Re: [spoon-discuss] Redundant rules

[Zarpint <athena@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 30 May 2004, Daniel Lepage wrote:

> 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"?

You have misunderstood this rule.
The difference is that an Unterumwelt is not a group of players. It's a
miniature game that exists inside of B Nomic. The rule is carefully set up
so that we can nest Unterumwelts and have interesting Labyrinth-like effects.
An Unterumwelt is a Rulebook. It doesn't contain players anymore than the
Ruleset contains players, and there is no "group of players" an Unterumwelt
applies to. It has its own Gamestate, but the gamestate takes precedence
over its Gamestate. Thus, the Players of any Unterumwelt are the same as
the Players of B Nomic, and you can't leave an Unterumwelt without leaving
B Nomic.

A Society, on the other hand, is a specific group of players. It has its
own legal personality, in some sense, e.g. it can propose and own things.
Players can leave a Society at any time.

A real-world analogy: If B Nomic is the United States, an Unterumwelt would
be a state or local government, but a Society would be a corporation set
up according to governmental rules.

>
> 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)

It seems to me that since the GC rule takes precedence over 1532, we can't
throw out players in Stasis. That was the whole idea - that since it costs
a few bytes to maintain the statistics necessary, there's no need to delete
them when we can just completely ignore them, since I figure it's better for
the game to use a small bit of computer space than to have Robs being garbage
collected. (If the space is a problem, I can keep the information here at
dynamicwind.com.)

So we can repeal 1532. It also seems to me that Forced Leave and Lurking are
redundant here, so we can remove those. We would then have On Leave, Off Leave,
and Stasis: On Leave for Players gone a short time, who would still affect the
Game, and Stasis for players who haven't taken actions for a while.
>
> 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.

r899: what does "Unauthored Proposals are deemed to have significance, and the true feeling of the players should be allowed to be expressed on them." actually mean?

I don't see a contradiction here. In fact, the only definition is in r19. All
r899 says is that whenever an Unauthored Prop is somehow made, the author
is changed to the Scoring Gremlin. Note that r19 says that Unauthored Props
can only be made as specified elsewhere, and r899 doesn't say how to make
them, so unless another rule mentions them, we can't make them at all.
>
> 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"?

Yeah, we can get rid of this.
>
> 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.

Eris, you're right. r11 needs the following change.
{{
The first three paragraphs of r11, which were:
{{
Rules are revisable Game Documents. Rules may only be altered as outlined in the Ruleset.

A Rulebook is a collection of Rules. Every Rule must be in a Rulebook; no rule may be in more than one Rulebook.

The Ruleset is a Rulebook; all rules that are not in other Rulebooks are in the Ruleset.
}}

are changed to:
{{
Rules are revisable Game Documents. Rules may only be altered as outlined in the Ruleset.

A Rulebook is a collection of Rules. Every Rule must be in at least one Rulebook.

The Ruleset is the Rulebook which contains all Rules.
}}
}}

This is fine from now on. Note that the Rules in the Unterumwelt 'gnusto',
which I am Unteradmin of, have an implicit "gnusto:" in front of their
specified unique IDs. We should specify this at creation from now on, like
I didn't.

Zarpint

-- 
Zarpint Jeremy Cook    "All thy toiling only breeds new dreams, new dreams;
mcfoufou@xxxxxxxxx         there is no truth saving in thine own heart."
dynamicwind.com               --W.B. Yeats, The Song of the Happy Shepherd
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