chicoazian, I think you're a bit lost in the discussion. My first suggestion was that we change the need to make a decision from unamimous to majority vote. Not change the charter. This was done almost as soon as I took my place in the council, and I think it was unanimously agrreed to.
Where above, majority vote was in red, and therefore scratched out according to the Wiki. That's the change I wanted to make, and then, after "acceptance of a probationary member" I made a suggestion as to adding and "promotion of a probationary member to a full member."
I didn't, either IC or OOC suggest changing that changes to the charter wouldn't continue to require a unanimous vote. I just wanted a majority vote for decisions of the council generally, except in the cases outline that required a unanimous vote. I think that issue had been decided, and we unanimously agreed (except Jamie and Viscaria) that general matters require only a simple majority.
The next item I brought up was the office of the disceptator, and that is where we are. Issues of majority or majority+1 would be necessary if we didn't have the office, so Amos bringing them up doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (or Ra'am). We have an office of disceptator, we need to fill it. Additionally, Heims is suggesting a change in the charter to do away with the office, which is where the majority+1 suggestion comes into play. Just saying this out of character, that's a really dangerous thing to throw out. If we have a 6 member council, a majority is 4 votes. Majority +1 is 5 votes. I don’t think that’s what Fixer was intending (I could be wrong!), but I am presenting an extremely legalistc interpretation of the language. So, really, the matter up for consideration is only the nomination of Heims to the office of disceptator, and all this other stuff is out of order, since Heims nomination was seconded by Azura.
As to discussions about changing the charter in such a major way as to removing the office of disceptator, I'm open to it, so is Ra'am, but that's not something that can be reasonably be accomplished in a short period of time, which is what Ra'am and Azura are operating under. Rather than explain it in character, I'll explain it here. He's trying to be expedient, and get through the meeting as quickly as possible to keep Shabbat, or at least keep it as soon as possible, and see is family whom he hasn't seen in over 24 hours.
"Oh look, bottom of page 5, everybody already voted and send that's fine. I completely missed that. My fault.
And we really are just arguing about word choice. On page 6, Hiems defined what he meant by "Majority +1" - I think he actually means "Flat majority, ties fail." Because note - he said "majority +1 of 6 would be 4". He's not suggesting doing away with the disceptator, just the disceptator's vote to resolve ties.
Umm, should I go back and edit my post to remove some of the loopback or leave it as is to make it obvious Amos got lost in the entire argument?
Well, we can argue about word choice as long as we want, really, since amul is AWOL.
But really, the issue is disceptator, who's going to take it. Since amul's been out, I'd been content to entertain the discussion of different forms of governance, because it's something to do to pass the time. Changing the charter is unlikely to happen, since 3 members, Azura, Cygna and I are treating that as something we're not going to discuss (now?).
Has anyone heard from amul at all? It's been 3 weeks on the refugee thread, and nearly as long on the council thread.
In the original charter, the disceptator can't have had that power, because all issues required a total agreement of council members. If even one disagreed, the issue wasn't valid.
If we change that to majority, it then becomes "flat majority", that's all, and there's still no need to resolve ties, since, as they're not "flat majority", they fail.
Adding a special case for ties, with the disceptator deciding those, would be adding something to the disceptator that wasn't present before.
No, the original charter was majority votes, and was changed at a later date to unanimous. If you read the charter again, you'll see that majority was scratched out and unanimous was added. Regardless, the office is still required by the charter and has other duties besides the tie vote.
And the charter actually requires the disceptator to break tied votes, it reads:
Key word in that passage, I think, being "discretionary." As Cygna pointed out, the disceptator has the discretion to simply not cast a tie-breaking vote. If Hiems establishes a consistent precedent of not casting a tie-breaking vote in such instances, and Ra'am were to continue likewise, then we have almost a decade of established disceptatorial abstinence.
Re: translating WC-- answer will have to wait on amul. When I was updating my info about a month ago it occurred to me that it'd be REALLY AWESOME for a Mercurian Mutantis to harness and tether castings of Wizard's Communions to other magi. My Magic Theory isn't as good as our characters', but it's hypothetically possible to abuse Mutantes capabilities to "cast" long rituals without having to stick around longer than 30 seconds
...I know, it sounds ridiculous, but "Here, I did my part, now YOU stand here humming for the next two hours, because you're not paying me by the hour" is totally the sort of thing Azura would do when taking on commissions
Everyone else dead on ideas too? I know there's more things to discuss but I can't for the life of me drag myself to actually sift through and discuss them right now...
Did Jonathan already outline the pertinent ones in character, or did we miss any?
Who's collecting the vis sources and who is going to renegotiate a contract with the dwarves are the two I can think of off the top of my head.
