Talk:Generic Core Rules

Compressed enactment rules

A pending proposal can only be enacted if all of the following points are true for it:-

• It has a number of FOR Votes that exceed or equal quorum or it has been open for voting for at least 48 hours, it has more than 1 valid vote cast on it, and more valid votes cast on it are FOR than are AGAINST.
• It has been open for voting for at least 12 hours.
• It has not been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

A pending proposal can be failed if any of the following are true for it:-

• The number of players who are not voting AGAINST it is less than quorum; or
• It has been open for voting for at least 48 hours and cannot be enacted; or
• It has been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

A pending CfJ is processed like a proposal, but it ignores the minimum 12 hour period, and Vetoing or Self-Killing a CfJ has no effect on it.

A pending DoV is processed like a proposal, but if it has any AGAINST votes and the Emperor has not voted FOR it, its 12 hour period is extended to 24 hours, and it cannot be failed within the first 12 hours. Vetoing or Self-Killing a DoV has no effect on it.

If a DoV is Failed and it had at least one AGAINST vote, the player who posted it cannot make another DoV until after 120 hours (5 days) have passed since the time their DoV was Failed.

Still needs some polish (the 12-hour window could use a name, for reference), but that looks a bit better than I expected. --Kevan (talk) 15:33, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

I feel like we can go a bit further and still be neat:

A pending votable matter can only be enacted if the following points are true for it:-

• It has a number of FOR Votes that exceed or equal quorum or it has been open for voting for at least 48 hours, it has more than 1 valid vote cast on it, and more valid votes cast on it are FOR than are AGAINST.
• If it is a proposal, it has been open for voting for at least 12 hours; or, if it is a declaration of victory, it has been open for voting for at least 24 hours.
• If it is a proposal, it has not been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

A pending proposal can be failed if any of the following are true for it:-

• The number of players who are not voting AGAINST it is less than quorum; or
• It has been open for voting for at least 48 hours and cannot be enacted; or
• If it is a proposal, it has been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

If a DoV is Failed and it had at least one AGAINST vote, the player who posted it cannot make another DoV until after 120 hours (5 days) have passed since the time their DoV was Failed.

Removes the finnicky timings around DOV validity but I think that's okay, it wasn't adding much... Josh (talk) 19:41, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Retake

Looking back over this again with a fresh brain, some things which are quite idiosyncratic to BlogNomic and may not be necessary here are:-

• The word "quorum" (which is only used twice in this Generic Ruleset, and is not how most people would use the word)
• All the stuff about not rushing to enact Proposals or DoV in fewer than 12 or 24 hours: if this is a generic system that we want random forums and subreddits and Discords and even tabletops to adopt, some are going to be puzzled when their game's first proposal gets instant approval and hits a weird "come back tomorrow!" wall. This probably merits a wider discussion about pacing: it may even be worth having a clock rule embedded in the ruleset ("a Tick is equal to [X] hours... if a Proposal is more than two Ticks old... cannot make another DoV for five Ticks...") and guidance to set that to two minutes, an hour or a day depending on playing context.
• The minimum-2-votes-to-enact rule is there to stop a particular type of not very common scam, which new Nomics might enjoy encountering and patching.
• The "If a DoV is Failed and it had at least one AGAINST vote clause" seems extremely niche and I can't even remember why it's there in our own rules (are we being generous in the obscure situation where a DoV times out with no votes cast, or is failed by a faster CfJ?)

Trimming that back gives us:

The oldest pending proposal can be enacted if more than half the players have voted FOR it, or if it's timed out and has more votes FOR than AGAINST. (Proposals which have been Vetoed or Self-Killed can never be enacted.)

The oldest pending proposal can be failed if more than half the players have voted AGAINST it, or if it's timed out and cannot otherwise be enacted, or if it has been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

Proposals time out after 48 hours.

CfJs and DoVs are processed like proposals, except that Vetoing and Self-Killing them has no effect. If a DoV is failed, the player who posted it cannot make another DoV for 120 hours (5 days).

