Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Proposal: Rumor Mill

Add a new rule named “Rumors” with the following text:

Rumors is a list of flavor text strings that is publicly tracked, defaulting to an empty list, where each string in the list is no more than 100 characters and may only include the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers, underscores, hyphens, full stops, spaces, and apostrophes.

If they have not done so within the past 24 hours, as a Virtual Action an Agent may add a string to the Rumors.

In the rule “The Break-In”, just before the step of Breaking In that starts with the text “Post a blog entry”, insert the following step:

* Set Rumors to an empty list

Anonymous statements, true or false, might be useful for Agents to rat each other out or confuse the opposite team.

Comments

DoomedIdeas: he/him

29-04-2025 17:24:09 UTC

for I’m not sure how it’s anonymous if we can all see the edit history of the wiki page, but it sounds fun!

JonathanDark: he/him

29-04-2025 18:15:32 UTC

It’s a Virtual Action, so adding a Rumor is done by privately messaging the Concierge. The edit history for Rumors will all be from Kevan, which makes it anonymous as to who authored each Rumor.

DoomedIdeas: he/him

29-04-2025 18:23:06 UTC

Oh, okay! Thank you for explaining that :)

ais523:

29-04-2025 18:38:56 UTC

An interesting rules point: this says “on behalf of the Agent” which implies it’s the Agent that did the change. That means that the fact that the Agent performed it is gamestate, and (per “Representations of the Gamestate”) is tracked in the wiki history – which implies that Kevan needs to state who created the Rumour when updating the wiki page.

(Hopefully Kevan’s using a method of tracking for virtual actions that change secret information that is also capable of tracking history. If not, he would have to put the history onto the Gamestate Modifications page, making the secret actions public.)

JonathanDark: he/him

29-04-2025 19:16:14 UTC

If you object to this proposal for the reason of tracking virtual actions by the Agent who performed them, then you should object to the entirety of this dynasty from the beginning, as it was built entirely on Agents performing virtual actions.

ais523:

29-04-2025 19:50:00 UTC

The history is tracked in the same place as the gamestate it modifies. That can work for virtual actions that update secretly tracked variables, but I suspect it doesn’t work for virtual actions that update publicly tracked variables.

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