Re: [s-d] How should I go about doing this?

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

DimShips were something Glotmorf proposed, in one of the first Prose 
Props ever made. At the time, there were a number of numerical 
quantities each player had called Dimensions, including Score, Charm, 
Style, and BAC, to name a few. DimShips were tools where you could fill 
them up with Score and then use them to shift yourself to other 
"points" in dimensional space (for example, you could cruise at +50 
Score, -10 Charm, +5 Style, +10 BAC; your dimensions would be modified 
accordingly).

I attempted a scam with them like this: I found a way (I don't remember 
how, maybe it was actually honest) to get the thousand points needed to 
win. I then used it to buy 10 DimShips (timing things so that I never 
actually had all 1000 points at the same time). Then I set all my ships 
to cruise at +100 points - they cost 100 points apiece, so this put me 
back up to 1000 points.

The idea of the scam was that although my actual score was zero, the 
DimShips would give me a "virtual score" of 1000, and so I would Win. 
Then everybody's scores would be reset to zero; but I'd still have my 
DimShips and they were unaffected by Wins, so I'd Win again 
immediately, and this would repeat so that I would gain an infinite 
number of Wins instantaneously.

The phrasing of the rule governing the way DimShips changed Dimensions 
said something like "The Dimension is treated as though it were X 
higher than it actually is". My reading of this was that 10 ships could 
thus be cumulative, with each seeing my score as being whatever the 
others had set it to, and then adding 100 to that. Glotmorf's reading 
was that what "it actually is" is the real value regardless of the 
effects of *all* DimShips. Everybody argued about it for a while, and 
then somebody CFI'd (actually, many people did). Rob judged the most 
important CFI, and determined that in fact DimShips not only stacked 
with each other, they also stacked with *themselves*. E ruled that 
"treated as though it were X higher" meant that everywhere it was 
referenced, it was X higher for all intents and purposes, including for 
the phrase "than it actually is".

Thus, either any player who was boosting eir Score with a DimShip was 
shooting their Scores to infinity (in which case everybody was winning 
simultaneously forever and our Scores were oscillating infinitely 
quickly between 0 and infinity), or they were all setting their scores 
to some integer N such that N = N+100. Either way, the scores were all 
Undefined, which of course required more CFIs to determine what that 
meant, more to determine who got to Judge the earlier CFIs since nobody 
knew what the scores were, and yet more to figure out if anybody was 
allowed to propose a solution to the problem.

Shortly after this we added Rule 0.

As for paying somebody to do this, you might consider making a 
"Minister of Truth" or some such thing who's responsible for overseeing 
the production of it, and empower em to reward other players for their 
contributions.

You can also gather some info by reading the mailing list archives, or 
using the historical document finder on the old homepage.

--
Wonko

On Apr 25, 2005, at 5.19 PM, eugman@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I keep hearing about this dimship and other things. I'm interested in 
> paying someone to make a historical summary page.  Would this fall 
> under a duty? Or maybe I could make a proposal for a fund which pays 
> people for  adding relevant information to the summary and people 
> could donate to the fund.
>
> Any ideas?
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"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
  -- Ford Prefect

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