I hate that my way of playing is having a smaller field when 1) there is already no private data and all data is avail for people to analyze and 2) people bandwagon on analyzers.

If what you do is want to dissuade analyzers; use random components.

random components makes analyzers even more useful because it allows for you to handle all the random possibilities

This appears to ban playing the game entirely.

How is saying “no using computers” “banning the game entirely”?

I’ve been using a spreadsheet to process the data of Score as part of the game (calculating the median Score), and while I could use pen and paper for the same thing, I’d rather spend my time processing other actions.

I’m not any good at creating/building/using computer programs, but my lack of skill in that area is no reason for other players to have to avoid it entirely. If some players can do something better than you can, don’t ban it, just learn how to do it as well as they do.

@JonanthanDark I feel like that could “reasonably be achieved via and paper”.

Furthermore, you are not a wordsmith for the purposes of building blocks, and thus this wouldn’t apply to you.

To echo what I said on Discord, this rule is written so broadly that I think it proscribes using web browsers to decode internet packets containing game data.

@bucky If this bans web browsers, I think Josh’s proposal does too given most of the modern web utilizes LLMs to an extent where its hard to use web browsers without using them

I’m not against this, as an occasional building block that an emperor can reach for if they wish. I largely wouldn’t, but I’d be on board with trying it out.

I agree with Bucky that arguably this disallows using computers to access the blog (as computers have to process the data held in the blog in order to render it) and not wishing to have that argument later I think that the wording could be clarified.

I wondered about exactly this building block when Josh was talking about pen and paper, so it’s good to see an attempt at writing it.

“can reasonably be achieved via standard pen and paper” is very subjective, though, and as a player I wouldn’t always be sure what it covered. At what list length would sorting words into alphabetical order using only pen and paper be considered to take an unreasonably long time, etc. And is “reasonably” in terms of the player, or the average person - can a player use a calculator to divide one large number by another even if they don’t personally remember how to do long division?

“computational methods” is tricky. Does it include a simple text search of the ruleset? A regexp search?

Expressed more explicitly as “apart from [some browser exceptions] you can only use pen and paper, or a text file edited only by manual typing”, and I guess exempting un-Malign Emperors who should be free to automate their paperwork, I think this could work. I don’t know if we’d use it, but it could work.