I don’t love the virtual actions language so will probably vote against as written.

It could use more work and maybe a change of name, but it seems worth clarifying some of the points it makes about the Emperor reacting to invalid requests (which I would currently silently ignore under a Guarded Imperial Style) and whether someone asking for a weekly Attitude change and then immediately saying “no, wait, ignore that” should be honoured or stuck with it. We could reinvent the wheel dynastically, but there is a Building Block for it right there.

I think its problems are deeper than that! Just for example: the Virtual Actions text states that a virtual action is an action that the city takes on behalf of a thief. Okay; so it’s an action that the city takes. That means that a weekly virtual action - like attitude changes, above - can only be performed once per week *per city*, rather than *per thief*. That’s not great!

The whole architecture of Virtual Actions shifting the act from thief to city is weird, counterintuitive, and I’d wager there are bigger problems still yet to be found in the text.

This Building Block has been used in a couple of dynasties, although I didn’t play them - I assumed that meant it was functional, but fair enough if it’s not quite there. Maybe we should flag up Blocks which we know need more work, so that Emperors don’t assume that they can just use them as intended.

I’ll drop the “weekly” from “A Thief may change their Attitude as a virtual weekly action” for now (I was only keeping it out of the principle of minimal change, the action seems fine performed at will) and I’ll see where this falls.

Would it be enough to add something like “the virtual action is still considered to be performed by the Thief for the purposes of other rules” to the building block?

Depends what the object of the exercise is. Does it solve the one proximate problem I’ve raised here? Sure, probably. Does it resolve the fundamental uncertainty of a rule that essentially upends the way that we intuitively expect actions to work? Who knows - the nature of sleeping demons is that you don’t know how many there are until they wake up. Does it resolve the inherent lack of clarity and ambiuity implicit to having the action and the rule required to understand how to parse the action half a ruleset away from each other? No.

I’m not afraid of sleeping demons. If there’s a part of the ruleset that’s unstable, let’s expose it and see how it breaks. Burying it doesn’t seem like the most head-on way to deal with the problem.

Virtual action wording gives Kevan leeway in the order stuff is resolved—he can post a new haul before resolving pending actions. So I think I’m with JOsh here.

[Clucky] This proposal adds “and no virtual actions are pending” to the two resolution actions.

Kevan runs this place, I support the city! I’m not a no-good thief like the likes of y’all!

<.< >.>

Withdrawn because the obsolete keywords on the Building Blocks page will make this action unperformable.