Re: spoon-discuss: initial ruleset

["David E. Smith" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

> You know, I find myself liking the "rule set" used for Game 3 of Pure
> Nomic:

[ Game starts with only one rule: All players must agree to any changes to
the game. ]

IMO, that isn't overly feasible. Once you have more than a few players,
eventually one of 'em will have something happen, like a relative will die
or they'll get arrested or they'll get abducted by aliens and then the
whole game freezes up because, unless/until that player is returned to
Earth, or paroled, or whatever, pretty much by definition, nothing can
happen.

The obvious solution is for someone to quickly suggest a "majority rule"
addition, but then a malicious player could block its passage, and it's
all downhill from there.

To bring all this back round to Suber: I tend to believe that, for either
a Nomic or a constitutional government, at least SOME structure is needed.
More than that one rule, less than one trillion words, finding a good
balance is the tricky bit. :-)

I'm going with a fairly simple "majority rule" rule in place for the start
of B Nomic, unless something really really cool comes along and someone is
really really persuasive.

To address scoring: I've only got a "1000 points wins" rule. I haven't
defined how players actually score points; this is by design.

The ruleset has been trimmed. The only major internal inconsistency right
now is that I haven't yet defined what a Motion is, even though I've got
rules for how one passes etc. (Aside: I'm only worried about internal
inconsistencies because I want the game to start somewhat in a rational
state. After that, it's a free-for-all, natch.)

...dave