[spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Underwriting

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday, September 14, 2003, at 02:20 PM, Glotmorf wrote:

> The Prez of M-Tek makes this club prop:
>
> {{ _Funding for This Program Comes from Players Like
> You_
>
> Create a new rule:
>
> {{ _Underwriting_
>
> }}

Hmm. I was just going to apply for a government grant from the Admin, 
but I guess this works too, except for some wording problems. I'd 
definitely want to see rewording of "a clear statement of the activity 
members of the Society participate in in order to gain points" - some 
societies may want to pursue multiple paying activities (INH comes to 
mind, if anyone would put their societies there). The current wording 
also says nothing about such activities being society specific; there 
are already activities that the members of, say, M-Tek participate in 
in order to gain points; for example, we make proposals.
	I also dislike the restriction that the Moderator must a) exist and b) 
not gain points from the activity. If, for example, Go were to become a 
society-based subgame (which would be possible if societies could get 
this sort of grant), it wouldn't be eligible for this sort of grant 
because it doesn't require a moderator.
	The second to last paragraph refers to an Underwritten Society 
'posting an announcement on the public forum'; however, there isn't any 
method in place at the moment for a society to post anything itself; it 
can only respond to posts by others.
	Finally, most societies would probably not want to be Underwritten, as 
it would force them to use proposals to change the definition of their 
subgames; so if the Underground were underwritten, you wouldn't be able 
to change the rules of the Tunnelers game except by getting the society 
to produce proposals about it. Likewise, INH would not be able to start 
new subgames except by outergame proposal. This would result in a lot 
of proposals that wouldn't be pertinent to many players - right now 
only 5 people actually have any reason to care about the Tunnelers 
rules; the other seven players would just have a lot of props they 
didn't care about cluttering their ballots.

	I think it would easier to come up with a way of simply providing 
points for societies, and letting the societies work it out. The 
simplest way to do this would be to allow petitions, either to the 
Admin, to some special Funding Council, or perhaps simply as an 
Unauthored prop, to get grants from the Gremlin Fund or from the 
mystical forces that create points when the rules don't specify where 
they come from.
	More complicated things could be devised, but I think many of them 
would rely on some sort of preexisting rule-defined subgame (I think 
something was suggested about Societies producing things on the Grid, 
but that's a moot point now). In order to make this idea viable, we'd 
need some sort of commodity which societies could produce but single 
players couldn't (preferably many such commodities) so that players 
would have a reason to pay societies for something; or if there were 
some service that could perhaps be done by a single player, but would 
take a while and waste a lot of resources unless for some reason you 
wanted to do it in bulk (I'd hoped to generalize Upgrades and turn WBE 
into something like this, but didn't have the commitment to go through 
with it when I lost the society; again, a moot point now).
	It also might a be a good idea to put limitations on single-player 
societies; a lot of potential loopholes would be closed if it took two 
people to create and run a society.
	I was working on a proposal that generally cleaned up a lot of basic 
things in the ruleset, but then I left it in my other computer; I'll 
probably be able to grab it by the end of this week, and maybe even 
finish it. I think it might make a lot of things easier to do.



Oh, and on an unrelated note, the changes to the Mercantilist Charter 
didn't happen in public, Teucer.

--
Wonko

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