I think putting “except where otherwise stated by the ruleset” makes it more clear that the statement applies to the whole sentence. Otherwise, actions performed on this rule’s wording might be applied immediately, which isn’t always to the player’s benefit.

There goes me sending messages without reading. I meant to say “at the beginning of the sentence”

I believe that this is an excessively wordy attempt to problematise natural language and will probs vote against.

Thanks @naught, fixed.

@Josh I agree it’s a little on the long side but that’s because the way we are doing it informally in the ruleset is already pretty wordy and all over the place. This is comprehensive and all in one place so defined actions are straightforward and there’s no ambiguity about how to perform or resolve them.

From my experience actions getting resolved in the specific order they are requested I think is a negative game trait. Dynasties tend to have more success when they are split into distinct blocks, everyone makes their move in those blocks, and then there is some other resolution other than “whoever goes first” to resolve those blocks

@Clucky That’s just a default behavior to make sure things are done consistently and fairly and so it’s not ambiguous or up to the Grim Reaper’s interpretation for what order to do things. Every dynasty is different and it’s easy to override that to fit the rhythm of a specific dynasty (see my other proposal for a practical example).

the default should encourage a positive gameplay loop not a negative one

I think I will remove “the Grim Reaper may resolve a virtual action as soon as they receive it” and just make it “Except where otherwise stated by the ruleset, the Grim Reaper must resolve all virtual actions in the order that they are received” since the Grim Reaper has the power to resolve them as soon as they are received anyway if the rules don’t specifically say otherwise.

I don’t see how resolving them in the order is negative, whether they’re resolved as they arrive or batched and resolved all at once. Would you rather I make it random, or leave it up to the Grim Reaper’s discretion? Then you wouldn’t be able to do things in the specific order you want or coordinate with other Necromancers.

I like this, but from the later example usage in Standard Incantations, it does seem a little complex to write rules for, to the point where it might not get the usage it deserves, and may (as Events has) fall over when people don’t declare it correctly.

We currently define daily actions without having to flag that they might be declared with prerequisites and inputs and effects, even though they usually are. As a rule, you can just write “if you have a vehicle, you can spend 1 time to move to any street as a daily action” and it will work.

Could we write something which would allow the same vehicle street rule to be declared ”...as a virtual action”, and have it play out exactly as we’d expect to? Or is that optimistic?

Does “The Grim Reaper shall resolve the Virtual Action by performing the following Atomic Action” actually mean every virtual action gets resolved twice?

@Kevan Yeah, I ageee the examples in Incantations are a bit complex but that’s only because we’ve already woven a tangled web of complex actions and I wanted to be as verbose as possible to make sure I kept everything exactly the way it was. If we were starting from scratch, I expect something simple like “As a virtual action, if you have a vehicle you can lose 1 time to move to a street of your choosing”. The inputs, prereqs and effects are clear enough that all you have to do is tell the Grim Reaper “I want to move to Sesame St” and they could carry it out.

@Clucky The virtual action is resolved once. Resolving it requires performing that atomic action. I wrote it that way so that if a Grim Reaper gets halfway through resolving a VA but realizes there’s something they can’t do, they can undo the whole thing and fail the VA.

I’ve simplified the language in this and Standard Incantations so it’s much less wordy/verbose, if anyone else has any feedback let me know!

In addition to “does not contain all the information needed to resolve the action” the fail list might want to rule out instructions which have conditional clauses, or which use information that the player doesn’t have access to but the Emperor does - “I go to sea unless a player has posted a storm blog entry since I submitted this”, “I move to the location of Mr X”, “I set my bid to a value one higher than the current highest bid in your inbox”. We often have to sigh and patch the third one in auction dynasties.

That’s a good point, but I almost think that should be handled on a case-by-case basis on the off chance you want to allow something like that, so the building block is dynasty-agnostic. Actually, we have an auction mechanic in this dynasty and it’s already covered by “The Bid must be a number between 0 and that Necromancer’s Power, inclusive”.

I actually think those are all covered by “the request does not contain all the information needed to resolve the action” because the request itself would have to include the fact of whether a player has posted a storm blog entry, or the location of Mr X, or the value of the current highest bid, or else it the request doesn’t contain enough information to resolve the action.

I agree with Clucky that I’m not a fan of the default being resolution in order of reception. Fortunately, this Dynasty has so far specified otherwise, so we can still fix it.

EaV

Much like Events, I think that this would be a bastard to actually use, and is at heart an overly prescriptive pile of verbiage in search of a real, meaningful problem to solve. 

[Zack] True! I started with that assumption but talked myself out of it, on the grounds that an Emperor would probably accept orders of “I bid all my coins” or “I do the same thing I did last round”, so why not “I bid as many coins as Zack” or “I do what Naught did this round”.

But thinking back to the Wizard Duel dynasty we did actually enact a rule to allow a player to say “I target Bucky” when the rule technically required “I target position #3” (and where there was no way for positions to even change at that point in the game), so we probably do tend towards the literal on these.