Monday, February 13, 2023

Call for Judgment: The Sketch Where The Henchman Objects To Being Given Ambiguous Instructions

Timed out 1 vote to 4. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 15 Feb 2023 08:52:18 UTC

If the CfJ “HWU2OFOOuW4” has been enacted, this CfJ has no further effect. If the CfJ “HWU2OFOOuW4” has not been enacted, fail it.

In the rule “Heat”, replace “transfer 0.1 Heat from the Villager with the most Heat in their Location to themselves” with:-

transfer 0.1 Heat from the Villager with the most Heat in their Location (if only a single such a Villager exists) to themselves

A plainer counter-CfJ to the other, asking the straight question of whether there’s a consensus view that Brendan was wrong to read “the Villager with the most Heat” as “any of the Villagers who have the most Heat”, and that we should - for now - just clarify the rule to how the majority were interpreting it. The question of whether Huddling should work differently is worth asking, but separately.

Comments

Josh: Observer he/they

13-02-2023 09:00:01 UTC

against 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.

Kevan: he/him

13-02-2023 09:18:35 UTC

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.

Josh: Observer he/they

13-02-2023 09:34:46 UTC

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

SingularByte: he/him

13-02-2023 09:44:22 UTC

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”.

Kevan: he/him

13-02-2023 10:26:29 UTC

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”.)

Josh: Observer he/they

13-02-2023 10:39:09 UTC

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.

Kevan: he/him

13-02-2023 10:54:36 UTC

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.

Josh: Observer he/they

13-02-2023 11:01:40 UTC

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

Brendan: he/him

13-02-2023 16:51:35 UTC

against, obviously.

Darknight: he/him

14-02-2023 02:03:47 UTC

imperial

Habanero:

14-02-2023 03:03:05 UTC

against