Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Proposal: The Hammer of God [Core]

Timed out 2 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 25 Jan 2019 18:47:27 UTC

To “Fair Play”, add:-

* A Detective should not use a core, special case or appendix rules scam to directly or indirectly achieve victory

I’ve ruminated on this before but never proposed it: BlogNomic is a game of rounds, and it would seem fair to say that players should only have to focus on the plots and scams and mistakes of the current dynasty, without being at the mercy of bad rules or slow-burn loopholes left behind by players of a (potentially long-past) previous one.

Comments

Madrid:

23-01-2019 20:02:31 UTC

I’m against this, because it would remove a part of the game that I find fun to both spectate and attempt.

If it does pass, I hope this isn’t used to punish people who have used scams that rely on clarifications of Dynastic content made via the Appendix: for example, a scam relying on people overseeing how default values work or just has a default value somewhere in the process, or how precedence is solved with contradictory Dynastic rules. Arguably, those would be taboo as well because a lot of formal clarification of Dynastic ruletext relies on the Appendix, which would be a pity.

Kevan: he/him

23-01-2019 22:21:02 UTC

I’d have said that the location of a scam was where the sloppy or malicious ruletext lay: if a scam uses default values or precedences that are only surprising because a dynastic rule has been written poorly or malevolently, it’s a dynastic scam and it’s the active players’ fault for voting it through.

If it’s non-dynastic ruletext that’s at fault, I don’t think the active players should be punished for not having checked twelve pages of non-dynastic rules, line by line, the last time that they joined the game.

pokes:

24-01-2019 00:39:17 UTC

I’m generally for this. But I would be interested in seeing how far we could get with a positive wording, like:

Detectives are encouraged to fix loopholes in core, special case, and appendix rules.

which might get people to tell everyone about the scams. I want to hear about them! (well, the good ones)

Kevan: he/him

24-01-2019 09:30:39 UTC

That sounds like BlogNomic would be happy to see a core scam victory so long as the scammer also closed the loophole behind them (which they would anyway, if they had any sense).

Madrid:

24-01-2019 11:32:38 UTC

I can agree with that, although not all Core rule scams involve things that the scammer themselves know a good solution to. Personally it has happened to me with rules that involve some kind of tricky IRL logistic, because it’s not as straightforwards as just fixing wording.

For example:

- Garbling the entire ruletext (which would include Core/Appendix/etc) with a loose sentence. I tried it here: (https://blognomic.com/archive/great_scott) , and card came up with the [Core] and such tags in response. Which I find brilliant, and I couldn’t think of a similarly good solution for the problem (and outside of scam protection it works to warn people of important proposals in general). In fact, I didn’t think of it as a solvable problem in the first place because all scams involve surpassing people’s perception in some way and I didn’t think of approaching the problem in the way card did.

- Deliberately timing out Atomic Actions - which I tried during Pokes I and it got Fair Rule’d out, which I consider a poor barrier, but I don’t know a better solution.

Kevan: he/him

24-01-2019 12:21:10 UTC

When I say “that sounds”, I just mean that Pokes’ suggested positive wording sounds as if it’d be endorsing that, not that I think BlogNomic is currently happy with this idea.

(Any half-decent core scam would close its own loophole, to stop another player from immediately exploiting it in response, so I don’t think it changes anything to say “core scammers should close loopholes if possible” - they always will if they can.)

pokes:

24-01-2019 23:09:32 UTC

for

derrick: he/him

25-01-2019 18:17:46 UTC

What’s the definition of scam here? it seems like a tricky word. Are we taking intent into consideration? against

Kevan: he/him

25-01-2019 18:37:11 UTC

I think it’s intentional that Fair Play guidelines are a bit subjective (I know I had to repeatedly fight to get any definition of “spam” in there at all). They don’t trigger anything automatically when tripped, and I can’t imagine players would ever vote to evict a player for breaking Fair Play accidentally.