Which is pretty spartan, but I'd personally really like to see a short, understandable ruleset that even the most uninterested member of a group will be able to get to grips with, if you threw this at a bunch of players that had never seen a Nomic. The twiddlier BlogNomic legacy clauses seem like more of a why-is-this-here distraction than a genuinely helping hand. (I appreciate you've already cut some, like the "Emperor has voted FOR" DoV stuff.) --Kevan (talk) 19:13, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Actually this does lose some of the neatness around proposals which have attracted a full set of votes (a 50-50 tie would have to time out as it could be neither passed nor failed, here), so this needs more work. --Kevan (talk) 20:16, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Tantusar's edits

Linking to User:Tantusar/Generic_core_sandbox before the link disappears from Slack and we risk forgetting it was there. --Kevan (talk) 19:24, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Rule-by-rule pass

Giving the whole ruleset another pass, here's what stands out to me:

• "Gamestate" will be a bit mysterious to someone who's never played BlogNomic. We should make it clear that the group will want to use a second document to track gamestate; or that if they're playing the game tabletop, the locations of chess pieces and poker chips and whatever else are the gamestate.
• Idling has been trimmed down too far here, to the point where tactical idling will likely occur to someone in every group's first game. We should also be conscious that in some settings, like a corner of a forum, players might not actually want other players joining directly: whether that's other half-interested forum members wandering in (and either messing things up or just saying "what's this, I'll join" and then never returning) or the easy scam of asking half a dozen friends to drop by the channel and say "I join the game and vote FOR my friend's proposal". So I'd cut it back further to:

"A player may join the game at any time, if all existing players agree to this. A player may stop playing at any time by announcing this. If a player rejoins the game, their personal gamestate retains the last legally endowed values it had, if they are still valid; otherwise the player is given the default value for new players, if such a value exists."

I think that this creates some new problems. For example: if new players can only join when "all" existing players agree, and a player disappears, does that mean that new memberships are locked forever? If a player has a one-vote lead on a proposal that would give them victory, could they hold off agreeing new players and thus raising quorum until it had passed? Does this imply that new players will likely face a lengthy wait before being able to play? Does this mean that there's no automatic mechanism for bringing down the pass/fail number on proposals, so that they all have to time out? Josh (talk) 12:49, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Disappearing players is a bigger problem we need to address anyway, as the ruleset here has no idle-timeout clause at all, at the time of writing. I think a lead player tactically denying a new member seems okay, and reasonably fun Nomic play: if they're being objectionable about it, they can always be overruled by CfJ. It's definitely going to be a problem for forum players that without some kind of restriction on joining: there will be occasional "hi, Josh said to join this thread and say 'I become a player, I vote for Josh's proposal'" victories, which I think would be seen as a bug in the ruleset. The barrier to disrupting BlogNomic is relatively high (send an email, work out how to log into a website, work out how to post a message), but on a bigger forum where accomplices just have to follow a thread link and type a message, it's much more likely to be abused.

Could also say that new players could only be added by CfJ, so would only need half the group to approve. --Kevan (talk) 13:20, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• Are we happy that idling-inactive-player situations can be covered by proposals or CfJs of "remove named player", even if (worst case where ten people on a forum said they'd play and only three are actually responding) the group has to wait for the CfJ to time out?
• Admins are a fairly BlogNomic-specific concept, mostly because we don't want to give full blog-administration rights to every user. I suppose they also act as a bit of a barrier against over-optimistic "I propose X, and I reckon I can enact it straight away because I've misunderstood a rule, so I enact X and trash a bunch of rules! I win!" scams which confuse the current game situation and might be hard to clear up afterwards. Maybe this ruleset could have the Emperor doing the enactment, leaving open the option for players to propose a wider admin system if they want one.

Admins have been removed, Emperor-as-enactor has been included. Josh (talk) 13:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• Rounds are good, but they need more explanation of what they're meant to be - this could be misread as the game being a series of rounds, like hands in a trick-taker. ("An individual game of X Nomic is known as a Round. At the end of the Round, the Round rules are repealed." or something.) The ruleset could have an introductory non-rule paragraph setting the stage, instead, but I think it's better to put it all in the ruletext.

