On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 9:58 PM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > 1. As you say, one Rule says you played a card and have it, and > another rule says you cancelled the play. The rules conflict, so > the play of the lower-powered is "conflicting" and void.
But the odd thing is, the latter rule isn't conflicting with the former: it's conflicting with a *past version* of the former. If the rule saying you could perform the action were repealed or modified, it wouldn't have any effect on the paradox. > You can > get around the "deemed to have not happened" by saying that one can't > deem the impossible. That "deemed" language was always a tricky one > in any case (similar to the sort of tricky things that happen with > ratification). ...But then again, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the simplest possible treatment of retroactive actions - just "deeming" them directly and being vague about the mechanism with which time travel is simulated - does not adequately explain what happens in certain situations. It's not that different from any other too-vague rule, it's just that time travel thingies tend to feel like fundamental universal paradoxes; and only reasonable that the solution is to be more explicit about it, as we have been. The only question is whether a scam rule can subvert higher powered rules by causing unwanted retroactive action (this has actually been tried, though I don't remember the outcome), and the answer quite possibly depends on the *other* fundamental CFJ waiting to be assigned, the one about whether the gamestate stores a mutable record of history or not.
