Roland of Gilead on 13 Nov 2000 23:35:32 -0000


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Re: spoon-discuss: modification of 302/0, Subliminal eligiousIndoctrination




Firstly, the purpose of RFJ's is to clarify a point of law. That is if
the Rules are ambiguous about something and Players cannot agree on the
correct interpretation, then an RFJ is used. An RFJ isn't something that
should be used during the course on normal gameplay.

The RFJ just seemed to be the well-defined, existing mechanism for deciding matters which require arbitration. If you have a better method, that's fine--but doing it as an RFJ would work, and would do so with the existing ruleset. I understand having aesthetic concern for the 'true' function of RFJs, but I'm personally not too concerned with it.

Secondly, when I wrote the Rule I assumed that once the Heresy is
pointed out then it should be obvious. For example "Look, your proposal
would create a rule that says 'xxx' and in Genesis 1:2 it says 'xxx'
therefore you have commited Heresy". Given that none of us are running
for President (snigger) I would think that we'd play fair and admit it
if we get caught.

Based on the way I've seen Nomic games progress in the past, I guaran-fucking-tee you that someone might resort to stonewalling, conspiracy, or other dirty tricks, given the opportunity and incentive. I know the Biblical texts are fairly self-apparent if one is caught trying to sneak a verse by; but I wouldn't be surprised if there were only one or two (if that) copies of the "ISO/IEC 14882, Standard for the C++ Programming Language" among the group of Nomic players. I certainly don't own one. It would be easy for owners of said texts to simply deny whether or not such a passage exists (or make one up on the fly).

Or on the other hand, such an incident might never occur.  Whatever.

Potter