BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

It’s a neat scam, but I’m not convinced that it works. “To perform X, a Fishing Contestant must do Y” most naturally reads to me as “A Fishing Contestant must perform X to do Y”. If the sentence was “In order for a Fishing Contestant to perform X, a Fishing Contestant must do Y”, then I would agree with the scam. But in the current formulation, I have a hard time seeing the actor of “perform” as being anything other than the Fishing Contestant mentioned immediately after.

I could however see the *second* occurrence of Fishing Contestant being someone else (and I considered trying to piggyback off this scam by not paying the cost for my Churn the Mind, but it’s still too much of a stretch for me).

It’s easiest to parse in the scammy way if you treat it as “[for the reader] to perform X, a fishing contestant must be X, Y, Z”. You could compare it to a theoretical condition like “to perform a lightning-calling, a cell must be stormy”.

It’s only because the fishing contestants have agency that it feels more natural to parse it as being a condition on the fishing contestant themselves, but it’s not the only way to parse it.

Historically, we’ve had these types of scams before, where the rule doesn’t establish a strong connection between the player meeting the criteria and a player performing the action, so there’s precedent for this type of scam.

In some dynasties, it may even be intentional and desired that one player’s criteria “unlocks” another player to be able to carry out an action, e.g. “When a Wizard is standing on a Hidden Plate, a Wizard may open a Locked Door”, where you want one player to be able to open a Locked Door any time another player is standing on that Hidden Plate. Normally, you’d want to be more clear by stating “any player”, but “a player” can still be read as “any player”.

Good to know. This particular phrasing still seems a little unnatural to me, but I don’t strongly object to the scam going through.

On the clarification in any case.