So, there’s very nearly a dictatorship scam that would allow a complete takeover of BlogNomic, but fortunately we were saved by one somewhat buggy sentence in the Appendix. In any case, things are somewhat broken and we probably need some rule changes and some upholds.
The issue is that the dynastic ruleset attempts to define “Name” as a variable that applies to Trucks – but the core rules also have an (untracked) “name” variable for Trucks, and I can’t see any ruleset-based reason for that to be treated as a different variable (the only way to tell which “name” variable is meant would be context or capitalisation, and I don’t think the capitalisation counts). This means that as soon as a Truck changes their name, they automatically become idle (because “A Truck is only Active if their name is on the list of currently active Trucks in the Sidebar; otherwise they are Idle.” – I don’t see names like “Bat Snacks” or “Finest Grill” on the list in question). As such, if the attempts by Trucks to change their name had succeeded, this would immediately allow an idle admin + idle player to take over the game, via posting and immediately passing a CFJ (because everyone would be Idle other than the Yard, meaning that 2 votes would be enough to make the CFJ quorate).
I was considering looking for an idle admin to help perform the scam (which would not be a core rules scam because it exists because of a dynastic rule), but fortunately there is a sentence in the Appendix which makes most attempts to change names impossible: “A Truck’s name may only be changed as a result of a Proposal approving the change.” Being in the appendix, this overrides most other rules, including the dynastic rule that lets Trucks change their names and the core rule that resets players’ variables when they unidle. This means that the gamestate tracker is wrong, but fortunately this prevents players being automatically idled due to their name not being in the sidebar – the appendix has a very high level of protection for name changes, not even a CFJ works (and the DoV auto-uphold doesn’t work either). I think I’ve noted before that it’s very strange that we have a portion of the gamestate that CFJs can’t change, but the protection came in useful here.
However, things may be slightly broken with respect to the new players, as it’s unclear whether they had a name variable before they joined. It is possible that it was automatically set to the default (which as far as I can tell is AAA – the appendix defines names as a minimum of three characters long, so that’s the alphabetically earliest option), given that the Appendix doesn’t specify a way to set it when joining and it’s actually defined as a tracked variable now. (If players could set their name when joining, the same logic would probably also allow them to set their dollars when joining, which would be broken).
I’m not actively playing this dynasty at the moment, so I’ll leave the fix proposals and CFJs to the rest of you, but wanted to alert you to the problem (and especially to alert you to the fact that the ruleset is very close to completely broken and that you should probably avoid actions that push it over the edge).
Vovix: he/him
I think the way the rules are written now, a player’s name is not a gamestate variable at all, as it’s only referenced implicitly (using the general English meaning of the word to refer to specific humans by their account display names) and never defined.