I've added some words on this. Josh (talk) 13:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• The whole "Official Entry > Votable Matter > Proposal/CfJ/DoV" thing feels like overkill in a simple ruleset, and phrases like "may cast one vote on a Votable Matter" feel a bit too formal and tautological. I'd be tempted to reframe everything as "proposals" instead: proposals are proposals, votes are cast on proposals, and CfJs and DoVs are like proposals except for enacting differently. I don't think we need to define "official entry" when all we're saying here is "sometimes official entries are votable matters" (there is none of the "you can't change an official entry" stuff that BlogNomic enforces).

I think we need all three concepts, annoyingly clunky as it is. "Official entry" is needed in particular for the in-person game, where there's more of a need to distinguish between speech that is just interpersonal dialogue and speech that is part of the game; this is less obvious in person than it is online, I think. Votable matter isn't an important concept but it is a helpful way of addressing the corpus in one phrase. I'm reluctant to group all VMs under 'proposal' as the meaningful distinctions between them contain quite a few exceptions; "A CfJ is like a proposal except it can be enacted out of chronological order and can't be vetoed, and a DoV is like a proposal except that it also can be enacted out of chronological order and can't be vetoed but also if it fails then the submitted can't post another one for five days" feels, to me, much clunkier than just having them be separable phenomena within a unified corpus. Josh (talk)

That's not the unclunkiest wording, though, you could express it as "CfJs and DoVs are considered to be proposals, except that they can be enacted out of chronological order and can't be self-killed or vetoed. Oh, and if a DoV fails you can't make another one for five days." - we could even go down the route of renaming them to "Emergency Proposals" and "Victory Claim Proposals".

I think the branching is simple enough that there's no need to put the additional concept of "votable matter" into the listener's head, setting novice players up for jargon mistakes along the lines of "I make a votable matter to give everyone 5 gold." --Kevan (talk) 15:04, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I've tried this, and, oof:

Official Entries and Proposals

An official entry is any communication whose content or format is determined by the ruleset. A proposal is an official entry which player may cast votes on, and includes Calls for Judgement and Declarations of Victory.

A proposal is used to make changes to the ruleset or gamestate. Any player may submit a proposal to change the Ruleset or Gamestate by making an official entry that starts with the text "PROPOSAL:", and which describes those changes, unless the player already has 2 Proposals pending.

A Call for Judgement (or CfJ) is a type of proposal that is specifically used if two or more players actively disagree as to the interpretation of the Ruleset, or if a player feels that an aspect of the game needs urgent attention. A player may raise a CfJ at any time by making an official entry that starts with the text "CALL FOR JUDGEMENT:". Calls for Judgement do not count towards a player's proposal limit.

A Declaration of Victory (or “DoV”) is a type of proposal used when a player believes that they have won the round. If a player (other than the Emperor) believes that they have achieved victory in the current round, they may make a DOV detailing this, by making an official entry that starts with the text "DECLARATION OF VICTORY:". Every player may cast votes in response to that DoV to indicate agreement or disagreement with the proposition that the submitter has achieved victory in the current Dynasty. Declarations of Victory do not count towards a player's proposal limit and may not have any effect other than conferring victory on the submitter.

Enacting and Failing

A proposals may only be resolved by the Emperor, except DoVs, which may be resolved by any player. Proposals must be resolved based on the following criteria:

Proposals (except CfJs and DoVs) must be resolved in chronological order, from oldest to newest.

A proposal can be enacted if more than half the players have voted FOR it, or if it's been open for voting for 48 hours and has more votes FOR than AGAINST. (Proposals which have been Vetoed or Self-Killed can never be enacted.)

A proposal can be failed if half or more of the players have voted AGAINST it, or if it's been open for 48 hours and cannot otherwise be enacted, or if it is a proposal and has been Vetoed or Self-Killed.

