Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Proposal: Term Limits [Core]

Reached quorum 10 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 28 May 2020 08:59:45 UTC

In “Victory and Ascension”, after “will be replaced with theme-specific terms throughout the entire Ruleset”, add:-

(where the replacement terms are different, and neither includes any words that already appear in the Ruleset)

We’ve found I think a couple of times now that if an Emperor picks an already-used word like “player” or “human” as the player noun, this mangles the ruleset for the next dynasty (because eg. “The terms “Amnesiac” and “Player” are synonyms.” now says “Player and Player”). As I think was suggested by ais523, it’d make sense to avoid all words that already exist in the ruleset - this would also head off problems where a curious Emperor tries changing the player noun to “Rule” to see what happens.

Comments

ais523:

27-05-2020 10:34:20 UTC

for

Josh: Observer he/they

27-05-2020 10:45:09 UTC

for

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

27-05-2020 11:41:59 UTC

It’s a rather expansive definition… It would ban terms like “Past Memory” because Rule 1.2.1 (“Idle Amnesiacs”) makes reference to “an entry or comment from the past four days”.

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

27-05-2020 11:48:59 UTC

And even if, for simplicity’s sake, we’re fine with limiting ourselves to all words not already included in the Ruleset, it might still be useful to somehow exclude the dynastic rules, which are about to be deleted anyway, and which might include all sorts of extra text and names that further constrain the new emperor’s options.

Kevan: he/him

27-05-2020 12:25:13 UTC

I think it’s worth erring on the side of caution for multi-word terms: if we think changing player to “Rule” could be a problem, we shouldn’t allow changing it to “Living Rule” either (even though the phrase “Living Rule” doesn’t appear in the ruleset).

Excluding dynastic rules would certainly be useful if we wanted to carry a narrative concept forward from one dynasty to another, though, good call.

pokes:

27-05-2020 13:09:48 UTC

for

derrick: he/him

27-05-2020 13:38:07 UTC

for

Darknight: he/him

27-05-2020 15:13:17 UTC

for

Publius Scribonius Scholasticus: he/they

27-05-2020 15:48:42 UTC

for

Clucky: he/him

27-05-2020 15:53:54 UTC

for

The Duke of Waltham: he/him

27-05-2020 16:41:30 UTC

for

Trigon:

27-05-2020 18:19:18 UTC

for

Clucky: he/him

27-05-2020 20:22:57 UTC

Wait. Wouldn’t this also ban a term like “Ruler” because it contains “Rule”?

Kevan: he/him

28-05-2020 08:54:40 UTC

Or “Past Memory” because of the “a”?

I don’t think so: the rule here says “includes” rather than “contains”, and given that a term can be several words, this seems implicit enough that we’re talking in terms of words rather than letters. But we can patch this if we’re patching it to allow dynastic terms.