.

I only bring up authorial intent to show that I don’t feel this is a perverse reading of the rule, and that I’d expect a majority to feel that way too. I thought when voting on the rule that it was a way of modelling non-genetic changes during a creature’s lifetime - if you spend time working out then you’re allowed to act for most intents and purposes as if you’d had a Brawn Gene from birth; you just lose that bonus when you’re replaced by a blank-slate offspring of whichever Progenitors, in the next generation. If the proposer had intended non-inherited traits to be some persistent spiritual or tool-use mechanic where a genetically fresh Ape can pick up something an earlier Ape once knew, that isn’t really in the text, and seems actively contradicted by some of the building we’ve done on top of it (that you gain Brawn by eating, and Beauty by dancing).

This is an incredible post title.

since that is what I thought it should have done. I don’t really care whether the traits are reset and the last generation is redone but since this is the fix closest to pass I’ll vote for it.

I like the rule clean up; this was my original intent with appending /No to Genes, though in retrospect that changed tracking but not Gamestate. I was debating as to retroactively changing a specific Ape’s Gene slot, but I suppose that’s not relevant now.