Proposal: Why the last part of rule 3.2.1 is a bad idea
Times out 13-2 -Darth
Adminned at 27 Feb 2010 10:15:05 UTC
In the Glossary, replace
No action may be taken which would require setting a gamestate variable to an illegal value.
with
A Guest who has a choice in whether to take an action defined by a dynastic rule may not take that action if both of the following conditions are true: a) the action’s effects are limited to changing values tracked in the GNDT and/or similar gamestate-tracking entities (such as a wiki page), and b) the action would change one of those values to an illegal value.
If the keyword “Guest” has been replaced by a different keyword since this proposal was created, then change “Guest” in the replacement to whatever the keyword “Guest” was replaced with.
Consider the following rules from the ruleset:
No action may be taken which would require setting a gamestate variable to an illegal value.
If four Guests have become Arrested during the course of the game, further Guests may not become Arrested.
The Executor shall change the state of any Murderers currently in the Manor to “Arrestedâ€, and the Guest who made the phonecall achieves victory.
It’s sheer luck here that no more than 4 Guests ended up Arrested during the course of the game. Otherwise, flurie’s email to Kevan would have caused Kevan to change a further Guest’s status to Arrested, which would be an illegal value. As a result, flurie’s email itself would have been illegal, rather than winning the game. This is a ridiculous concept; arguably the dynastic rules are broken, but I think it’s more likely that the Glossary is broken as it keeps on encouraging this sort of stupid situation.
Really, something needs to be done about this rule before someone scams it. The intent of the rule is presumably to prevent people doing purchase-type actions, like spending Money to buy Armour, or whatever, that would bring a value out of its normal range; by restricting the scope of this rule to GNDT-trade-type actions, I think it’s likely to have the intended effect in the situation it was intended to cover, without breaking situations it wasn’t. (The restriction to dynastic-defined actions is probably redundant here, but is added as a separate safety measure; did you know that the old version of this rule can even prevent CFJs enacting?)
I think it is more that the Dynastic Rules are broken. Also, I think “variable” covers more possibilities than “value.”
Klisz: