BlogNomic: What Year Is This?

Monday, August 29, 2011

Proposal: What Year Is This?

Timed out 8 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan. The year is 1933.

Adminned at 31 Aug 2011 03:56:47 UTC

Enact a new rule, “Timeline”.

The SS Haniver sank in the year XXXX.

For each EVC on this proposal which included a single number between 1879 and 2011, take the arithmetic mean of those numbers, round it down and replace XXXX with that number in the rule “Timeline”.

If this number is lower than 1940, replace the string “fridge” with “icebox” in the names of all Items.

If this number is lower than 2000, replace the string “Deck of Dvorak cards” with “Deck of cards” in the names of all Items.

In the rule “Hunger and Tiredness”, replace “but is always 2011” with “but is always considered to be 2011 for gameplay purposes”.

May as well narrow down the year in which this dynasty is taking place, for the sake of thematic consistency and sanity checking.

Comments

bateleur:

29-08-2011 10:36:01 UTC

Out of interest, what is the thinking behind the “always 2011” part? Seemed odd to begin with and seems even odder in the amended form.

I don’t think we need a year. After all, if we assume it is this year, then people can still have historical items but not things from the future. If we set a date from the past, then we basically limit the things people can own as Items.

Kevan: Oracle he/him

29-08-2011 11:15:54 UTC

[bateleur] It was just to make the time between any two dates unambiguous, particularly when we start talking about a GNDT value as being “three days ago”.

[Anduril] That’s my point - are we assuming that it’s this year, or assuming it’s historical? If we rescue two survivors, one of them carrying a mobile phone and one of them carrying a freshly-rescued WW2 Enigma machine, which one of them is deluded? It seems better to pin it down than to leave it to the Captain to decide on an ad hoc basis.