BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Conditions, requirements, potato, potahto

Wonder if we can just define the two as synonyms (for the dynasty, not permanently).

might be safer as could easily get confused

though I guess there is some risk involved there. I say we try to stick to using “Conditions” and if people keep messing it up we can define them as synonyms

I mean, I did mess it up in the initial proposal…

I agree with JonathanDark, but I think I’d better defer to someone else anyways :)

This makes sense as a fix, but CfJs are for disputes and when “an Heir feels that an aspect of the game needs urgent attention” - not for when people have a slot free but “don’t really wanna have to waste a proposal”.

(That this CfJ would probably enact before Perishable is a good example of why CfJs are meant to be limited to disputes and convincing cases of urgency; a player who wanted to chance a long-shot scam and realised that the Conditions/Requirements error was blocking it shouldn’t be able to rush through an obvious but non-urgent ruleset change in a few hours, to the surprise of players who were offline.)

As we are now okay with the ruleset being interpreted through the lens of implications, sure, it’s implied that CfJs can be for uncontroversial fixes as well.

What implies that?

The name “call for judgment” implies a procedural motion as opposed to “proposal” which implies something more contested.

(Evidence: it keeps getting used that way and that energy comes from somewhere.)

You may disagree, of course, but implications are inherently subjective so I’m happy with my read of that implication.

This is a fun way to read the ruleset!

Josh, I’m not quite seeing what point you’re making?

One person seeing the rules as more subjective and implication based than another isn’t especially notable. Everyone has their own internal view of what the ruleset says, and how far wording can be pushed to mean what you want it to mean.

I even viewed the issue in my own proposal as big enough that I raised a fix proposal so that it would have solid wording, not just implications.

@SB I am grateful that you proposed a fix! I am content that the issue in the original proposal isn’t by itself a huge deal - you’ll note that my comment raising it came with a FOR vote. I am not at all bothered about the specific issue of that one ruleset glitch which is, as you say, in the process of being patched anyway.

I do have a big concern with the argument, made by Vovix and endorsed by Kevan, that the ruleset can be understood to be implicatory. You’re right that different people can view this in different ways, but we resolve difference that by arguing about it and discussing it and highlighting the contradictions through examples, which is what is happening here. As long-term players, we each have a responsibility to challenge underlying arguments around philosophy of play, not least because it affects the nature of the game we are playing and the common terms under which is it progressed. A game-ending scam that relied on “actually, the rules don’t *say* I have to return my claims” would be a lot stronger than many scams that have won dynasties in the past. We all need to have a common view of how such a scam would be interpreted.

The conclusion of the line of argument raised by Vovix and Kevan is that almost any position can be adopted, often in outright contradiction to what the ruleset actually says, because implications are almost by definition broad, subjective, intangible and impossible to attack. This makes all gameplay inherently risky, as one can never know what implication will prevail.

It is correct to say that we want the ruleset to be to some extent non-literal - BlogNomic is a game that thrives when we don’t feel like the ruleset has to bolt down every corner. But no other game would work at the level of implication being proposed by Vovix and Kevan. In no other game would a player receive a token and be expected to return it when the game book didn’t say “here are the circumstances under which it is returned”. I believe that they are advancing an argument that stretches the definition of what is permissible way past the point that the text supports.

The proximate issue may be solved but the underlying philosophical issue remains live.

I was seeing Kevan’s argument as that the specific meaning of the word “have” was what mattered, which is very in line with a “rules as written” stance rather than “rules as intended”.

Needless to say, I disagree that “will be taken away when conditions no longer met” is a necessary implication of the word “have”, and thus we have a long discussion about the extent to which contested implications make for good game design.

Honestly, my personal stance on it would be that it’s both.

I could see the case being made that you either gain and keep it forever, or that it’s something you have while you have the conditions met, and it’s ambiguous enough that I’d happily base a scam on whichever version would be most convenient to me at a given point in time.

But admittedly, this subject is completely off topic from the cfj itself.

I think I’ll CoV   as per Kevan’s logic about this not being exactly urgent. I’ll probably propose this as an actual proposal when I have a slot free, unless someone gets to it before I do.

