Rule 202. It's mutable, and could solve our issues with rule 105, time limits, and judgement confusion, all at once. A bit long, but straightforward. Substitute desired time limits for (24 hours) below.
202. One turn consists of the following steps, which must be performed in the listed order unless explicitly allowed otherwise by this rule:
1) Open a new discussion thread proposing one rule change
2) Wait no less than (24 hours)
3) Open a vote on the proposal. As the first comment in the voting thread, post the exact text of the new rule.
4) Wait no less than (24 hours)
5) Remove any players who have not voted from the player list
6) Calculate the points earned for the turn
7) Resolve any outstanding judgements. The judge is the preceding player to the player who proposed the rule just voted on, after completing step 5.
8) If any judgements were invoked during the turn, conduct a vote to move on to the next turn.
9) Determine if the judgement(s) will be overruled.Step 1 may be performed concurrently with any previous turn and need not wait for judgements to be resolved. Step 2 may only be commenced once step 9 of the previous turn is completed.
If a judgement is invoked during step 8, the vote to move on will be invalidated. Go back to step 7.
If a judgement is invoked after completion of step 8, it will be considered to have happened during the next turn.
To calculate the score, players subtract 291 from the ordinal number of their proposal and multiply the result by the fraction of favorable votes it received, rounded to the nearest integer. (This yields a number between 0 and 10 for the first player, with the upper limit increasing by one each turn; more points are awarded for more popular proposals.)
Bolded text IAW rule 211.
I like this, though I'm wary of setting a specific time for judgment resolution. Could a player stop judgment from proceeding by refusing to open the voting thread?
add "judgements may be resolved concurrently with the turn prior to step 7, but all active judgements must be resolved prior to step 8."
Also, maybe 8 and 9 should be swapped or combined.
I think you can cut step 7 entirely and I'm not sure you need step 9. The judging process is clearly laid out in rule 212 and I don't see why we need anything further here. Judgement may be invoked and judges may make decisions at any time, so it doesn't really need to be in this step-by-step process.
Step 9 seems like it also better covered by 212. Also, it doesn't make much sense to determine if a judgement has been overruled once we have already conducted a vote to move on. I'd suggest that if anyone wants to try overrule a judgement can open a vote on it whenever they wish (during the current turn, of course).
For times, I'd suggest at least 36 hours of voting time. Regarding discussion time, I'd like to note that rule 111 already requires a reasonable time for debate prior to a vote, so I'm not sure a time needs to be specified here.
I think an actual time for debate does need to be set given the last to votes were opened with zero discussion. If 305 had had some discussion time we would have been able to point out that backseatpilot had to wait until the judgement process was finished before posting their vote, instead of the messed up timeline that actually happened.
The main danger of trying to set timelines for everything at once is that we might all agree on one part but not another, so none of it gets passed. I don't know how likely this is, I guess giving it all a good long discussion before proposing it would help prevent this.
I actually think the zero discussion-time thing was accidental, since the title of the menu item on the nav bar was misleading. It said post new rule proposal, which sounds like what people want to do, but it really started the vote.
Really this was all about trying to record what's already happening most of the time, and then stick in something concerning the same. old. shit. that gets argued about every turn. Resolve it once, instead of having a judgement (or more than one) every turn.
Probably too optimistic for this obstreperous group, though.
Yeah, it was accidental last time. But if we have a worked out procedure then accidents like this shouldn't happen.
This is one of the reasons why I want everyone to get a chance to vote. Then they've seen and read the proposal and hopefully some of it sinks in. Having everyone read and agree to a timeline / voting process would help remove confusion about how the play proceeds. And given how complex and confusing it all is and how crappy the rule set is this is probably a good thing.
ssg: you would think that some of the steps are redundant or obvious, except that we keep having arguments over exactly those issues.
Determining at what point in which turn a judgement occurs seems obvious, but it sure seems like every judgement we've had so far has included a discussion of whether it was this turn or last turn, do we need to vote to move on, who's the judge, or some such that's supposedly already covered in the rules.
"reasonable time" vagueness has already proven not to work. I could go for leaving "reasonable time" if it were defined elsewhere as no less than/no greater than. I'm not suggesting a number for time limits - I just put in 24 as a placeholder.
Really, this post wasn't so much about proposing a new rule, as 1) pointing out another possible angle to get time limits into the rules, and 2) suggest that we need a more formal turn procedure to keep track of WTF is going on, which has been a... challenge so far. Just thinking out loud again.
I do agree that either 8 and 9 need to be combined or 9 needs to be dropped. How it stands up there doesn't quite work.
I think 8 and 9 are backwards now. The point of 9, though, was to not have someone trying to overrule a decision mid-next-turn. Maybe that wouldn't even work, though.
I'm just getting really irritated at the wait-go-back-ness so far. We need either minimum time frames to wait for everyone to do what they want to do or some sort of mechanism for saying, "nope, too late." Preferably both.
The point of 9, though, was to not have someone trying to overrule a decision mid-next-turn.
I think we need to maintain the generality of the judgement mechanism. It may be that someone wants to invoke judgement prior to voting and that judgement may affect the vote. By your rule, we would have to wait until the voting has been completed to let the judge rule. I'd also argue that such a judgement, if the players desire to overrule it, should be overruled immediately.
I do think it is wise to keep step 8. Voting to move on should be the last part of any move in which judgement was invoked.