BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

Not sure about the use of the word ‘defaulting’. This doesn’t necessarily mean what is implied. Also, the second amendment is simply not true, as an entity can only be permanent if it is newly introduced. I think that when we start introducing false statements into the ruleset that scams become more likely.

Apart from all of that, the idea seems fun. But it does strike me as a bit of an unnecessarily fundamental change with victory looming for someone.

It’s not very fundamental, I’m just changing a Trap effect - nailing down the Temporary/Permanent keywords (already used by Acid Pools) was just a way to make the wording of that a bit cleaner.

I think “defaulting” is okay - to open a random dictionary, a default is “an option that is selected automatically unless an alternative is specified”, so if we don’t know whether an Entity is Temporary or Permanent, it is automatically Temporary. And if we know its Permanent, then it’s not Temporary.

Not sure I see the problem with redefining the Dispenser as Permanent. The Dispenser’s existence is defined by the rule, so changing the rule (as we did when we altered its default location) changes the gamestate. It’d be tricky if there was a separate gamestate version of the Dispenser floating around (if the original Dispenser-creating proposal had said “create an Entity at E5” as an extra proposal effect, as well as making a rule that said “There is an Entity, the StickyBomb Dispenser, located at E5”), but that wasn’t the case.

Howver I would like column AND row even betetr. What do you think?

My problem is that you are defining the dispenser as permanent, which means ‘lasting, unchanged, indefinitely’, which it clearly wasn’t when it was originally proposed. Unfortunately, you can’t just say something is permanent now, after its inception, because in doing so, you make it changable, thus, making it not unchanged.

I wouldn’t mind if you defined ‘permanent’, but the whole concept makes no sense if you just make stuff permanent. You’re effectively saying the gamestate is what it isn’t, which, if we hold that as precedent, I could equally say that I’ve won when I haven’t, and be backed up by the very same principle.

for the title, and for the content

I don’t see Anduril’s point. Maybe it’s me.

[Anduril] I’m afraid I don’t understand your first paragraph or your gamestate-victory argument, but the term “Permanent” is just a keyword, and it’s sufficiently defined by other rules. In the context of the game, we can see that “Permanent” means “a quality of an Acid Pool which means it is not removed when there are more than two” and (if this proposal passes) “a quality of Entities which means they are not destroyed by lasers”.

If I was just saying “the Dispenser is Permanent” without any other rules referencing that term, then we’d probably struggle a bit in interpreting the common English usage of that, and you’d be right to be concerned about it, but it would still be legal.

Summary: you can’t change something to make it unchanged because in changing it, it is not unchanged.

Reading through the rules, there is no definition of permanent, but simply that there are permanent acid pools. My understanding is that if something isn’t explicitly defined in the rules, a standard English definition pertains. I have already given the standard definition of permanent as “lasting, unchanged, indefinitely”. I have no problem with the acid pools because they were *created* permanent. My problem is when you try and *make* something permanent, which, according to the above argument, makes no sense. It’s the application of this rule retroactively that the problem comes in.

If you add the word ‘now’ in, then that shouldn’t be a problem any more. Alternatively, you could simply define ‘Permanent’ as a keyword in Section 3.1, which would also solve the problem. Your contextual definitions don’t help either, because:

a) we are not talking about acid pools
b) lots of entities could be not destroyed by lasers just by chance, but *could* be destroyed by lasers if they were in the path of one. Just because I’m not in a square a laser happens to be does not make my gladiator a permanent entity (because I can be killed like any other gladiator).

I think I see where you’re going but the ruleset doesn’t exist in the context of previous rulesets. Previous rulesets in fact have no bearing on the game, so the persistent use of the word is not required for the meaning of it to apply. The fact that formerly non-permanent objects become permanent is not germanine.

Anyhoo, 

Maybe we should sharpen up what the ruleset means when it says “A keyword defined by a rule supersedes the normal English usage of the word.” - the way it’s always interpreted is that as soon as we start bandying around a new word (often capitalising it), it’s a keyword, and we immediately ignore any real-world meaning that word might have.

(By “a quality of Entities which means they are not destroyed by lasers”, I of course mean “a quality of Entities which means that if a Vertical Particle Beam Trap would be triggered in their column, it has no effect”.)