Thursday, May 22, 2008

Ruleset draft, take two, take two

With all the talk about changing the ascension rule and other parts of the core ruleset going on, I’d like to focus your attention on a post I made a few months ago, which garnered little to no attention at the time:

Two years ago, some intrepid captains created a Ruleset draft to try and create a possible replacement for the ruleset (be sure to check the discussion page for some insights into the changes they proposed). In an effort not to let this hard work go to waste, I created an updated draft, incorporating many elements from the first one. The formatting could use some work, but all in all it seems functional.

If enough captains see potential in this, we could refine it further, and perhaps ultimately use it to replace the current ruleset.

To that end, I humbly invite everyone to check out the new draft, improve it where necessary, and leave any remarks on the discussion page.

I’m reposting this partly because I’m stubborn, and partly because the current crowd seems more interested in and capable of refining the ruleset to improve it.

I believe this method of altering the ruleset enables us to fix multiple issues at once, and create a more powerful, more consice and easier to understand ruleset.

Here are some questions to get some discussion going on:
1. Do you think the core ruleset could be improved?
2. Do you think the core ruleset needs to be improved?
3. Do you think this method (multiple players contributing towards creating an entire new ruleset) is the way to do it? If not, what is?
4. If so, would you be willing to invest some time and effort towards accomplishing this goal?

posted by Purplebeard at 22 May 2008 09:45:00 UTC Comments (9)

Comments

Amnistar: he/him

22-05-2008 10:21:49 UTC

I’m willing to put time and effort into organizating the rules better…and I know Axeling would be interested (he had a whole list of changes to make the ruleset better) if I can get him playing again…

question, what is the purpose of ‘voting posts’?

Kevan: he/him

22-05-2008 11:58:42 UTC

I’d forgotten about all that. I think the ruleset’s in fairly good shape at the moment, though - that ruleset draft was from a couple of years ago, and although we didn’t switch to it, we have addressed some of the points raised by it, since.

I don’t see that we gain anything by dragging out “Voting Posts” and “Passing the Mantle”; these seem like special cases that could just be handled by a proposal or a dynastic rule, and don’t need to hang over every dynasty.

And although there are cases where the new ruleset draft cleans up ambiguities (particularly the precedence issues), I think the fact that this hasn’t actually been a practical problem in the lifetime of BlogNomic suggests that we don’t really need a rule for it, and can just handle it by CfJ if it ever comes up.

I’m strongly against adding new stuff to the core ruleset, even if it makes us watertight against rare events - the core ruleset is where a lot of potential players decide whether they’re going to join the game or not, and Rule 1.1 alone would look rather intimidating, from this draft.

arthexis: he/him

22-05-2008 13:44:27 UTC

I like the core ruleset as it is. However, I think we should actually have at least a rule that explains the precedence on proposals. It doesn’t have to be on the first rule, or maybe it could even be in the glosary(?). Right now precedence has not become a problem, because it is kind of a “implicit understanding” but I think it should be made explicit.

arthexis: he/him

22-05-2008 13:45:00 UTC

*err not precedence on proposals, I meant precedence on rules. oops.

Purplebeard:

22-05-2008 14:47:09 UTC

I should state that I also hold the belief that less is more. I never intended my draft to be any more than a starting point for us to refine further, and only implemented most of the changes from the original draft in an effort to remain partial.

I do see Kevan’s point, though, in that the ruleset should be consice and accessible to new players (as I stated in the post). Perhaps this should be our main goal, and something like this would be preferred as a starting point.

It’s written to be reasonably understandable when read from front to end (e.g. defining terms before using them where possible). It’s also somewhat shorter than the current ruleset.

Yoda:

22-05-2008 15:54:39 UTC

In all of these drafts, the first sentence of the ruleset is in italics, so we would have to unitalicize it before it is actually implemented.

Kevan: he/him

22-05-2008 16:11:08 UTC

That was apparently just “to prevent any rule-lawyering trouble during editing”.

Rodlen:

22-05-2008 16:34:52 UTC

1. Do you think the core ruleset could be improved?

Yes.  It always can.

2. Do you think the core ruleset needs to be improved?

Not yet, but somebody is likely to find a game-breaking problem.

3. Do you think this method (multiple players contributing towards creating an entire new ruleset) is the way to do it? If not, what is?

I feel that this method has a bit of a quality control problem.  The proposals we are using are good enough for me.

4. If so, would you be willing to invest some time and effort towards accomplishing this goal?

...

Ornithopter:

22-05-2008 19:25:34 UTC

The only issues I have with the current core ruleset are 1.9’s allowing a new Commander to change any “keywords” they want, where the only keyword defined in the glossary is “quorum”; and the fact that either new Commanders are not allowed to change the cosmetics of the blog (header, colorscheme, etc.) or the cosmetics aren’t gamestate anymore since the rules don’t regulate their alteration, and can thus be changed by anyone at any time.

I do like the distinction between “laws” and “rules”, but it’s just cosmetic.