This may all be moot. Amul's been absent from the game for 5 weeks at this point, without any notice to the players. This happened about the time that Arya and I had our contentious argument IC and OOC. I have since sent private messages that have been read (no longer sitting in my Outbox) but he hasn't responded. Much as I hate to say it, this game may be dead.
I'm basically checking for new posts, but until Amul comes back, I'm afraid to commit more energy to it than that unless something bizarre and/or wonderful happens.
The more I think about it...a wet tunic contest is waaay overdue. And since it's mid-March, the weather should be nice and nipply.
And I can actually almost see Azura setting something like this up...charging the entrants a modest entrance fee; charging the audience/judges a modest...um...participation fee. Taking a slight administrative fee for herself and putting the rest into a prize pool. And of course, there would be absolutely no conflict of entrance if she were to enter, herself.
Cygna...doubtful if she would enter, especially if you could see anything through the tunic.
Celestria would be all over it.
Claudia would not...she would feel she has no chance of winning, even if she were to enter...and besides, she doesn't wear a "tunic," and would a "wet abaya contest" have the same appeal?
One-Eyed Maria wouldn't enter...it would give the demons too much of an opening, even if we didn't all catch cold and die.
Other than that...I can see Viscaria entering, just because.
(this is a bored attempt to keep the forum alive...doubt that anything would come of it, but wouldn't it be fun if it did?)
Ra'am would volunteer Etienne for the dwarven negotiations.
Seasonal activity for Ra'am would entail either learning the library's copy of Wizard's Communion to assist with the Aegis or work on setting up his lab if he could learn Azura's 30th level Aegis relatively soon.
I'm sorry I disappeared on all of you. On top of typical summer stresses and the whole BS with moving into a new home, which I'd been managing to predict ahead of time and warn you all about, there have been four deaths within my intimate circle, three of which had a legal component that I am responsible for. It all got to be too much and that just pushed me over the edge into a state of total social withdrawal. I should have told you all that I was dealing with stuff, but it seems that I was in a fair bit of denial about my ability to manage everything that was on my plate, and everything that didn't have a legal deadline (including a fair number of business prospects) just got chucked into the discard pile.
I'm in the process of repairing all the damage this has done to my life, and that includes picking up my responsibilities for this game. I understand that there was some player-vs-player conflict while I was hiding under my rock. I hope that this has been resolved, because frankly, I don't have the emotional energy to deal with it right now.
From what I've gleaned from skimming through the backlogs, I feel like part of this conflict came from my failure to clearly delineate what sort of impact House Mercere could have on the game. This will need to be rectified soon, but before that happens I really need to have some fun with all the pieces that are currently laid out on the table.
I do not currently have the energy to read through an argument, even knowing that it's been resolved. Can you guys summarize what that resolution was, and what needs my attention?
I believe Azura is giving up her sigil. This makes all new members equally exposed to Jamie's plots.
We agreed to adjust the charter so that majority votes, not unanimous votes could resolve issues.
There was a long discussion of governance and who would take the role of disceptator. I think Heims was established as most senior, if Jamie is leaving. Heims doesn't like the office and we might discuss changes to the charter in the future.
Azura and Ra'am's admittance as full members needs to be ratified, as does the change from unanimous to majority votes for resolving issues.
I made an OOC point that the Vis Grant Boon doesn't make sense for the saga. We aren't junior magi amongst seniors. If it goes Illusory resources could go. I took it even further that we could adopt the Vis Salary hook and pick a boon granting additional resources. We need more Vis. 6 pawns, 5 if Jamie remains, per magus is a paltry amount for the power level. Or if that's not possible then we need to adjust amounts per type. We have so few of any specific Art, which makes trading difficult.
I would like Ra'am to be able to learn Azura's Wizard's Communion (WiCo). Does she have a lab text since she gets it automatically as a Mercurian? Regarding WiCo and the MuVi errat Fixer and I had figured a WiCo of sun duration would be sufficient to cast a ritual. Which would subtract 10 levels from the amount used to calculate double the spell level, I.e. a lvl 30 WiCo adds 20 levels.
As near as I can tell, the dust-up's been resolved to both Arya's and JL's satisfaction. Still not quite how it got so out-of-hand, but it seems to be all cool now.
As far as the threads and what needs resolved or intervened in?
In the Covenant Design Flaw thread, I was wanting to check to see what Cygna would be starting with to build on her lab.
The Investigating the Refugees thread in in the middle of combat.
Not really sure what else needs a hand in...kinda looks like everything kinda petered out in the confusion, and hopefully we can get back on track now.
Oh, and welcome back...hope things start to get better for you now.
The more I think about it...a wet tunic contest is waaay overdue. And since it's mid-March, the weather should be nice and nipply.