There’s an unintended flip here; if a Special Case rule is written as Default Inactive, and is Inactive, then at the start of the next dynasty we look at to see whether the “text of a Special Case Rule may state its Default Status; if it does not, its Default Status is Active” - it doesn’t state this (it’s only flavour text!), so it defaults to Active and wakes up.

it’s looking at the text not the rule itself

and we’ve established that the text of a rule is accessible to other parts of the rules even if it would be flavour text

Flavour text “is not considered to have any meaning beyond being a string of characters” and “any statements that flavour text makes about gamestate are ignored”. The flavour text of an Inactive Special Case rule cannot “state its Default Status”.

Ah, wait, your clause of “The text of a Special Case Rule may state its Default Status” is intended to allow the text to make one brief and specific statement, even if it’s flavour text?

that is the intention yes

Hmm….I agree that using flavor text to determine the active/inactive state of a rule is being a little loose with the rules. But what would be the way around this?

There would have to be a seperate always-active rule that stated the default status of all special case rules. You wouldn’t want that bit of information to get turned off when a special case was toggled.

You could have an Ascension effect of “All other Special Case Rules are set to Active, and then set to their respective Default Status.” A bit clunky but I think better than having to resolve unusual precedence issues.

That would do the trick. But I think you could get rid of that last piece of clunk with something like this:

Upon the posting of an ascension address, unless otherwise noted, the special case rules return to the following states:
Seasonal Downtime ... Active
Dormancy ... Active
Simple Numbers ... Inactive

Agh, I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more they each have their own flavor of klunk.

On the grounds that this could be clearer about what it’s doing, and is non-urgent.

self-kill for rewrite