On Wed, 2017-09-27 at 10:13 -0700, Gaelan Steele wrote: > I’m curious about the RWO “no rule changes thing.” It says something > along the lines of “RWO can’t cause a rule change.” That obviously > bans direct rule changes, but what about RWO’ing into existence a > proposal with FOR votes from everybody set to resolve tomorrow? If > that doesn’t work, what level of indirect cause and effect do we have > to reach for it to be legal? Giving shinies that are later spent to > pend? Ratifications that for whatever reason cause a player to think > of an idea for a rule? You can RWO a gamestate that's likely to cause a rules change in the future. I did that a while back to close a scam loophole.
This wouldn't happen automatically, though; you'd have to be quite clear on what the gamestate was in your ratification message. This would make it much more likely that people would object. > Even scarier question: what happens to the gamestate if we discover > that ratification itself has no effect? We'd have to reconstruct the gamestate. Typically, this is done by identifying a time in the past at which ratification (or another similar consistency rule) definitely worked correctly, then identifying a minimum subset of rules that can be used to alter the gamestate and haven't significantly changed in that time (e.g. the proposal adoption rules rarely change), and then using those rules to fix ratification. At that point you can use the newly fixed ratification rule to repair the rest of the gamestate. (This has happened a couple of times before. Sometimes it involves things like all but one player deregistering to gain certainty about who the Assessor is, but we haven't needed to do that in ages.) -- ais523
