Building Blocks
Contents
Building Blocks
Low-Player Mode
The Core Rule Dormancy is flavour text.
Everyone’s Playing
For the purposes of all dynastic and Building Blocks rules, the Capital is an City.
Malign Emperors
If “Mantle Passing” is active, the Capital may be recipient of the Mantle as if they were an City. The Capital may not cast a vote of VETO on any Proposal whose effect is limited to the dynastic rules or gamestate; any such vote is disregarded for the purposes of proposal resolution. The Capital may not use the rule “Official Posts” to move posts into the proposal category.
If there is a Building Block rule called No Private Communication then any City may remove this rule from the ruleset.
No Private Communication
Cities may not privately communicate with each other about dynastic gameplay or votable matters that affect the dynastic ruleset or gamestate. Private communications are considered to be anything that any other City could not reasonably be privy to, perceive, or understand. Discussion conducted in plain English on the BlogNomic wiki and blog, and the #current-dynasty, #blognomic-general and #new-player-questions-and-mentorships Discord channels, are not considered to be private communication. Idle Cities (or people who are not yet Cities) also face the same restrictions if they intend to become an active City during the course of the dynasty. The use of creative strategies to circumvent this rule may be considered to be a scam for the purposes of determining whether an infraction of Fair Play has taken place.
A mentor and mentee may still privately converse with each other, but should keep their conversations away from discussing specific gameplay strategy. This rule’s restrictions on communication do not apply during an Interregnum. The restrictions in this rule on communication in non-blognomic-related media shall not be construed as to cause those media to be gamestate.
If information which was not allowed to be discussed is still privately discussed, the Cities who were part of the conversation should make a post to the blog disclosing what information was discussed at their earliest convenience.
Mantle Passing
During an Interregnum, the new Capital may Pass the Mantle by making a post naming an City who was not the last dynasty’s Capital; the passing City then ceases to be the Capital and the City so named becomes the Capital.
Declared Alliances
Each City may have an Alliance, which is publicly tracked, and consists of the distinct names of no more than two other Cities; an City's Alliance defaults to an empty set. An City may change their Alliance as a daily action.
If “Mantle Passing” is not active, and if an City has achieved victory in this dynasty, has posted a Declaration of Victory which has been enacted, and did not change their Alliance for at least the 48 hours immediately prior to the posting time of their Declaration of Victory: then that City may pass the Mantle to an City (as if “Mantle Passing” were active) who was named in their Alliance at the posting time of their Declaration of Victory.
If “No Private Communication” is active, it does not apply to communications between Cities who each have the other’s names in their Alliance.
Bounties
A Bounty Notice is a post in the Story Posts - Votable Matter category which broadly requests a single mechanical or ruleset change. Despite its category, it is not a votable matter and any votes on it are ignored. A Bounty Notice may be Open or Closed being Open by default and being Closed when set to the ‘Enacted’ or ‘Failed’ status in the post backend. The Enacted Status should be used for successfully completed Bounty Notices, while Failed should be used for ones that were closed for any other reason
The Capital may post a Bounty Notice, or close an open Bounty Notice, at any time.
If a Bounty Payout action is not defined in the dynastic rules, then the Bounty Payout action is that nothing happens.
If the Capital believes that one or more enacted votable matters satisfy the demand of an open Bounty Notice, then they may apply the Bounty Payout action to each City (other than the Capital) who authored at least one of those votable matters and set that Bounty Notice to closed.
Reinitialisation
If they have not already done so in the current dynasty, An City may make a post to the blog announcing that they are Reinitialising; if they do so then they must immediately set all of their gamestate tracked values to their defaults for new players, and if the Capital is privately tracking any information about them then they should do likewise at their first opportunity. If an City has Reinitialised during the current dynasty, then, for the purposes of determining the validity of limited actions, they are considered to have undertaken no actions in this dynasty prior to their most recent Reinitialisation.
Virtual Actions
A Virtual Action is a type of action that the Capital performs on behalf of an City. An City may initiate a virtual action by privately communicating to the Capital their request to do so, along with any additional information needed to carry it out. The Capital shall resolve the Virtual Action by performing the following Atomic Action:
- Determine whether the Virtual Action fails (if it does not fail, it is successful).
