BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I like Brendan’s version and see no reason to faff around with a multi-stage process to enact it. Sure, by the book it should have been a proposal, but it wasn’t and it’s up for a vote so I’m not sure why were creating a cottage industry around this.

The question currently up for voting is “was Brendan right to have taken this action and/or wouldn’t it be better if Huddling could take more targets”, and it only accepts a single yes or no from each player. If it fails (or even if it passes) we don’t know whether a majority have concurred that “the X with the most Y” also counts ties, if a similar situation comes up again this dynasty.

With a plain “was this legal, yes/no” CfJ, it’s at least implicit that the fail state is endorsing the opposite view.

Well for the avoidance of doubt, my answer is yes and yes.

At some level, I’m not sure it matters whether the majority would count ties or not. It’s ambiguous, and the result will always change depending on which people are active.

Either we should keep it in mind when making new proposals, or we need to add an appendix keyword for the word “Most”.

In any game you need to resolve it somehow when two people read a rule differently. A majority deciding it in the moment is probably all we’ve got right now, unless we go down the road of dusty precedent and look for past cases in the archives (which doesn’t seem much fun).

Short-term precedent has some weight, though, among the same group. If this CfJ fails and someone pulls off some related endgame scam that relies on a word not being implicitly singular, they can point to this CfJ more usefully than to Brendan’s.

(I think the contentious clause is not “who has the most Heat”, it’s “who is the player with the most Heat”.)

A sensible, relatively neutral position of “Brendan’s action was technically illegal by the book but it’s still sensible that it work that way, so let’s move to that position” might be tempting, but this continued insistence that the ruleset should just work worse on a point of principle feels very odd to me, and certainly not worth a retaliatory cfj war.

I’m not suggesting that we keep the rule unamended forever. How the rule works right now and how we could fix it are two different questions.

But they don’t have to be - the choice to make them into two different questions is an unnecessary one.

, obviously.