BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

why the against vote?

how was I able to set/mark the caves effect to that long list of effects without paying the cost for them?

i feel like there have been lots of reasons for an against vote on the slack? i just don’t think ur interpretation of the rules is right & i think ur twisting words p hard to make it work

(and it says u pay for the shadows scores “being placed”, that’s why u wouldn’t've had to pay for the big list)

but the rules “Features as its Effect”

so its Effect are only the features I give it

if the rules said “Features to its Effect” then yeah you probably could argue it gets appended. but if we’re gonna nitpick over grammar, lets actually nitpick over grammar

I’m on the fence about this. The “as its Effect” argument is compelling… I do think that it’s an argument that’s working hard but I’m not completely against it.

I think this argument could go either way but Clucky bothered to put his position forward to a vote so I think I’ll come down in his favour this time. 

By the way, I think it’s quite plausible that Lighting a Room doesn’t work at all; thinking about this in an attempt to work out the correct resolution (rather than jumping the gun like Clucky did), I think the Lighting a Room action requires modifying the effects’ definition in the ruleset in order to specify that the given effect is in the room in question. Nobody’s been doing that, so the action didn’t work.

A fix therefore needs to uphold existing Lightings of Rooms, in addition to fixing the wording, rather than just trying to sort out this one event.

Let’s see… my interpretation of what the rule actually says, after analysing, that when we Light a Room, we mark any number of Features as the room’s Effect. That means going to the Ruleset (where the Features are defined), and placing a mark next to the Feature that says “this feature is the effect of room such-and-such”).

There are two ways to interpret that. One is that the marks overwrite each other; this means that each Effect can only exist in one room (the room which was most recently Lit). The other is that the marks don’t overwrite each other, in which case the Ruleset has a long list of marks next to each effect, specifying all the rooms in which the effect exists. This last interpretation would approximate what we’ve actually been doing (the “effect” column on the gamestate tracking page would be entirely blank, but the Ruleset would be tracking all the effects).

However, things are still broken even in the latter case; Josh’s cleanup proposal replaced the entire dynastic ruleset, so it would have removed all effects from all rooms in the process.

Incidentally, note that the text of this CFJ therefore doesn’t resolve the ambiguity; under my interpretation of what the rule actually says, the Effect is already “none” on the gamestate tracking page, it’s simply being overridden by the rules.

we’ve been using “marking” to mean just setting it as the effect all up to this point. while I think you could maybe make the case that isn’t how its technically worded, in the past this dynasty we’ve just upheld previous actions if we found out that technically due to some phrasing we were doing them wrong (see the denizens can’t hurt you)

We’ve been interpreting the rule as adding to the effect all up to this point, too (which I think is a more intuitive wording). When not trying to scam the rule, it doesn’t matter. When you are trying to scam the rule, though, the exact wording does matter and we should only uphold the action if it actually succeeded (which it didn’t).

Note that your interpretation of the rule (in which you relight a lit room) isn’t consistent with the way that everyone had been treating the rule so far. The actual relighting is consistent with what the rule says, but the way in which you did the relighting isn’t. Meanwhile, the way everyone else has been lighting rooms is consistent with what the rule looks like it says, but not what it actually says. You can’t have it both ways at once, saying “my scam relies on this rule’s exact wording to be possible, but then relies on the way we’ve been disregarding issues with the exact wording to do what I want it to”.

Lighting a room that’s already Lit to entirely replace the Effect is totally in line with my own reading of the rule in question, and I was considering using my Ancient Action to do so.

> We’ve been interpreting the rule as adding to the effect all up to this point, too

Can we maybe can it with the shitty myopic takes that are clearly designed to distort the truth?

We haven’t been interpreting the rule as “adding to the effect”. Sure, every time we’ve applied the rule it had added stuff to an empty list. So the line between “are we appending or are we setting” hasn’t ever been clearly defined. Hence the need for the CfJ to define it. And in my mind, the “as” shows we’ve been setting not appending.

What we can safely say we haven’t been doing is some sort of convoluted “going to the Ruleset (where the Features are defined), and placing a mark next to the Feature”

@Bucky didn’t you already use your ancient action? Or did you pull your shenanigans before ancient actions were defined and so get to do it again?

I decided to use my ancient action the way I did instead of using it to overwrite an existing room such as the Crypt Entrance with something entertaining.

@Clucky: My point is that all the non-scam uses of the action, it’s impossible to tell how people were reading the rule because it comes to the same thing either way, so you can’t use that as evidence in favour of your interpretation.

I also think that it’s a legitimate response to an exact-words scam that uses a rule in a way that isn’t intended to point out that the rule as a whole doesn’t work at all. You can treat this as a late-reveal scam being counterscammed by another late-reveal scam, if you like. Saying “this rule works because we’ve been treating it like that all along” isn’t a legitimate argument when you’re actually using the rule in different way from how it was being treated all along.

I think “append” or “set” are both reasonable interpretations of how the effects get applied, but “as” shows it should be “set”

I do not think your “we mark any number of Features as the room’s Effect. That means going to the Ruleset (where the Features are defined), and placing a mark next to the Feature that says “this feature is the effect of room such-and-such”).” thing is at all what anyone is doing. that feels to me like you’re just grasping at straws.

I don’t think there’s any other interpretation of “mark as” that’s actually correct English.

In any case, “mark no features as the Room’s Effect” (what you did in your attempt) actually is unambiguous: it doesn’t do anything at all, because you aren’t marking anything. If you’re marking one or more features, it’s less clear, but it should be obvious that marking nothing does nothing.