Before I say anything else, would someone be so kind as to bring me up to speed and explain why this sort of rules change has been proposed in several forms over the past few days? I feel like I would have a better chance at finding a good formulation of this rule or explaining why this might not work if I understood why this is necessary.

People have been posting Proposals along the lines of “Player has achieved victory” and attempting to force them through with Political Capital. It hasn’t worked, but it’d be good to stop them, just in case.

Excellent. Thank you; that is exactly what I thought I would hear. Then, the idea of removing this from time and formulating it in terms of the current gamestate is not so far from what I was thinking of, which is this:

“No Proposal may propose to change the Ruleset in such a way as to make it possible for one or more Honourable Members to achieve victory at the instant the Proposal is enacted. Such a Proposal may be marked as illegal, etc., etc.”

This seems like it might work—any thoughts on this?

I disagree with this equation and formulation.  More accurate would be ∀x (x ∈ {hon. members} & (x <> speaker)—> x ∈ {possible winners}).  Perhaps, in words this would look like:

“No rule may propose a win condition that is impossible for any subset of players to acheive”

This is impossible to achieve without a human arbiter.  The rule can just be something like “whoever has exactly X credibility achieves victory” or “everyone in the Religious party achieves victory”, something that could be a legitimate victory condition in other circumstances but just happens to favor a specific player.

Omd:
Those, potentially, would be fine rules, since those could apply to anyone - since it’s possible for a player to get (or have gotten) to that place.  Rules like, “larrytheturtle wins” is not ok, though, since I could never fulfill that requirement.

Sorry nqeron; I wasn’t sure whether or not the Speaker could win, but it makes sense that they can’t.

I like both ideas, but are they both necessary?

nqeron, my point is that if someone can push through a proposal to make them win, they can also push through a proposal to create a victory condition that they just happen to be the only one to satisfy (or be able to satisfy immediately after enactment); the result is the same,

SKJU:

The other major change was moving from iff to implies.  I’m not sure it needs to be the case an individual who belongs the set of possible winners implies that the individual is either an honourable member or not the speaker.  Perhaps there is someone who can’t win, but is an hon. member or a speaker - like in my rule regarding corruption.  (or a rule that stated corrupt members cannot achieve victory). 

omd:  yes they could, but it would be based in a game mechanic that anyone could have achieved. (and could still achieve, given enough effort).  I don’t have a problem with these.  I have a problem with rules that only limit the win to a single possible individual.  It’s a fine and subtle distinction, but it’s important.  It also makes it easier to distinguish between ‘bad’ proposals for victory and ‘good’ ones.  With your stipulation, it would be pretty hard to ever institute a rule like, “whoever has the most credibility” - which would be an acceptable way to end a dynasty.  It’s not really ok to say - “I win, because I win”.