Any concerns with back-to-back CfJ putting the game in Suspension? I know there’s the fair play clause, but I could see a scenario similar to the end of the Jenga dynasty where CfJs are continually posted with the express purpose of determining a victory chop, just as an example.

Maybe that’s a legitimate use case, but if so, we should at least acknowledge and be ok with the possibility.

A little. I’m trying to figure out how to express that this is a tool that should only be used when a potentially game-ending or ruining flaw has been discovered. Not sure of the best way to put that into the rules in a way that’s binding but not too binding.

Also of concern: what if someone passes a rule that says “the game is Suspended”? I assume that it becomes unsuspended after 96 hours as the Appendix has priority over the dynastic ruleset, but then what? Does it become re-suspended an hour later?

Back-to-back or otherwise malicious CfJs seem manageable, so long as it’s possible to raise multiple High-Priority CfJs; if one player was posting repeated bad faith CfJs within the bounds of Fair Play, a quorum could agree to remove their ability to raise CfJs.

There is a related issue here that two overlapping CfJs would find that “the game ceases to be Suspended when [the first] CfJ is resolved”. We need something more like the Hiatus definition, where the status continues until nothing is left invoking it.

What effect is “all information that is tracked as part of the game must be preserved in the location and form it took immediately before the Suspension” intended to have, here? It reads at first blush as if it would block core actions like voting, unidling and proposing (even voting on the CfJ itself) as they would alter the information that’s being tracked about the game.

@Kevan - That clause is trying to ensure that we don’t have any of Bucky’s performative issues last time, blanking the gamestate page and removing tracked information. Basically it’s about preserving the perceived gamestate while we figure it out, rather than having things get destroyed - especially important when something is being privately tracked that should be public.

Can you think of a better way to word?

I don’t think I can. It seems like a two-edged sword to try to regulate the recording of perceptions - if the performative player were the one making the CfJ, they could lock down their preferred gamestate page by the same token. I’d leave it out and let any dispute about it be resolved informally in the comments of the CfJ.

If we’re setting up a general definition of what it means for the game to be paused, I would add a restriction on new/unidling players to that.

Preservation wasn’t as big an issue as you’re making it out to be - it’s trivial to pull the information from the page history, and easy for a CfJ to say something like “revert all gamestate information that was tracked in (link)this revision(/link) of the gamestate tracking page to the state in that revision”.

I’m not really liking all the different kinds of pause, tbh.

You can kind of already do this under the current system by just saying “revert all dynastic gamestate to the point it was at when the cfj was created”. It seems extremely rare to have to halt the dynasty completely, so having a special kind of cfj for a once in a blue moon situation doesn’t feel necessary.

@Bucky Not super interested in your idea of whether it was a “big deal” or not - it’s clear that you thought it wasn’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have rammed yourself into a situation that did not require you. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t agree.

@redtara That’s a very fair criticism, and I did think about trying to tie this all together into a single form that covered suspension, hiatus and interregnum. Unfortunately they all do different things for different reasons so there really isn’t an overlap.

@SB In case the context wasn’t clear, this is a building block towards eliminating Orphan Variables, making it so they can be fixed in situ rather than having them become a massive iceberg. Orphan variable issues aren’t that rare, and figuring out a framework by which they can be synthesised in-play makes a lot of sense to me.

[SingularByte] A CfJ with a “revert all gamestate” clause is very much a “kind of” - it only reverts if it succeeds, so if dynastic actions were still performable alongside it, everyone would want to keep taking them just in case.

I think there are blue moon situations where a pause-the-game CfJ is essential, but a lot of lesser situations where it would make a rules ambiguity easier for the group to focus on and resolve.

[redtara] Part of my takeaway from the last dynasty is that the group could (I think without any controversy) have included “new players can’t join” as part of the pause-everything-and-discuss chop lockdown rule, it just didn’t occur to us that we might have to. For the sake of future dynasties where no survivors of Misty III are on hand to advise, I think “pause the game” merits some kind of keyword.

Hm. My worry is that if we halt the game though, it can lose momentum and bring about the end of the dynasty. Admittedly I wasn’t actually part of the jenga dynasty but it looked like the game being paused to deal with everything is partly what caused the whole thing to fall apart and kicked off the whole chop process.

Fixing the definitions of variables to avoid orphan ones cropping up feels like the better choice.

I think the real problem with the last dynasty was the lack of definition and the sense that the gameplay / gamestate wasn’t valid. If there had been a ruleset framework by which the situation could have been resolved procedurally and the faith that the game was validly worth saving then it would have been saved; the chop came about because there wasn’t a clear, neat way out of the mess, nor the impetus / desire to chart one.

The idle players deciding that the gamestate didn’t count and could safely be obliterated didn’t help with the legitimacy problem.

A mechanic that just says “this happens, everyone calm down, we’ll just resolve it quickly then move on as if it didn’t happen” would prevent a lot of issues.

FWIW over the past two decades the issue of orphan variables has come up a lot, and a lot of people have tried to fix the definition to avoid them and have failed; I’m not saying that there isn’t a possible solution to it but, with my veteran hat on, it’s not an angle I would consider very worthwhile pursuit.

Disagreement over the legality of live moves is also a big momentum killer, for creating a state of chaos where different people feel they can do different things. There was an element of that last dynasty, with players differing on whether we could and/or should continue to attempt to log game actions when the orphan variable CfJ had included a clause to uphold past actions. If the CfJ had been able to call a Suspension, that sideshow would have been unambiguously out of bounds.

[Josh] Does the issue have that much heritage? I’ve been trying to think of cases where it was a problem in the earlier days, and what we would have called it back then, but I’m drawing a blank. The concept was only named in 2017, initially as part of a scam.

Oh, I suppose a lot of it is probably down to moving away from the GNDT in 2019, isn’t it? Before then, most game variables were one-per-player cells in the unambiguous GNDT table, and the few exceptions had to be spelled out as “tracked in this rule” or “tracked on a wiki page”.

with some reluctance.

Oh huh I did not realise it was that new!

A quick scan back over older secret-information dynasties does suggest that wording was compliant, even back then (“The Werewolves’ identities are not tracked publicly, and are initially known only by the Mayor”, for eg).

I support the intent, but expanding the grounds on which any player can freeze gameplay just makes me really wary.

And I feel that it’s no more dangerous than a DoV with regards to freezing gameplay.