CfJs and DoVs do not need to be resolved in chronological order and Vetoing or Self-Killing them has no effect. If a DoV is failed, the player who submitted it cannot make another DoV for 120 hours (5 days).

Whenever a proposal or CfJ is enacted, the Emperor must make the prescribed changes to the ruleset or gamestate. Whenever a DoV is enacted then the procedure described in the rule Victory and Ascension takes place.

The first bit is okay but Enacting and Failing is just tortured. Distinguishing between "proposals that are proposals" and "proposals that is the collective noun for votable matters" is, it turns out, quite important, I think. Josh (talk) 15:37, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, it's tough. The "votable matter" keyword has just always looked a lot like old BlogNomic polyfilla to me (its backstory might even be "we need a blog category for this kind of thing, call it anything"?), which makes it feel like it would look even shoddier presented to new players. It's holding some important parts of the ruleset together, but it isn't (I think) a term players ever actually use in conversation, so I think it's worth rewording around it if we can. I'll see if I can get anywhere with it --Kevan (talk) 19:08, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• We should avoid talking about players making "posts", since that doesn't apply to a tabletop group. Easy enough to reword.

Agreed; now "submission" or "submitter" throughout. Josh (talk) 13:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• I can't remember whether DEFERENTIAL is a BlogNomic thing, or common in Imperial Nomics. Are we happy that it's useful enough to be worth the complexity? I suppose it's friendly to new players, and keeps the game moving if early and undecided voters are allowed to shrug.

I think if we're going to keep Emperors then we might as well keep DEFs. Simplicity isn't the only goal; flavour and character is also important, I think. Josh (talk) 13:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• "Ascension Address" seems unnecessary jargon, for the act of saying "shall we play another game?". The idea of "Emperor announces theme" is worth including, but earlier in the ruleset (in "Rounds") rather than after the game has finished.

Ditto to above re DEF's - I don't think AAs are the clearest language but some character and pageantry is, I think, worth a tiny bit of jargony fluff? I also think there's something to be said for the clear line-in-the-sand 'this is the start of the new dynasty'-ness of it. Josh (talk) 13:24, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

That's it for now. --Kevan (talk) 11:19, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

pokes' commentary

• "gamestate channel" is clear for BN, but opaque otherwise. Maybe worth a paragraph in "Ruleset and Gamestate" to the effect of

The Official Channel is insert something specific here relevant to the medium: e.g. a blog at xxx.com; #nomic on xxx discord; this sheet of paper

noting that I am suggesting having actual italicized text there as an explicit point where modification is needed.

• "Each player may cast one vote on a Votable Matter by making a response to the official entry" -> "Each player may cast one vote on a Votable Matter by making a response to the official entry in the official channel": Right now I can vote FOR by writing my vote down on a post-it note nobody can see. Perhaps the format of the response should be an explicit customization point.

• After discussion on Slack, the above points are probably better as Usage Notes:
  • "Consider also making explicit what are acceptable gamestate channels, and what a 'response' is for the purpose of the "Votes" rule."

Agreed - I've put something in Josh (talk) 15:43, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• It's maybe clear that "resolving" a proposal makes it not "pending", but it's possible for a non-pending proposal to be enacted multiple times. Maybe:
  • After "A Votable Matter is an official entry which player may cast Votes on, such as a Proposal, a Call for Judgement or a Declaration of Victory." add "When a Votable Matter is created, it is Pending."
  • "A votable matter may be resolved by the Emperor under the following conditions" -> "A pending votable matter may be resolved by the Emperor under the following conditions"
  • At the end of the "Enacting and Failing" rule add "When a votable matter is enacted or failed, it is no longer pending."

I've gone with "Any votable matter ceases to be a votable matter once resolved", as it's a more minimal intervention and seems to do everything that needs to be done. Josh (talk) 15:43, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• A proposed idle-ectomy for "Players":

All humans are either players, or observers. Any observer may become a player by announcing their intent to do so in a gamestate channel. If a player wishes to become an observer, they may do so after making an announcement in a gamestate channel to that effect. If a player has undertaken no game actions for at least 7 days, any player may make them an observer. After someone has been made an observer, they cannot become a player again until five days have passed.

