Awesome, thanks for the feedback! On June 21, 2018 1:59 PM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote: > Define who tracks these switches or are they untracked? (being the > recordkeepor for chess pieces doesn't mean recordkeepor for the switches). Ah, that's a misconception I hadn't realised I had - that switches are necessarily tracked by the same person as their entities. Looking over this that's actually the root cause of many of the other problems with this. I'll read the rules about switches more carefully and rephrase to accommodate them. Really
> More generally, this puts a burden on the Cartographer. And this also > implies that if the Cartographer isn't a party, there's no recordkeepor? My intention was that the Cartographor could choose, by becoming a party to the contract or not, whether to bother spending time trying to keep track of the pieces (actually the switches, see above). Mainly, it was just a way to keep up the "we are actually playing on the map" metaphor going. I don't think it would be too difficult to keep track of the board even without a recordkeepor - correspondence chess players manage it in real life all the time - but if it were converted to a tournament, the gamemaster would be the obvious choice for recordkeepor. > > (Parties to this contract are ENCOURAGED to vote for > > any Proposal that would enable backing documents to define switches > > possessed by the assets those backing documents define.) > There are arguments for or against this but I'd cut this and advocate/ > propose it separately. Oh, I do intend to propose it separately as well - after Aris's "Minimalist Contracts" has been passed/rejected, so I know what it is I'm proposing an amendment to. I modelled it after the sentence in V.J. Rada's contract competition: "If nobody does anything interesting, parties to this Contract and non-parties SHOULD vote to repeal Contracts ASAP." It's not a particularly important part and I'd happily cut it out if you think it wise. > > Any party to this contract MAY, by announcement, move a chess piece. > I think in place of MAY you want "CAN, subject to the restrictions of > this contract," Ah, I hadn't read rule 2152 carefully enough - I hadn't realised MAY and CAN were subtly different. Thanks for pointing that out. I believe the clause "subject to the restrictions of this contract" is covered by "Where this contract contradicts itself, later statements take precedence over earlier ones." near the beginning. In my first few drafts I did explicitly specify every time a statement overrode another, but that got unwieldy quickly; this way, as long as the paragraphs are ordered correctly, it can be parsed almost exactly the same way as natural language. > Turn-based games can sometimes stall out waiting for the other players' > turn - what happens if you end up with only one person taking black and > they don't respond? Maybe add a game clock: "if a move isn't made by > X time, than [either a PASS or the other side can move that color]" Allowing either side to pass would make the game nearly unwinnable. (Actually, that reminds me that I didn't put in any allowance for a draw.) I see two possibilities - either allow the other side to move the colour, like you suggested, or just forfeit the game, which would be less complicated: "If, after the current turn is flipped, no party to this contract moves a chess piece in a timely fashion, the White King is destroyed if it is White's turn, and the Black King is destroyed if it is Black's turn." > The way this reads, a player moves the pawn (successfully), but if > e fails to create a piece, then e breaks the terms of the contract (fails > the MUST) but the pawn is still stuck in the last rank and can't be > converted. Good point. Another way of doing this would be to decouple the promotion from the act of moving the pawn - something like "If there is a Pawn at [...], a party to this contract CAN and SHOULD, by announcement, destroy the Pawn and create a Knight, Bishop, Rook or Queen..." (with a restriction to players of the same colour as the pawn). And require that to happen before the other side takes their turn. That way there's less scope for a move to fail without anyone noticing, which would be bad. > I'd hard-code the reward a bit more. I'd suggest making this a Free > Tournament (R2566) although I don't know if having this be Regulations > rather than a Contract makes anything in here not work (e.g. you can't > become "party" to a set of regulations I don't think). You could do it > by reference though. Set up the Contract, then make a Tournament with a > single regulation: "whomever wins the Contract wins the Tournament". Yes, I agree this is probably more suited to a tournament. (I'm sure it could be slightly rephrased to remove references to "parties", which would make it considerably simpler to read anyway.) I don't want to distract from the birthday tournament, though, and it clearly needs more work anyway, so perhaps it would be better shelved for a month or two. Also, nobody has actually stated interest and it would be mildly embarrassing to initiate a tournament that attracted no players! Another, less important, reason to wait is that if Trigon's most recent prototype proposal passes, it would encourage groups of land to be disconnected, making the map look more like a chessboard. -twg
