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

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.

Oh, okay! Thank you for explaining that :)

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.)

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.

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.

[ais] Which rule or language interpretation do you see as requiring an “on behalf of the Agent” action to identify the Agent?

@Kevan: “The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in the history of whatever resource is used to track the gamestate modified by that action” in Representations of the Gamestate. I guess you could argue that the fact that the action was performed is gamestate, but the person who performed it isn’t – but that would break a number of other things, including daily actions and Preparation Actions.

Think of it this way: suppose I perform a Preparation Action, then attempt to perform another one. That wouldn’t work because the fact that I performed the first one is gamestate, and that fact has to be tracked somewhere (in this case, you privately track it along with your record of the variables that the action affects); if it wasn’t, it would be an orphan variable and thus it would be impossible to perform the Preparation Action.

Now, suppose I add a Rumor, then attempt to add another Rumor within 24 hours. Again, that shouldn’t work, because the fact that I tried to add a Rumor is gamestate (it has to be tracked – otherwise it would be an orphan variable and rumors wouldn’t work at all). So where is it tracked? According to the rules, it’s tracked in the history of the “The Town” wiki page (because it modifies a variable tracked there), rather than being privately tracked. So you have to put the fact that I performed the action into the wiki page history in order to track it properly. But then anyone can figure out it’s my Rumor, by checking the page history.

So this isn’t directly requiring the Agent to be identified – but it’s requiring you to record information that happens to identify the Agent, and it’s requiring you to do it in a location that’s publicly accessible.

@Kevan: if you would interpret it the way ais would, please let me know. Obviously, I didn’t intend for Rumors to be publicly trackable to their original author, so I’d have to rewrite this.

For what it’s worth, I think this is a core rules (or at least Building Blocks) bug – but it’s worth flagging those up before they start affecting the game.

Hmm, it doesn’t seem to me like it would require too much effort to tweak the rules to a state where everyone agrees they work as intended. Would something like this work?

Amend “Representations of the Gamestate” by replacing
<blockquote>The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate, tracked in

with

The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate. Unless the rule defining the action specifies otherwise, it is tracked in

and by adding a paragraph break before the newly amended text.

Amend “Virtual Actions” by appending the following new paragraph:

The historical fact of the occurrence of a Virtual Action is tracked privately by the Concierge.

</blockquote>

Ah, nested tags don’t work properly. Lovely. Good to know. Well, hopefully it’s intelligible enough.

(For what it’s worth, I am in favour of the proposal as intended.)

That makes sense as a problem and a fix. So yes, I’d go with the interpretation that I had to record the action-taker.