Proposal: Pecking in order
In the rule “The Award Ceremony”, change
Each Snail may have a Pecking Order;
to
Each Snail may have a Pecking Order, which (if present) is an ordinal number representing a position within a list (e.g. 1st, 2nd, etc.);
In the rule “Race Fame Modification”, change
Any Snail whose Pecking Order is 2 or Higher is Scrutinised. Any Snails whose Pecking Order is one of the two lowest values is an Underdog, unless they are Scrutinised. All Snails who are neither Scrutinised nor Underdogs are Runners.
to
Any Snail with a Pecking Order of 1st or 2nd is Scrutinised. Any non-Scrutinised Snails whose Pecking Order is later than all, or all but one, other Snails with a Pecking Order are Underdogs. All Snails who are neither Scrutinised nor Underdogs are Runners.
The Pecking Order is defined backwards to the way that Race Fame Modification expects – high fame leads to low Pecking Order values, whereas low fame gives you a high value. Presumably, the Fame rewards are meant to give the largest rewards to players who are behind, rather than players who are ahead (especially as it doesn’t make sense to call the highest-fame Snails “Underdogs”).
Per JonathanDark, clarify exactly how the numbers work, in order to avoid confusion.
CoV
JonathanDark: he/him
The problem is that Pecking Order is treated like an ordinal in another part of the rules. In “Races”, there’s this step:
I’d rather see this corrected by simply changing “lowest values” to “last ordinals”. Continuing the use of “highest values” and “lowest values” retains the undesired ambiguity.