Minor discussion topic here.
Right now, as evidenced by recent CFJ, the rules are in a slightly weird place in winning where sometimes you do a thing (Raise a Banner) that causes you to win, and sometimes what you do is "win by announcement" if certain conditions are met. These can break in different ways so the inconsistency may be frustrating. So, if we were to try to regularize this somehow, we could go "more direct" or "less direct". More direct: Winning is always an action, and everything is re-written as something like: "A Player CAN win by (some type of announcement, perhaps involving fees or other expenditures on the player's part, if conditions are met)." Implication here is that if someone tries to win, and conditions aren't met, nothing happens (e.g. if you paid a fee to win, but you have some blots, the fee isn't paid and you keep your money). Less direct: Something like ribbons: A player who performs certain actions "earns" the right to award emself a win (say for 7 days), but e can't actually do so if another rule says e can't win. So e can earn the win condition (say by a fee), expunge eir blots, and then actually award emself the win if e does it within the time limit. However, if e times out before e expunges eir blots, e doesn't get a win and eir fee is lost. We've had both ways in the past (either seems workable). No preference myself except that the current ambiguous middle-ground could use a push in one direction or the other? -G.
