does this carry with it the implication that a player cannot post a DoV at all if there’s no clear 2nd and 3rd place?

also, does the last sentence mean 2nd place can’t pass the mantle to 3rd place if they get it? because there was no AoM that ever makes 2nd place the Dealer

*‘would be’ no AoM, not ‘was’

I feel like this doesn’t fire off in the way that it’s intended to. For a start, if “an AoM is a Declaration of Victory for the purposes of voting, being enacted or failed, hiatus, and establishment of an Interregnum” then it misses a few other things, like:

If a DoV is Failed and it had at least one AGAINST vote, the Player who posted it cannot make another DoV until after 120 hours (5 days) have passed since the time their DoV was Failed

- meaning that AoMs can be spammed, or - perhaps more importantly -

When a DoV is Enacted, all other pending DoVs are Failed, the Player who posted the DoV becomes Dealer

- so I don’t think that an AoM would actually establish that the person passing it actually becomes the Dealer at all.

I’m not super keen on the idea in general but would accept it on a dynastic basis, so I think special case is the right place for it.  but would be open-minded to a second pass.

So Second and Third place are implicitly set up to be defined by the rules, rather than being a subjective “I reckon Gold plus Territory is a good measure of position” call made during the AoM, that other players could dispute? If so, it could be cut down to just a single-sentence “if the dynastic rules define a Victory Measure, the mantle may only be passed to the player who has the next-highest Victory Measure” rule.

It’s an interesting idea to weaken kingmaking. Although it is going directly against the other thread on Slack that low-scoring players should also get to have dynasties sometimes, isn’t it?

for all the above reasons

I’ll S/K this eventually but want to keep it open for more discussion - it does cut across the Slack discussion about getting new blood a bit, but I want to keep it in mind for the future.

lemonfanta, Kevan: The intent was that a DoV can’t be posted until the ruleset defines how to be all of First through Third Place. There may be cases where a Victory Measure that orders everyone is hard to define, but top three could be defined (e.g. getting to end a race after 3 people finish, straight-up elections where most people aren’t running and get no votes, etc.)

Josh: I agree it’s probably better to say it is a DoV and then specify the negatives that distinguish it from a DoV, to import all of that machinery.

If the mantle pass restriction was something like “can’t pass to a player if there’s another player whose Victory Measure is closer to yours” then you could also apply it to binary “1VM if you finished the race, 0VM if you didn’t” situations.