Re: [spoon-discuss] vSET

[Daniel Lepage <dplepage@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 10:46  PM, Glotmorf wrote:

> I was just perusing vSET's charter, and came up with a question that I 
> can't remember having been answered before (though it may well have 
> been)...
>
> Is Dave a public forum?

Nope.

> He hasn't designated himself as such, which I think is the deciding 
> factor, but vSET would require him (or some minister) to be one, 
> since, according to r17, "Actions occur upon reaching the appropriate 
> Fora."  Therefore, for vSET to have its secret membership, which by 
> definition is part of the gamestate, actions would have to be 
> specifically emailed to Dave, who would recognize them and maintain 
> his record of the gamestate.
>
> But since Dave isn't a designated public forum, actions sent to him 
> can't be officially recognized by him, and therefore vSET's secret 
> membership can't be maintained.

Yup.

> Which leads to a followup question...
>
> Should Dave be a public forum?
>
> Is there an actual genuine need for a GM with a GM screen, to whom 
> notes can be passed for actions to be taken that may well have 
> publicly visible consequences but not necessarily publicly visible 
> causes?  Do we anticipate any sort of large-scale need for hidden 
> actions?

The ugly thing about hidden actions is that they often have costs. One 
of the problems with, say, Force Absorption (pay some amount of Force 
*in a note to the admin*, and the next anti-you Force move gets 
countered) was that either the Force Minister wasn't told, and we'd 
just have to trust that after spending all eir force on Absorption, a 
player wouldn't then try to use Destruction with the Force we didn't 
know e'd lost; or to tell whoever ran the records (which would have to 
be Dave if it worked like this), and have Dave note that e's absorbent 
and also surreptitiously alter the Force records to show the decrease 
in Force, and hope that nobody noticed the change.

So a lot of hidden action things are too much of a hassle to be worth 
putting in the game at all.

On the other hand, things like private voting (and here I'm really 
thinking about Bidding for Super Powers) could profit greatly from, 
say, a little mailing program that gathers messages sent to it, then 
releases them all when somebody sends the right one. So, for example, 
we'd all submit msgs with some tag on the top, perhaps something like

{Secret Class="SuperPower_GnashyClaws Text = "I, Wonko, bid 30 points 
on the Big Gnashy Claws."}

Then, when the auction ended, the Guardian would send it a msg with 
something like

{Release Class="SuperPower_GnashyClaws"}

and it would mail to s-b a list of all the 'Text' fields it recieved.

Something like that could also be used to make a trustworthy and 
easy-to-use random number generator; send it {Random Choice('Rain', 
'Hail', 'Gnomes', 'Sulphur')} and it s-b's one of those at random.

I could even write the program to process such things pretty easily.

However, I have absolutely no knowledge about the 'mail' portion of it, 
i.e., setting it up to call a program on the text of each incoming 
message (I do know how to make python send mail back); perhaps what 
I've just described is easily done by someone with the requisite 
knowledge, or perhaps it would require much more work than I'd expect.

Anyone know anything about it?

> I suppose Dave wouldn't want the additional work, though even if we 
> set up a minister for this any action involving said minister would 
> probably have to cc: Dave, in case said minister DOFOEs (Drops Off 
> Face Of Earth) and Dave has to reconcile the current hidden gamestate.

Dave could have access to all the secret msgs stored by the program.

> Personally I think the only practical way to do hidden actions is a 
> separate email address with a procmail handler, or a webform, that 
> updates a database that Dave, in a DOFOE situation, has access to.  Is 
> there interest at this time in a general-purpose database-logged 
> hidden-action submission webform?

Uh... that sounds like it might be what I said, but with a side of 
technical knowledge. What's a 'procmail handler'?

--
Wonko

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