[spoon-discuss] Redundant rules

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been looking over the ruleset, and I've found a couple things that 
seem pointless, ill-planned, or redundant. Can anyone explain to me the 
rationale behind having them, or are they actually unneeded?

They are:

1) Unterumwelts
	As far as I can tell, "Unterumwelt" is a fancy name for a society that 
has to have a secretary. Each is a group of players, governed by a 
local body of law that doesn't apply to anyone outside of the group. 
The differences are that Unterumwelts cannot take game actions, and 
must have Unteradmins presiding over them. Why can't an Unterumwelt be 
defined by "Unterumwelt: a society that cannot take game actions, and 
must have a secretary in charge of tracking its charter"?

2) Stasis/Lurking/Lost Souls/Comatose Players
	I see very little to point to Lurking now. The only thing you get out 
of it is immunity to Garbage Collection. However, Garbage Collection 
now only puts you into Stasis, which seems to be *better* than being 
Lurking, because you can't be targeted by anti-player effects and your 
attributes never change, so you're immune to post-win resets, etc. Then 
all of this seems to be better than being a Lost Soul, meaning that if 
you're going to leave the game, you're better off simply walking away 
and waiting for Stasis than actually quitting. I don't think we should 
be rewarding people for abandoning the game rather than quitting, and I 
don't think we should be preserving people who join and then just 
ignore the game completely.
	And then Comatose Players (r1532) seems to run against the spirit of 
both Lurking and Stasis, allowing us to throw out these players anyway. 
(I'd forgotten that we had this rule)

3) Unauthored Proposals/Unauthored Proposals
	I think this really is just a stupid error (I think on my part, 
actually), and I'll propose to fix it soon unless somebody can think of 
a good reason not to. The error is that Unauthored Proposals are 
defined in r19 and in r899, with definitions that are almost 
contradictory. I think I rewrote the rules on Proposals and simply 
forgot to repeal r899, so I'll fix this unless somebody knows why I 
shouldn't.

4) Unbridled Hostility
	I can't really think of any time in this game's history when the 
Unbridled Hostility rule was actually useful... on the one or two 
occasions when it was called into play, it served only to irritate the 
alleged offenders more, and generally contribute to the ill spirit of 
the game. It's also badly worded: what does it mean by "the charge is 
referred to the upper house"?

5) Rulebooks
	I'm not claiming that these are stupid and pointless, just that they 
don't work very well right now: they still require that all rules be 
given unique serial numbers, which means that breaking things into 
Rulebooks still leaves us with the problem of keeping the numbers 
straight across the books. It would make more sense to assign each 
rulebook its own precedence and number rules only within their book, 
using the rulebook precedence to decide issues between books.


I'll work on props to fix some of these once I have some spare time; in 
the meantime I welcome any explanations of why these problems are 
actually features that should be kept.

--
Wonko

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our 
thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one 
another in the waking state?
                -- Plato

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