So, in the Apprendix, we got our Should:
Should
  “is recommended that”

And we got ourShall:
Shall
  “is required to”

Sorry, but the Appendix is pretty clear about what “should” is, as janky as it currently is. If he had to do it, it would’ve been a “shall”, I believe. Or a “must”. But it’s not. It’s just a “should”.

So, Kevan is in his right (as things are written currently) to do what he did.

So your belief is that all instances of “should” in the ruleset can be disregarded at the discretion of the player?

Even fair play?

No slippery slope here. Fair Play works because there are penalties for violating the rule.

(The penalties aren’t specified and still behind similar ‘should’ language and are still up to discretion though. But you get the idea.)

I did propose earlier in the year that it would help if Emperors explicitly picked a style from a list so that we’d know what their priorities were (eg. whether they’d veto a victory scam proposal that nobody else had noticed, or wave it through silently with a DEF and warmly congratulate the scammer during the DoV), but people were almost unanimously against clarifying this, at the time.

It’s hard to search for examples in the archives - all I can find is the optional coughing in the Plague Dynasty - but I feel like we’ve accepted many unperformed “shoulds” in the past where it would result in a fully legal but disruptive, destructive or otherwise unwanted state, even if only from the point of view of the action’s performer. From where I’m sitting, ending the dynasty (or setting up a contentious DoV) would be disruptive at this point in the game, and I’d choose not to take “the Computer should press the button” action, given the option.

The point from the post is that “should” may be optional but it’s less that fully discretional. There are very few shoulds that allow a player to just disregard something because they don’t feel like doing it.

I still don’t see it as totally binding. A shall or must, sure. I can see a really good case for that.

But for shall which is just a recommendation, I can just sip air through my teeth. I don’t see it as being something someone has to do, there’s just some social pressure and the encouragement of some arbitrary action if it’s not done.

But it’s not strictly compulsory. There’s other words for that.

*But for should which is just a

I know I always consider these as discretional when writing them or scrutinising proposed rules. When we say “the Emperor should post a weekly bulletin”, we’re saying that nothing breaks if the Emperor is physically unable to do this - but also that we can’t really object if the Emperor says on Sunday evening that they don’t feel like it this week and will just be taking some lesser game actions, sorry everyone.

When we say “players should rewind tapes before returning them”, and a scammer deliberately returns all their tapes unrewound, to win, we can only react with social disapproval; I don’t think we can argue that the ruleset didn’t permit them this discretion.

(In fact, I don’t think we’d even react with social disapproval, to a tape-rewinding win, we’d kick ourselves for not making the rule that unrewound tapes couldn’t be returned.)