The change being made here is: “retains its context, and can be referred to in other places, but is not considered to contain any meaning”.

Which I can’t see changes anything in practice. If you’re saying it’s currently illegal for a proposal to refer to “the rule ‘Keywords’” because Keywords is merely a string of characters with no inherent meaning, how does adding that string “can be referred to in other places” change that?

(I’d also still disagree that it’s currently illegal to refer to rules by name. Although examples were thrown around last dynasty of how saying “the rule xxxx” is no different to “the Leader of the xxxx”, we usually say something closer to “the rule ‘Xxxx’” which is interpretable as “the rule with the name of ‘Xxxx’”.)

I’m also not seeing what distinction is being drawn by replacing “have” with “contain”.

Yes, I think this needs more, in order to render flavour text specifically inert and avoid name-change shenanigans without destroying referencability.

“Souls are not required to obey flavour text and may not perform any action defined by it”

If an action were to be defined in both flavour text and normal rules text, would we be forbidden from taking it?

UGH that’s such a good scam I’m so annoyed that you spotted it and I didn’t and now you’ve raised it so I can’t use it

just doin’ my civic duty

That clause looks like a belt-and-braces one: the string has no meaning, so it can’t actually be defining an action.

as I’m not seeing that this addresses anything.

I’m not attached to my wording, here. And I’m not *trying* to change the meaning of the text, as I read it. But people voted down my DoV, which I think would have passed if the way other people read and understood the rule matched this wording.

I expect some people to instead want what Josh said, to “render flavour text specifically inert and avoid name-change shenanigans without destroying referencability”. That’s not the direction of this proposal, which would allow name-change refs. But someone else could propose it, so at least we can all get on the same page?

> what distinction is being drawn by replacing “have” with “contain”. (@Kevan)

I was attempting to clarify that the symbolic meaning of a flavor text name should be allowed. I see names as “having” meaning, but not always “containing” meaning, which is more a thing that sentences and paragraphs do.

this at the very least places a “but” between external reference & the lack of containing meaning, which i think does something for us! something vague & misinterpretable, but its there, so why not have it for the time being? if we resist changes that aren’t complete, it’ll make it harder for us to get the rule into a better shape.

[TyGuy] Got it, from your proposal’s text box it sounded like you were trying to allow rule referencing yet disallow “I name my dog ‘more than 100 coins’” type stuff. But you want both?

@Kevan, that’s what I was getting at. But now I’m sort of realizing how silly it would be to keep allowing that stuff, intentionally, if there’s a more ironclad way to write the rule.

So I guess I’m now wondering, how *do* we allow external reference by name without enabling such things? Somehow make it explicit that you have to put “” around the name?

Per lemon.

Reminder that changes to Appendix rules need quorum, not just more For than Against, so this is probably doomed to become “Unpopular” at 48 hours. It’s still purposeful, since it got us talking, but we should maybe write up a new version, and get it better publicized, if we want to see a change.

On balance, though TyGuy6 is right, this is on track to time out.