BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

yes, i do think the ruleset needs to specify that/when an action can be taken for it to be performed, and in the absence of specification, an action can’t be performed!! it’s a part of the basic structure of game rules, imo; when you’re writing a board game rulebook, it’s important to outline not only how an action works, but also /when/ you can do it. that’s the thing that’s missing from the Innovate action. “who” and “what” are there, but not “when”!

“The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset.” specificity is the key here.

Is the fact of “Josh has performed Innovating” a piece of gamestate, though?

If we had a rule of “when a player drinks coffee, they gain 1HP”, and the game hadn’t yet defined drinking or coffee in any way, would we read that rule as being activated when a human player drank coffee in the real world?

the fact of “Josh has performed Innovating” is most definitely a piece of gamestate, per “The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate” in the Appendix.

on your second point Kevan, yes, i do suppose that would count real coffee drinking! right up until a rule was added that mentioned coffee and/or drinking, at which point “A keyword defined by a rule supersedes the normal English usage of the word” :0

the difference between this and coffee drinking is that the coffee drinking wouldn’t be a “defined game action” on account of not being defined by the ruleset, imo — whereas this is definitely a defined game action, which means that the fact of having performed it is gamestate and can only be altered in manners specified by the ruleset.

@lemon “The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset” doesn’t apply here as Innovating is, as discussed, extensively specified by the ruleset. You might even argue that that clause gives me cover to do the action, rather than acting as a prohibition.

There are plenty of tabletop games in particular that have rules that describe actions that a player can undertake, which describe limitations and criteria on when those actions may be undertaken but do not feel the need to specify that “a player may undertake this action at will”; that is taken as read. I can find several examples of this in The Treacherous Turn, for example, although I accept that it would be bad-natured to pull those out at great length. BlogNomic isn’t a TTRPG, but nor is it a board game; it is insufficient, I think, to appeal to a meta-expectation that is inconsistently applied in neighbouring formats.

@Kevan To elaborate on that, the rule Keywords says ‘A keyword defined by a rule supersedes the normal English usage of the word’ - Innovating follows the game’s conventions around Keywording, so I’d argue that Innovating exists fully within the walled garden.

@Josh my main argument is that, while Innovating /is/ specified by the ruleset, the fact that when to perform it /isn’t/ specified means that there’s no specified manner to alter the gamestate of the historical fact of the occurence of the Innovating game action. that’s the important bit; i think that that rules interaction does pretty solidly demand an action’s “when” to be specified just as much as its other details before it can be performed.

in terms of the philosophical argument here, i definitely think that blognomic has much more in common with a board game than a ttrpg (and TTRPGs often don’t need that sort of “here’s when you can take this action” specificity the way board games do imo), but yes, it’s definitely not quite either of those things! and yes, i agree that the purely philosophical/meta-expectation argument is inadequate for this CfJ. i’m including it in addition to my rules argument ‘cause i think this conversation is about not just what blognomic is, but what it ought to be :0!

@lemon On that basis, the ruleset doesn’t give permission for resolving CfJs, either.

I think there’s a lot of smoke here but not a lot of light: the ruleset is not clear on this issue. IMO it should be.

@Josh i don’t see what you mean? the ruleset is very clear about the circumstances under which any admin may enact or fail CfJs, and there’s no such statements of any kind regarding Innovating

The CfJ point is probably that the ruleset says “A Pending CfJ may be Enacted by any Admin…” - that this and other parts of core could be read as only granting permission, and not the actual capability to take these actions. (That a more specific phrasing would be to say that an Admin “can and may” enact things.)

well, that’s just not what i’m talking about, then; my basis isn’t that there should be “can and may” everywhere.

my basis is that the ruleset simply needs to specify the circumstances an action’s performance in some way for it to be legal to perform it due to the interaction between “The historical fact of the occurrence of a defined game action is itself considered to be gamestate” and “The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset.” i think ‘may’ is specification plenty; but Innovating doesn’t have a ‘may’.

I guess I think you’re making an argument about how the ruleset should work, or perhaps about how it is conventionally assumed to work, rather than one that is definitionally about how it currently does work, lemon.

I will say that you’re hitting this historical-fact-of-occurrance line way harder than it can inherently sustain. If I can’t alter the historical fact of the occurrence because it’s not specified by the ruleset then I can’t carry out an Innovation on the exact same basis, so the historical-fact argument is an extra step that doesn’t need to exist and one that seems to only obfuscate.

Perhaps it’s useful to draw that key line out a little though. The relevant line is ‘The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset’. Humour me: if you omit the word ‘only’ then you’re left with ‘The Ruleset and Gamestate can be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset’. Don’t you see how that is then a senetence that is giving very clear permission to carry out any action that is sepcified in the ruleset? Yes, removing words changes meaning, but the word ‘only’ in that sentence is qualifying other external inputs, not setting restrictions on the inherent capabilities of the ruleset. Note here that the word ‘can’ is defined in the Appendix as ‘is able to’.

My essential position here is that this needs clarifying in the ruleset and anyone who is certain that the ruleset either does or does not authorise my action should be much less certain.

then shouldn’t this CfJ be clarifying that instead of attempting to canonise an unconfident ruling?

Nah, that’s for a proposal imo. Happy for this CfJ to stand alone as a referendum on the action itself.

per all that other stuff i said :u

I’m leaning to on this, although it is a little murky.

I don’t follow the opening premise that the ruleset as written tells us who can Innovate and when they can do it - or even that it’s explicitly a player-initiated action, rather than some automatic or Imperial game event. All we have is the trigger of “When a District Innovates…”, with the verb being used nowhere else. There’s maybe an argument to be made that in the absence of a definition, the verb “to Innovate” must be implicitly connected to the Innovation noun, most likely meaning “to learn an Innovation”.

I’d wager

since that sentence could’ve been used to mean some kind of automatic action instead of a player-initiated one (and I’d rather preserve the option to leave options as stubs)