To me it’s a classic “missing word” scam - I’ve written a hundred of them. I keep vacillating over whether to do a Scam 101 essay for the wiki but if I did, Missing Word would probably be the first entry. The trick is to write the rule in a way where someone reading it might assume that it means something other than what it says. Classical Conditioning relies on the assumption that only dynastic actions count but it doesn’t say that, for example.

[Josh] Talk of tokens has clarified this a bit. It sounds like you might be reading “a player who meets condition X is considered to have Y” as “when X happens, token Y is given to that player” (like the longest road in Catan), where I was reading it as “when looking over the game, if X is true for a player then they are said to possess the status Y” (like summoning sickness on a Magic creature).

Two players reading a sentence differently happens. We shouldn’t frame that as one player being objectively right and the other trying to usher in an age of chaos where rules can be ignored. We talk it over and take a vote to clarify the sentence.

The term “implication” specifically puts us into the space where we are leaning hard into the age of chaos. I agree that sentences can be interpreted differently and we resolve through discussion (which is actually what we’re doing here, believe it or not) but I think the underlying issue here is still one of whether implication is a valid interpretation mechanism for the ruleset. This whole dispute would have been easier to resolve if we hadn’t got caught up in implication-as-a-framing-device but I think that just highlights that I probably *am* objectively correct on the narrow issue of whether implication is Good, Actually.

For sure, though, let’s agree to call a status a status and a token and token from now on.

Anyway yes obviously this should not be a CfJ.

@Josh I feel like if anything, the example you provided illustrates my point. Nowhere in the ruleset is the word “action” explicitly defined. The scam you’re referring to relied on the assumption that “achieving victory” counts as a game action. Which it does, but not by any ruleset definition, simply by the plain English reading of “a game action is a thing you do in the game”.

We’re making the same point, then, as my point is that vague implications enables scams, of which that was a successful one.

Classical Conditioning was bad for the dynasty it was in; it ended it, very prematurely!

[Josh] Levels of implication vary from dynasty to dynasty. Some are happy with “destroy an item” meaning that it gets removed from a player’s inventory, other groups spell it out scrupulously. I suspect my personal preference is probably around the same level as yours.

Of the token/state issue, we’re presumably both feeling that our own reading was the intuitive and correct one, and that the other person was inferring something which isn’t suggested by the text. I’m not seeing that as a difference in our tolerances for implication, just that we’re each bringing a different set of background assumptions to reading an English sentence.

Nah, my stance on this has never been that my read was the intuitive or correct one, only that it was valid, that it could use fixing, and that “implication” wasn’t a magic way of getting past that. As SingularByte has demonstrated themselves to be the only person in this scenario with virtue, however, probably best that we don’t till the soil on it too much further.

Perhaps you read too much into my “It seems okay to me.” in my only actual comment on Stain Upon Your Honour. I meant that it seemed okay to read the sentence that way, not that it seemed okay to leave it unfixed and magically play on. (SingularByte’s proposed fix was already pending when I wrote it.)

There is an aspect of the game, namely the fact that a claim has a meaningless “Requirements” but lacks a Condition. It seems to me that aspect of the game requires urgent attention, as something like https://blognomic.com/archive/a_stain_upon_your_honour could suddenly cause everyone to gain 4 reputation without this fix.

I’m not sure it could cause it. A claim is defined to have one or more conditions. Either the requirement is a condition as needed in which case it works normally, or the requirement isn’t a condition, which would cause the claim to not be valid.

I mean if that’s the case, having an invalid claim in the ruleset certainly sounds like a pretty urgent thing we should fix to me

It’s not urgent as long as “When the Old King Perishes” (or whatever the revised statement will be) has no current way to be triggered. Heirs can have, not have, gain, or lose Claims, and all such states can be retroactively corrected without accidentally allowing premature victory.

But isn’t that all the more reason to speedily ensure that no one can possible argue “I meet all the Conditions for this claim, and the king ‘Perished’”?

I feel confident that such an argument could be successfully challenged and voted down. If there’s a scam that allows the Old King’s state to be set to “Perished”, now’s a good time to speak up.