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)