Daniel Lepage on 1 Dec 2003 04:48:06 -0000


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Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] New card: Nop



On Saturday, November 29, 2003, at 03:31 AM, Glotmorf wrote:

On 28 Nov 2003 at 12:17, Daniel Lepage wrote:

Also, what constitutes a card related action? If somebody plays a card
that requires me to draw a card, for example, what happens? According
to their card, I must draw; according to mine, I cannot.

The text reads, "upon receipt of a Nop card"; that means
you're acting in immediate response to the Nop card.  If you
get the Nop card because you're forced to draw, I would
interpret the situation to mean you'd stop long enough to
discard down to two cards, then draw more cards if still
required.  If you were somehow forced to have more cards than
the Nop-count maximum, you'd have to discard cards to come
down to the maximum.

If you're asking whether a card that forces drawing takes
precedence over the Nop card, I'd guess the B Nomic precedence
rule kicks in, such that cards added after the Nop defer to
the Nop unless they explicitly claim precedence.

I'm worried about a situation like this:
I play for a while, and accrue a hand of, say, 9 cards. Then I stop playing, as many players have done in the past; I will eventually be garbage collected out of the game. Shortly after I stop playing, many nweeks before garbage collection kicks in, you play Nop on me. The next nday, The Baron targets me with a card, Foo, that says something like "Wonko draws two cards". According to the Baron's card, I must now draw two cards; according to Nop, I cannot do so until I've discarded down to 2.

You could argue that since I am forced to draw by Foo, this supersedes the restriction set on me by Nop. In this case, it would also be true that if the Force were still in effect, and the Mind Trick was altered slightly, I could keep playing as normal, ignoring the Nop, simply by repeatedly forcing myself to play. This scenario also raises the issue of what happens then - Nop said I couldn't do anything, but then I did. Am I still under the Nop? Must I now discard before my next action (which will never come...)

You could argue that since I am forbidden to take card related actions, the draw card fizzles and has no effect, as I am unable to carry out its instructions. In that case, it is highly to my advantage to ignore Nops until the last possible second, so as to make myself immune to anything that forces me to discard.

Or you could argue what seems to me to be the most accurate argument based on the text of Nop, that I *must* discard before the Foo hits me; that is, as you suggested above, "I'd stop long enough to discard down to two cards", then continue as usual. Then we run into the old problem of the rules declaring that a player *must* do something when it has no power to enforce it - if I've left the game and am no longer responding, there's nothing the ruleset can do about it. So if I don't declare which cards I'm discarding, the game enters an indeterminate state, where, according to the rules, I must have at least two cards, and I must have drawn two from the Deck at some point; but there is no way to figure out which two are still in my hand, or whether I did discard the Nop first and thus have 10 cards in hand now, or whether I drew another Nop, or anything.

That is, IMHO, a Bad Thing.

Perhaps Nop should simply state, "If you hold a Nop card, you may not play any cards unless you first discard down to twice the number of Nop cards you hold."

This means that you can continue to draw, and even to give cards away if you were foresighted enough to set up a Syn/Ack connection before you got Nopped, but if you don't have a Syn/Ack, you'll have to discard before you can play anything new.

Perhaps a note should be included, too, something like [[Note - you choose which cards to discard first, then discard them all at once, so if the number of Nop cards in your hand changes as a result of this discard, you still discard the same number of cards.]]

--
Wonko

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