BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

This happens enough across dynasties that I wonder if there’s a generic way to cover this in the Appendix. Items and Locations are two concepts that seem to show up regularly.

I think most dynasties with locations and items are okay with concepts like “containing” and “moving” being implicit with only one plausible reading, because the fundamental rules are written equally simply: “each Player has a Location”, “Locations may contain a number of Items”. This dynasty is unusual for defining some aspects of the game as strings, and saying how to interpret those strings as referring to the identifying names of other gamestate entities.

I think it may be worth adding a layer over the top of that, making clear that it’s fine to write a rule like “if a Runner moves to Cell that contains a Trap”; that nobody will vote it down or scam it for failing to explicitly spell out “if a Runner’s Location is changed to the Identification of a Cell where the Value of that Cell is Trap”.

It may well be redundant if everyone agrees that the existing ruleset actually already implies of all this.

I know that I wrote some of these rules with the “string” verbiage due to not realizing that “containing” and “moving” are implicit concepts. I’m still relatively new to BlogNomic, and my only other exposure was the original Nomic many years ago. My experience there was that the players were very pedantic about wording, probably appropriately so in the context of original Nomic.

So, while it may be understood in the experienced BlogNomic community that there are some implicit concepts, it would definitely be helpful to newer players to have those concepts stated explicitly.

There are definitely examples in the ruleset today where this is already the case: the language around “spend”, “pay”, “loose”, “gain”, and “transfer” is one. I’m simply asking if “moving” and “containing” should be treated in the same way. If not, are the “spend”, “pay”, “lose”, etc. explicit definitions also unnecessary?

Not suggesting these implicit verbs are unique to BlogNomic in any way, just that they’re simple enough that it seems unlikely that a player of any game would contest them. Some past dynasties have certainly gone the other way by explaining in depth that to have an item in one’s inventory is to “carry” it, etc, it just depends on the preference of the active players.

There’s more complexity at play here - and interesting complexity, if Disks might later be able to manipulate strings! But I’d rather find out ahead of time whether a statement like “if Runner moves to a Cell containing a Trap” is already universally understood, or whether players are (in the absence of explicit shortcuts) expecting rules to be written with the longform phrasing.

The “spend” definition certainly looks like it could tell a few tales. I guess it was added and iterated from people trying to spend more of a resource than they had, to spend a negative amount, to spend someone else’s resource, etc. It does all seem a bit redundant, read cold, but if those alternate interpretations existed in the minds of some players in the past, perhaps it’s worth keeping a common sense interpretation around.

You know, I think it would have been great to go ahead and define what a “string” is, while we’re at it.