Friday, March 14, 2025

Proposal: New defaults dropping

Timed out and failed, 1-3. Josh

Adminned at 16 Mar 2025 22:43:54 UTC

In the rule Numbers and Variables, immediately before the string “or the list which is alphabetically earliest”, add:

false (if the range of possible outcomes is limited to “true” or “false”),

To the end of the same bullet point, add:

When an action is added to the ruleset that allows for the manipulation of a game variable based on set timescales, the first use of that action for each Seeker uses, by default, the time at which that action was added to the ruleset as the basis for assessing the most recent time at which that action was performed by that Seeker.

Comments

Habanero:

14-03-2025 20:07:36 UTC

I’m a bit worried that the second bit about default action times might make it so that you can’t take a newly-defined Weekly Action until the next week after it was added. Maybe the “basis for assessing the most recent time at which that action was performed by that Seeker” is specific enough to not have this happen though, since Weekly Actions don’t explicitly refer to the most recent time of occurrence

ais523:

14-03-2025 20:18:36 UTC

The second bit is interesting – often we want an action that can only be taken once every X hours (different from a daily or weekly), but sometimes we want a delay after it first becomes possible and sometimes we don’t, and there are lots of potential wordings that could be used. It might be nice to have a standardised suggestion on how to do that in the Glossary (or maybe a Building Block if it’s complicated).

We also often want actions which scale based on how long it is since the player has performed them, which is probably what the proposal is intended to target (but as Habanero says, it’s unclear whether this proposal does indeed target only those actions). For those, the default suggested in this proposal is fairly obvious.

Habanero:

15-03-2025 01:51:48 UTC

for as I think it’s probably clear enough it only applies to the intended “the more you wait the bigger the result” actions

SingularByte: he/him

15-03-2025 07:42:10 UTC

I would fall on the side of seeing daily/weekly actions as affected by this. They are, after all, set timescales.
[Recusant for] but I think we need a patch.

Kevan: Concierge he/him

15-03-2025 09:23:19 UTC

Is the second paragraph coming from some unstated dynastic issue? Skimming the current ruleset I only see cases which seem like they’d land the wrong way if we assumed that the player had silently performed the action when the rule enacted: “If a Seeker has not created a Deal in the past 72 hours” and “has not changed any Targets in the previous 72 hours” would be stopped from being used within three days of their enactment; “the first week after giving themselves a Vocation for the first time” would allow a late joiner to be considered to have set their own Vocation weeks earlier; “every time they have performed this action before this dynasty” may or may not count an additional early performance (when I perform it for the first time, the ruleset will also inform me that “the most recent time at which that action was performed” by me was some specific earlier point in time).

This would fix the occasional bug where we write something like “a player may spin the wheel if it has been at least 48 hours since they last spun it” and forget that this doesn’t let someone spin it for the first time, but covering all actions applying to “the manipulation of a game variable based on set timescales” seems like throwing the net too wide.

(I won’t idle-vote against this as I don’t know if it’s patching an important dynastic issue, because I am not following this dynasty.)

Josh: he/they

15-03-2025 09:35:27 UTC

@Kevan I think one of the implications of Recusants is that idle players are expected to act as guarantors of the core ruleset rather than feeling like they have to defer to dynastic gameplay.

It’s in response to the slightly clumsy last clause in this proposal, but cuts to a recurring issue the recurring issue that you mentioned. I see the argument raised but I think the overly restrictive interpretation might be better than the overly permissive status quo. I would be happy to see further alterations.

ais523:

15-03-2025 11:06:18 UTC

This arguably entirely breaks Reinitialisation (which is off for this dynasty, but we use it fairly frequently) – it depends on what “based on set timescales” means, and that phrase doesn’t have a clear meaning to me (as in, for pretty much any situation it might apply in, I’m not sure whether it applies or not).

I think maybe the correct wording is along the lines of “If the performance of an action needs to know the length of time since it was most recently performed (by a given Seeker, or in general), but it has never been performed (by that Seeker, if applicable), use the length of time since it was added to the ruleset.” That way, actions written in the “looking back” style (“you can’t do this if you did it in the last 72 hours”) are (hopefully) unambiguously unaffected.

ais523:

15-03-2025 11:08:52 UTC

That said, this strikes me as the sort of situation in which a glossary fix might not really help, either due to people forgetting it exists or due to people placing excessive clarifications in proposals for fear that the glossary won’t do what they want.

I’m not sure whether or not I like the idea of doing this automatically in general (as opposed to having a keyword or building block that could be invoked intentionally), but against to this wording.

Habanero:

15-03-2025 12:51:57 UTC

CoV against, Kevan has convinced me

Raven1207: he/they

15-03-2025 15:02:58 UTC

against