Does this wording work on the Shadow Ruleset? It’s flavour text, so might not have subrule relationships involved. (In particular, it has no meaning other than being a string of characters, which means that the formatting isn’t meaningful, which in turn means that you can’t distinguish a subrule from a parent rule because the rules are unable to see that the headings are different sizes.)

Rephrased to avoid the term “Subrule”, but now that you say that I’m not sure whether we can even say what a “Rule” in the Shadow Ruleset is, if its text has no meaning.

Second time in a month. Maybe the definition of flavour text goes to far, and should be rescoped as being inert rather than devoid of meaning.

For what it’s worth, I think “flavour text” is vastly overused at BlogNomic. I suspect that the definition was originally designed for things that were entirely meaningless and that the rules didn’t refer to at all – but we’ve increasingly started to apply it to things that are supposed to be meaningful in some way (e.g. shadow rulesets that can be edited like the real one, which often requires some amount of interpreting the meaning to do edits correctly).

The correct fix is probably just to say that the contents of the Shadow Ruleset are not currently applicable rules; that would be enough to prevent them directly influencing gameplay, whilst still allowing them to be interpreted as rules for the purpose of amending them.

I love saying the same thing as ais but in one-seventh of the words.

@ais: is there a feeling that Building Blocks don’t work as expected for this reason? We’ve been able to successfully (perhaps incorrectly) reference specific sections of the Building Blocks wiki to add, edit, and remove “rules”. Either the Shadow Rules should work the same way, or both have the same problem.

In any case, assuming that this works,

If it doesn’t work on the Shadow Ruleset, then this proposal will do nothing, so no harm in voting for it.

[JonathanDark] Inactive Building Blocks don’t use the term flavour text, they instead “are not rulestext”.

I’m not sure if we need a single catch-all keyword for this, or if we could get away with having two different words and remembering to use the right one.

It does seem hard to thread the needle so that a single definition of flavour text would answer yes to “is there a Rule named ‘Skills and Flaws’ in the flavour text Shadow Ruleset” but no to “does any player have a Crown of Victory (including in players’ freely-written flavour text descriptions)”.

Having a keyword to just mean “this should not be interpreted as rules text” would seem like a good enough solution to me. Flavour text brings to mind the Demiurge dynasty, where it had a ton of descriptions that could have been deleted with no effect on anything.

For this proposal,    but we need to also add a way to gain skills again since this deletes that.

[SingularByte] Good catch, I’ve put up a follow-up proposal to add that back.