- If the action is successful, apply any specified effects on the gamestate and/or perform any specified actions on behalf of the City, and indicate to the City that their action has succeeded.
If a Virtual Action fails, the Capital should tell the City why. A virtual action may fail for any of these reasons:
- Some requirements/prerequisites to perform the action are not met.
- The request does not contain all the information needed to resolve the action.
- The request is unintelligible, or too vague to interpret unambiguously.
- It would require the Capital to do something they cannot do.
- Any other reason specified by the action itself.
Except where otherwise stated by the ruleset, the Capital must resolve all virtual actions in the order that they are received. A virtual action is considered to have occurred at the time it was resolved.
Until a virtual action is resolved, it is pending. An City may cancel a pending Virtual Action by privately communicating to the Capital their request to do so.
When the performance of a Virtual Action causes the modification of publicly tracked gamestate, the Capital should publicly track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action on behalf of the City who initiated that Virtual Action, using the Capital’s own name in that public tracking, and privately track the historical fact of the occurrence of that Virtual Action using the name of the City who initiated that Virtual Action.
No Cooperation
In this dynasty, Cities are expected to avoid co-operating to effect Victory, except through the use of co-operative mechanisms defined in the Dynastic rules, any activities carried out as part of a Mentorship, and the posting of votable matters and casting of votes. The Mentor clause that a Mentor and mentee “may work together to achieve victory” does not apply in this dynasty.
Idle Cities are considered to be Cities for the purposes of this rule.
If an City feels that another City has gone against this expectation in some way during the current dynasty, then they are encouraged to vote against all DoVs from that City during that dynasty. If an City feels that a DoV has come about as a result of one or more other Cities making a sincere attempt to ‘kingmake’ for the Declarant, even if the author of the DoV was not a party to that cooperation, then they are encouraged to vote against it. This overrules the encouragement to vote according to the perception of a victory in the rule “Victory and Ascension”.
Precondition Unidling
Idle Cities may submit Calls for Judgement as if they were not idle; such CfJs are known as Precondition Calls, and should suggest terms (in the form of amendments to the ruleset and/or gamestate) on which the proposer would be willing to join the current dynasty. The proposer of a Precondition Call is not considered to have a vote on that CfJ while they remain idle.
If a Precondition Call enacts, the enacting admin must unidle its raiser before applying the Call’s effects. As an exception, this requirement does not apply where such an unidling would be impossible.
Protected Edit Window
An official post may be altered by its author if it is less than 4 hours old. This rule supersedes the rule “Edit Window”, if it exists.
Revisions Allowed
For use in voting, an arrow https://blognomic.com/images/vote/arrow.gif shall represent a Vote of REVISE, which is treated the same as an AGAINST voting icon with respect to all other rules except when a rule explicitly describes other uses or effects of the REVISE voting icon. Cities should use an AGAINST voting icon when voting against a proposal due to disagreement with the general idea behind the proposal and should use a REVISE voting icon when voting against a proposal for which they agree with the general idea behind the proposal, but disagree with the details or with the exact wording.
A Proposal that is Pending is considered Revisable if any of the following are true:
- If a Proposal’s author withdraws it using REVISE, and there were at least as many votes REVISE as votes AGAINST among the other (non-author) Cities’ Votes on that proposal at that time
- If a Proposal’s author withdraws it using REVISE, and the sum of FOR and REVISE votes for that Proposal exceeds or equals Quorum at that time
If a Proposal is considered Revisable, then the proposal ceases to count against that author’s limit of 2 pending proposals and can be failed by any Admin, even if it is not the oldest pending proposal, and the author should submit a corrected version. If a proposal’s author is planning to withdraw a proposal, but not to submit a corrected version, they should withdraw it by voting AGAINST.
When the Capital has a valid REVISE vote on a Votable Matter, then all votes of DEFERENTIAL on that Votable Matter are instead considered to be valid and counted as REVISE votes.
