git ssb

I've been reading through the rulebook again while we've been playing, and it has me second-guessing some of the content from my turns.

On page 67.

Avoid broad “what happens next?” Questions.

I think I'm guilty of this in the "Set adrift" event. In a game with less latency it might be easier for one of you to say something if I'm being vague, but the risk of holding up the game may act as a bit of a deterrent to what might otherwise be constructive feedback.

I'm going to try to focus more on details, but I'm considering whether it might be worthwhile to allow for small revisions to existing history to correct for these things. As long as they don't conflict with existing history, or take into account information that wasn't available at the time, it may be worth the departure from the rules.

I'll try to rewrite my thoughts from this morning tomorrow morning, as it's pretty late.

The rules suggest that now is a good time to pause and reflect

I wrote a detailed response this morning, but it seems I didn't hit the comment button :/

When I'd proposed using markdown lists, my thinking was that each list item would link to a separate file with the in-depth content. I figured it would be nice to be able to have one file as an overview, and then be able to zoom in from there.

Having one file overall is simpler, but as you said, it has its drawbacks.

I added the FOCUS section, but used an h5 tag to match Legacies. I have a very busy day today, but tomorrow I'll see about documenting more of these changes in microscope-ssb/template.md.

Dictated scenes definitely seem like the easiest thing, unless we schedule a live call, but that seems far too complicated and outside the scope of a play-by-post game.

+1 to all of the above.

I'll hold off on pushing any changes in case you're working on committing something, to avoid having to merge. If you feel like reformatting, feel free (assuming @haileycoop agrees).

I jumped in as Lens because I was going to be awake for long enough to write a post, and it seemed like it would line up well with time zones.

I didn't think about it at the time, but it shook up our turn order (I posted about that issue in the Game issue).

@haileycoop, I didn't see this issue until after I'd posted as Lens, so I wasn't sure of the motivation behind the change. I didn't feel at all like you were exerting too much influence. In fact, I appreciated the quick decisions about the bookend history which helped us move forward to the next stage of the game. Next time it will probably be simpler if we stick to the turn order so we have fewer decisions to make about procedure.

There was a bit of change of plans with @haileycoop asking if either @kas or myself would like to take the first turn as Lens, and I accepted.

Following the last turn in the round, the rules (also page 18) specify that:

The player to the right of the Lens picks something from play in this last Focus, and makes it a Legacy

We agreed that we were going to play three rounds, and I just wanted to confirm our terminology:

Is a Focus the same as a round? That was how I'd interpreted it, meaning we'll each get one round as the Lens.

The same player creates an Event or dictated Scene that relates to one of the Legacies, either the one just created or one already in play.

So, having shifted the playing order, we should define who is to my right and left. Whoever chooses the Legacy this round will choose the Focus on the final round.

The player to the left of the Lens then becomes the new Lens and picks a new Focus

I noticed we didn't have anywhere to take note of the Focus, other than in history.txt. Do you think this fits anywhere better, or is that something we don't need to document in gameboard.md?

@kas and I have added entries in the second round of the palette.

@haileycoop, if you abstain in this round then the first pass begins. Otherwise, we can take another round for the palette.

With there being just three of us, it shouldn't be too hard to track votes. When there are more players, and ssb-loomio is ready, that's ought to be a good solution for tracking things.

I added the rules above to rules.md.

I just gathered our title and bookend history into a file based off of the template @kas suggested.

:+1: to move the content into a new repo once it's ready.

This seems closely related to the how do we make decisions issue.

I suppose we want to find a balance between speed of play and inclusion, so we can get to the rest of the game while everyone has equal input. Unstructured discussion might be difficult to close.

Maybe we can treat it a bit like deciding on the palette, either proposing a title, description, or tone, or amending a change that someone else suggested. We could consider it final once one person has actively abstained from making more changes on their turn, and all the fields have been decided.

Maybe we could improve this process by doing some things concurrently? Maybe we could change two things at a time, provided they are different (don't set both the titles, tones, or descriptions).

What do you think?

Maybe we can create a reference file for a style guide, and link to it from the readme?

I'm ok to use this repo, since we only have the one game so far, but if you create another repo I'll use that one. If you do, please ping me about it so I don't miss it!

With the big picture requiring consensus, and it being the first step in the game, we ought to see about wrapping it up.

I'd suggested:

Refugees carve out a new life in a distant land

...but that's straight out of the game text. We can go with that (verbatim), or we can make some changes to any particular words if anyone likes. I suggest we mostly keep to the same structure, but maybe change some adjectives? Distant could be barren, refugees could be explorers? Or we can leave it as is (since this is an experiment).

I'm ok to proceed with anything, so whatever is suggested gets my vote. We can start on the palette once the two of you consent.

Since this was a test, I'm gonna go ahead and close this issue too.

The game of Nomic that was played a while back generated quite a lot of text (it was also played over git-ssb, I think). As far as I know, nobody objected. If any problems come up, then perhaps it's an opportunity to work on content filtering in the ssb ecosystem?

Mix's proposal to organize regular threads into a single channel may be the best we'll be able to manage for now.

Thanks for the input!

I've made a new file (meta.md) which we can use to summarize some of our discussions as they come to a close. On that note, I'm going to close this issue.

Fortunately the rules for termination are clear (once everyone has taken a turn, and one person has abstained), so that helps.

Additions to the palette should (in theory) be fairly short, so maybe the number of steps won't be an issue. I'll do my best to check in on the game regularly when we're deciding the palette to keep things moving, in any case.

(oops, wall of text)

I was thinking about this last night.

We can try to close all the issues we have, and then if any problems arise during play we can open new ones flagged as a discussion, or a blocking issue.

A blocking issue might be something like an inconsistency in the plot inadvertently caused by someone missing a point in a previous turn. In situations like this, I imagine we'd want to resolve the inconsistency before piling more history on top that might depend on the conflicting details.

Perhaps it's as simple as taking up some clear conventions about when a proposal is made and when a vote has been cast and an outcome agreed?

To speed up the voting process, we can try to provide our preferred solution along with proposals to vote on (as you did by proposing ssb-loomio), so as to avoid having the additional step of proposing, then voting. Beyond that, we can make an effort to express our vote whenever responding, and go with initial proposals unless there are serious problems with them.

Voting leads me to believe that we'll go with the majority, which is easy with there being three of us. This doesn't handle the case of a deep disagreement which halts the game. I don't think we need to avoid starting the game before deciding how to handle that. I imagine that would need to be dealt with on a case-to-case basis (if it happens at all).

On that note, as far as I know ssb-loomio isn't ready to go just yet. If I'm wrong about that, I'd be good with using it for making decisions.

I've specified the 48 hour limit in rules.md

I updated rules.md just a moment ago.

One thing about the process listed above, are we changing the palette process? In the rulebook it follows turn order and is synchronous.

Other than that, this issue can be closed, I'd say.

I've started updating the rules in rules.md according to what we've discussed, but since we haven't discussed this edge-case, I'm tentatively writing 48 hours until we proceed.

I added a tiny commit which removes a TODO comment (translation).

After looking around a little bit I found a few other untranslated strings printed to the console. I guess translation strings are only a thing in Patchwork?

merged to master :)

merged to master

merged to master

Looks great! I'll merge this tonight as well.

sorry to have let this go, I'll merge later tonight.