Talk:Imperative Rework

May

Worth noting that we dropped the word "may" from the glossary in 2018 for actually having two different natural meanings, both of which crop up: "to express possibility" and "to express opportunity or permission". This was partly after repeated attempted scams from Cuddlebeam along the lines of "the rule says that players may be injured, and that falling over causes injury - after falling over last week I now choose not to exercise my option to be injured, and ignore it!".

This kind of problem seems hard to avoid without going down Agora's strict capslock legalese "a player MAY" route, which feels like an unnecessary gear change for BlogNomic, and one that might diminish the Nomic ecosystem. --Kevan (talk) 14:17, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

I agree, no interest at all in making it too aggressively legalistic. Josh (talk) 14:33, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Shoulds and musts

Looking at this with fresh eyes five years on, a few thoughts:-

• Unpacking the new should, what does this actually amount to? If a rule says I "should sleep", then I'm "required" to sleep, I must treat the rule as if it said I "must sleep" (which means I can't take other actions until I sleep) - and yet "[my] failure to do so does not put the gamestate into an illegal state". If I ignore the "should sleep" rule and travel to Brooklyn, the resultant gamestate is legal (I am now in Brooklyn) but I've broken a rule? What are players supposed to do next, about that?
• Checking the current ruleset's use of "must", to see how people use it informally, we've got "An Accusation must be sent within 24 hours of the original action being performed" - which is intended to mean "if it happens, this is the only way it can happen", but under this rework would become "somebody must accuse in response to every action". Perhaps restricting the enforcement to cases where "a player must" do something would be enough. (Off the back of "an accusation must be sent", it could also use adjusting to cover phrasings like "if the room is on fire, a player must extinguish the blaze" - where once one player has done this, other players cease to be bound by the must.)
• I feel like the "strictly forbidden under the stated circumstances" inversion shouldn't apply to shoulds. Saying "a player should not enter the warehouse" reads more like a breakable guideline than a declaration that doing so would be impossible. --Kevan (talk) 10:57, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

For reference, Agora's definitions of the words:

• can: if you try to do this, it works; however, this does not force you to try
• may: if you attempt to do this, you will not be punished for doing so; however there is not necessarily a guarantee that it works (normally used to override punishments elsewhere in the rules)
• should: you need a reason to not do this, and must be prepared to give the reason if challenged (such challenges hardly ever happen)
• shall/must (equivalent): if you fail to do this, the other players should punish you for the failure (comparable to a Fair Play breach in BlogNomic if intentional, often a slap on the wrist if accidental); however, the action does not automatically occur, not prevent you from doing other things, if you do in fact fail to do it

There's a category above this, where the rules describe that something happens without specifying anyone as responsible for it; in such a case, the changes in question automatically happen (causing a discrepancy between gamestate-tracking documents and the gamestate, which anyone can fix when they become aware of it via changing the gamestate-tracking documents).

The definitions on the main page are very different from this, and I don't think the differences are a good thing. For what it's worth, I would strongly caution against any "you're automatically locked out if you fail to do this 'must' action" rule, because it could lead to people being locked out for a long period of time with nobody noticing and causing huge mismatches between the actual gamestate and people's view of it; about the furthest I'd go would be recommending that players apply punishment (e.g. by CfJ) if done deliberately, and vote down any DoVs that became possible only as a consequence of a failure to perform such an action. Ais523 (talk) 11:34, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Fail states

A big stumbling block here seems to be what happens when an action that the ruleset mandates be completed isn't.

Culturally, BN isn't very legalistic - when we notice that something has been done wrong, the first impulse is usually to retcon it rather than bringing the game to a half and reverting back to the last known good state. This proposal's ambition is to make that explicit - to reduce the number of situations where an action can make the gamestate explicitly illegal and to be permissive of adjusting the gamestate post-hoc rather than forcing us to revert things.

Is that a good assumption to work from? Josh (talk) 12:09, 19 May 2020 (UTC)