Daniel Lepage on 15 Sep 2003 22:43:28 -0000


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


On Monday, September 15, 2003, at 05:16 PM, Glotmorf wrote:


Sorry I took so long with this response.  This
semester's homework is a bitch.

--- Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


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.


True, but M-Tek's points are from proposal passage;
those points are created out of thin air.  The odds
are somewhat against people voting to deplete the
Gremlin Fund to pay us instead.

This is why I make it a proposal: the game populus has
to think whatever activity the society is doing
worthwhile before they'd vote approval for draining
the Fund.
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment; I'm disagreeing with the wording. Mentioning "the activity" that society members do to gain points suggests that there's only one such activity; I could see someone making the argument that if, say, the Underground were Underwritten, its members would be unable to do any activity to gain points except playing tunnelers. It also suggests that the society can only specify one such method; something like INH is designed to host multiple such activities. 


	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.


A society really needs a central figure for keeping
things in tune and making society actions.  Yes, such
things can be done by a committee, but that would only
slow things down in the case of a lot of games.
Besides, it keeps things somewhat focused and cuts
down somewhat on greed scams...Someone has to want to
do the game either out of love or out of the stipend
the players are willing to pay.

Of course, the biggest reason for my phrasing the rule
that way was to ensure there would be someone in
charge of the society should whoever created it
vanish.  Otherwise, aside from posthumous seizures,
the minute a founder leaves you have a dead game.
Okay, so I'll buy that a central figure is good, but why can't the central figure gain points from the activity? For example, I've been contemplating an Eleusis-based subgame; the rules of Eleusis definitely provide for a central authority, namely the dealer, but the dealer still gets points, and in fact those points are necessary to give the dealer an incentive to make a good rule. 


	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.


That would refute much of the actions a society
supposedly performs, such as changing its own charter,
since any action in the game requires a public forum
post.  The precedent so far has been that if a
society's charter says it takes an action when a
particular person directs it to, said person can take
actions in the name of the society.
So far precedents have only dealt with societies taking game actions; what you propose requires the society to actually make the forum post itself. If the rule simply required it to take the action, then it could be done by a member on behalf of the society, by game precedent. 


	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.


It is necessary for there to be some part of the
Underwritten Society's charter to be frozen;
otherwise, once underwriting is approved, the members
of the society could simply change their charter to
say, "Everyone gets points each nweek!"

Tunnelers is self-supporting at the moment, so I
probably wouldn't worry about underwriting, unless I
wanted to keep a bigger piece of the entry fee.  If I
did go for underwriting, I'd probably isolate some
particular portion of the charter, such as:

"The Underground Society's primary point-earning
activity is the playing of the game of Tunnelers, the
rules for which are described elsewhere in this
charter.  Each player has a mole in the game, and two
points are earned by a player for killing another
player's mole."

That would let me change the Tunnelers rules as
needed, while leaving this piece alone.
Then you could change the Tunnelers rules to say, at the beginning of each nweek, every player gets a hundred moles, then kills all the moles of the player following em alphabetically by name.
I don't see any way to prevent that sort of thing short of actually freezing the entire subgame ruleset. 


	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.


Er...the unauthored prop bit...Isn't that essentially
what I'm proposing?
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. What I meant was a way for societies to apply for one-shot point gains; then a society could do with those points what it wanted. Yes, it could then change its charter to give all those points to the members immediately, but then it would never get a funding application granted again (and the Moderator who let it happen would probably never be allowed to manage funds like that again). 

--
Wonko

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