When an observer becomes a player, if they had been a player in the same game, their personal gamestate retains the last legally endowed values it had, if they are still valid. Otherwise (including if a value is invalid, does not exist, or the player has not been a player during this game), the player is given the default value for new players, if such a value exists.

And then in "Votes": "An idle player's vote" -> "An observer's vote".

Yep, like it - incorporated Josh (talk) 18:22, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

• From Slack, so it doesn't get lost: A stub game in the round ruleset would be useful for clarifying what a round rule can look like, introducing dynastic rule tropes that we've found useful, and suggesting that the implementers think about some other useful additions like rolling dice or where to track gamestate. For example, if we wanted to steal from Suber it might look like:

Each player has a number of points, which defaults to zero, and is tracked publicly.

If a player has not done so within the last 24 hours, they may roll a six-sided die and add that number to their points.

If a player reaches 100 points, they achieve victory.

Notes from the #fast-nomic playtest

• On formats (such as slack) where only a poster can edit their own message, ownership of the core rules is complicated; if the Emperor is the only person who can enact proposals then they need a version ot exist that they can edit. Josh (talk) 13:56, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
• How should the ability to change votes be handled Josh (talk) 16:54, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
• Platforms that don't attach timestamps to intuitive voting mechanisms need an alternative way to determine idleness Josh (talk) 18:46, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
• Lack of automatic-proposer-FOR interacts badly with votes not being changeable (you can't self-kill a proposal that you thought was a good idea when you made it). --Kevan (talk) 19:42, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
• "may do so after making an announcement" for the player/observer toggle should probably be "by making", to match other core game actions. --Kevan (talk) 10:30, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

CfJ opacity

Casting an eye back over this, the slim CfJ rule has a pitfall that new players often fall into at BlogNomic: it doesn't prompt the players to specify an explicit ruleset/gamestate change to resolve the situation being described, which can result in vague "this thing is wrong, we should fix it somehow" CfJs which don't end up anywhere very useful after a yes/no vote. --Kevan (talk) 11:58, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

Tabletop/online games

Worth remembering that the Suber ruleset actually has a line within the ruleset itself about how to adapt the game for online (or postal!) play:

Players shall alternate in clockwise order, taking one whole turn apiece. Turns may not be skipped or passed, and parts of turns may not be omitted. All players begin with zero points. In mail and computer games, players shall alternate in alphabetical order by surname.

It could be a good idea to do the same thing with idling and timing thresholds here, so that the ruleset will always work straight out of the box with no pre-game edits required, whether you throw it down onto a pub table or paste it into a Discord channel. --Kevan (talk) 13:29, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

TyGuy6's Notes from Fast Nomic Round 2

I found the rules on what to do at the end of a round to start a new round ambiguous and scattered. Discussed it on the Discord, and decided to shift the rules about Rounds down to join Victory and Ascension, and rewrote it somewhat. Now everything you need to end a round should be in the DoV section plus that last rule, and starting a new round is just in that last rule.

I removed the line that you couldn't do anything but DoVs if the Emperor went idle; it was redundant with the rule that only the Emperor could enact proposals and CfJs. It was probably meant as an explanatory warning, but in our game, we started right off with allowing anyone to enact anything, and since we missed removing this line it could have theoretically killed our game if the Emperor had ever been idled and nobody had won yet.

We noticed at some point that we weren't ever using "PROPOSAL:", but rather "Proposal:". Nobody cared enough about the lack of caps to make it an issue. I'll leave it as-is, but maybe most online groups would prefer not to prescribe all caps.

It might be nice if the emperor's responsibilities could be more evenly distributed among all the players, if the group is more nomic-experienced or has played a round or two already. I initially thought that "Proposals and CfJs may only be resolved by the Emperor." was the only line that would have to be changed, but the enactment and adminning role is baked in to a few other wordings. Should be ok, I guess, since a strong group should also be able to untangle it, and since this base ruleset is probably intended for play with many newcomers.