, I think quibbling over where exactly the line should be drawn is a key part of this dynasty. The only reason I supported Reading Rainbow was because I enjoyed the idea of intentionally producing Gibberish

I’m not sure whether I prefer the quibbling or not. Probably depends on whether I agree with the status quo or not. :-)

  If we start requiring perfect grammar, we’re not really going to get anywhere in this dynasty. Previous actions have gotten away with it, and I’m reluctant to see it go in a more restrictive direction.

@JonathanDark: I’ve been enjoying most of this dynasty, but haven’t at all been enjoying the CFJs. It’s a) hard to play at all strategically if you don’t know how other players will interpret the rules, and b) leads to random gameplay holdups when a dispute erupts (unless you decide to plough on forwards anyway, at the risk that a potentially large reversion might be needed).

In particular, CFJs and proposals haven’t been resolving disputes fast enough relative to the pace of gameplay – we saw the situation earlier in which a controversy arose, a proposal was made to fix it, but then players’ timers started counting down while the proposal was pending, meaning that whoever enacted the proposal could immediately score because the actions had recharged by then. Although it was fun pulling that off with you, I don’t think that’s a healthy play pattern in the long term.

Not having a clear guide as to whether or not a Heist action is legal also means that there isn’t a clear guide as to whether the timer has reset or not, which means that the optimal play is often very different in one rules interpretation as it would be in the other.

All this has the effects of making CFJs especially fractious, because it encourages people to vote for them based on what they think would improve their own position in the dynasty, or ruin someone else’s plans, rather than what they think is actually the correct interpretation of the rules or on what would get us back to a known gamestate (and in one case we even had a second-order CFJ disputing the wording in a previous CFJ, which threatens to undermine the whole CFJ system – it’s supposed to get us back to a known gamestate despite disagreements, but this dynasty it isn’t even doing that).

Interesting to see the rift in perspective here - all the things ais mentions are exactly the things I enjoy the most about the game.

Maybe with the exception of ‘CfJ’s don’t resolve disputes fast enough relative to gameplay’, but ah well

The game timer hack via CfJ is a good point, but Proposals can do the same thing. Consider that we have a rule that if rule text is enacted via Proposal, the timer resets on any new words on that text. You see a word that the opposite team might be able to use, and you can’t block it? Get a proposal that resets the text before they can use their Heist Action, and it’s locked down for another 48 hours.

I get that CfJs aren’t traditionally used as strategic weapons, but this is a dynasty based on manipulation the rules themselves, so it seems on-brand that even when a CfJ is meant to add clarity, there is some strategic use for it as well. It probably doesn’t feel very “pure” to hijack the purpose of the CfJ for personal reasons, but this is the theme that you and Josh agreed to, and here we are.

@Habanero: I do enjoy CFJs at other nomics, but not this one. That might largely be because BlogNomic is so gameplay-focused; not knowing what the rules mean makes the gameplay very hard to focus on, and the process of reaching an understanding about what happened is necessarily quite rushed in order to avoid breaking the gameplay too much. CFJs here also tend to focus much more on solving immediate problems rather than establishing general principles, meaning that even after reading all the votes and comments on a CFJ it’s often unclear what players’ opinions even are and/or how those translate to CFJ votes, so it often doesn’t solve the same problem if it comes up in the future.

In sum, it is hard to predict how other players will interpret the rules. That ambiguity is built in and is part of the challenge. In a dynasty where rule manipulation is core to dynastic play, it seems like looking for a ruleset with perfect clarity is going to be a fool’s errand.

@JonathanDark: At least in that situation, the rule unambiguously contained the old word before the proposal passed, so you can race it. The problem with CFJs is that they’re partially about determining the gamestate-while-the-CFJ-is-pending, and trying to perform actions based on that is difficult because it is necessarily disputed what it is, and thus any action taken on the basis of it will also be disputed (and yet the CFJ usually doesn’t prospectively fix the gamestate for actions taken while it is pending). So acting while a CFJ is pending produces “uncertainty amplification” that tends to ruin the game (whereas with a proposal, there’s no uncertainty, it’s just a straight race).

Many experienced nomic players intentionally try to avoid creating additional uncertainty when a dispute occurs, on a “good of the game” basis. That does run into trouble when it conflicts with aiming to win the dynasty, though, and at some point you reach the point of “is it socially acceptable to still try to win if you’re damaging the nomic in the process?”. I don’t want to have to choose between what’s socially acceptable and what’s best for my chances in the dynasty – ideally we’d have a ruleset that allowed the two to align, but we don’t really at the moment.

(note: our messages crossed, my previous message was a reply to JonathanDark’s last-but-one message)

Having a ruleset with perfect clarity is probably impossible, but having more clarity can only be a good thing, I think. To take an extreme example, the Fair Play rules ban actions that make the game unplayable – and it is hard to know whether you are breaking those rules unless you have some guidelines for how rules would be interpreted (e.g. if there is any genuine doubt about whether noun/article agreement breaks a rule, that would prevent you picking a player/emperor synonym that started with a vowel, as doing so would make many core rules ungrammatical). Even in less extreme cases, having unclarity in the ruleset means that optimal play is often to create a dubiously-worded rule and then try to browbeat the rest of the other players into agreeing that your wording is correct. BlogNomic had a culture of doing that once, and I was playing at the time – and it wasn’t fun, and lots of players got upset (even to the point of several ban proposals being made). It is much better to have the rules specified in advance so that you can try to scam them creatively rather than bludgeoning through a scam with rhetoric.

  Just in case there’s no veto, given the new dynasty.