Re: [s-d] Ministries independent of the rules

["Peter Cooper Jr." <pete+bnomic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Lepage wrote:
> I have two main objections to the "everything-in-the-rules" philosophy.
>
> The first is that it encourages huge rules. I'm thinking especially of the
> legendary Rule 301, The Grid, which contained several entire subgames, and
> at its peak came out to something like 20 pages all by itself. After the
> first great rules reset, our ruleset as a whole was shorter than Rule 301
> had been. Much of the rule's content was in defining various objects that
> could be found on the Grid.

Well, I think that we can organize rules into sections better than that.

> The second is that it's harder to change. We could, for example, make an
> Administrator who had the power to unilaterally create or disband
> Ministries. If Ministries are separate objects, then this is easy to do.
> If they're defined in the middle of rules, though, then we need all
> sorts of safeguards to make sure that the Administrator can't make
> arbitrary changes to the ruleset by wrapping them in Ministry decrees.

We had Referenda in the past only allowing certain changes though, and
that seemed to work. I can see advantages to this method as you mention,
though.

> The downside, I suppose, is that we couldn't have ministries with more
> complicated behavior. For example, the Ministry of the Force, long ago,
> bestowed a number of special Force Powers on its Minister; that required
> special rules. We don't want something to be defined both by a rule and
> by a separate object, either, because then we have loose ends if the
> Administrator dissolves the Ministry of the Force without touching the
> related rules.

So, currently, additional powers granted to Ministers that I see are:
Rulekeeper: Assigning rule/section numbers and moving rules (r1-8)
Chairman: Assigning prop. numbers (r2-2)
Oracle: Assigning and numbering Consultations, zotting (r2-5)
Registrar: Accepting name changes (r1-4)
Rule Tag Moderator: Has powers/restrictions in Rule Tag (r4-4)
MoM: Setting state of Clock (r2-1)

We already have loose ends in that particular ministries are tied to
powers in other rules. Really, each of our rules has connections to other
rules, such that changing one requires looking at everything else to see
what else might need to be changed. One of the reasons I think I prefer
the all-in-the-rules approach is that it's just one document to search for
related things, rather than needing to search everywhere.

Now, maybe we can arrange our rules and/or other documents in a better way
to make it all easier. But, I don't think the loose ends problem is
entirely avoidable.

-- 
Peter C.
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