Post making contest 2.0

Credit, please tell me that you have rules in mind that make sense and are not things like "post must include a ballad to Satan composed in Pig Latin" or "reading the post aloud must cause a toaster to explode".

I also have some reasonable rules in mind and would be interested in joining the list.

This post scores ~34.38 points, so though it wouldn't have won you a book, it does win you the round!

Infodump to follow.

they are reasonable

Blessed freedom! We did it! Hallelujah!

Assuming we've correctly deduced these rules, these are good rules (1-4 anyway (though for four i kind of would have preferred the more restrictive 'Must contain a word which has a higher than 10 score value in Scrabble and must not use a character more times than it is found in a Scrabble tileset')). A good round.

So, I said this was rules hell, and that it had a theme. The former is painfully apparent, but the latter is perhaps not so clear. Well, about a month ago now (!!!), whilst trying to think up my second ruleset, I was casting about for a rule that very specifically limited the words could use, to complement another rule idea. And then I thought - hang on a minute, I did a piece of constrained writing a few months ago...

Specifically, I took part in this. I mean, I was in Oxford at the time. There was only one reasonable location that could be being clued here, so I bumbled my way there after lectures one day and thus made it to step two: write a 250 words max story using only those on Thing Explainer’s wordlist, whilst scooping up points according to some very bizarre rules as seen at the above link. You may find some of them familiar. Specifically, you might recognise the word constraint, along with 5, 6, 11 and 12 as:

#1: post must use only the "ten hundred words people use most often", as checked by https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ *
#2: post must only use words that can be constructed from element symbols **
#3: the post's longest sentence must begin with at least five words whose word lengths correspond to the digits of pi ***
#4: post must contain no words that score 9 in scrabble whilst having at least one word that scores more than 9 ****
#5: post must use exactly thirteen letters of the alphabet an odd number of times *****

* upon deciding to write an entire book in the Up Goer Five style, Randall cobbled together his own, rather more up-to-date list of 1000 words with more weight given to media and correspondence - thus, "escape", which made it into the simple set used for the comic, didn't make the cut for the wordlist used to write the book, and consequently the wordlist used at the link in the rule. Hence, when Akumu copied the top caption off the original comic, I nearly screamed.
** the actual rules let you split symbols across punctuation and spaces, which made writing the story somewhat simpler; you could actually use "the", for instance, provided you set it up carefully! I figured it would be easier to guess if I disallowed this, else you'd have had to work out why words only seemed to pass rule 2 on certain occasions, based on what other words they were adjacent to... and also, for the record, Ix's transposition of N and O in the alphabet prevented this rule from being cracked by Google, which was the way I was expecting it to be dealt with...
*** unless the sentence is of five words or less, in which case all words must correspond; this gave you your break-in. Note that the competition rules let you continue for as many digits as you liked, but here, upon imposing rules 1 and 2 on the dictionary you find there are only 8 nine-letter words that pass them both, which would have made things even more difficult had I required that your entire sentence pass, especially with respect to rule 5...
**** this was originally going to be the iambic pentameter rule, but that got used by Anomaly's set and I wouldn't have wanted to repeat. The very particular ban on words that scored 9 was what failed Akumu's original attempt, and was imposed thematically so as to maximise your final score! I'd have much rather had a rule like the one you suggest, Ix, but I wanted to be as faithful as I could to the competition rules...
***** you may note that this is the condition that scores you precisely zero points for this rule - that's not because I was feeling mean, but because it meant that all rule 5 compliant posts had an odd number of letters (since 13*odd + 13*even = 13*(odd + even) = 13*odd = odd), hence giving you something to work with.

The reason why this was pretty fresh in my mind is because I know own a signed copy of Thing Explainer, thanks to a poem that I will post in the relevant Hawkspace thread later...

Congratulations to you all for not just surviving, but triumphing! My understanding is that Ix (4), Fogel (3), Akumu (1 and 2?) and Kíeros (5) were the people who figured out rules, so extra-special super-duper congrats to you! Plus, like, many apologies to Ix, whose life I have ruined, and likewise to Akumu for the permanent suffering.

May the next ruleset not be quite this fucking terrible...

For the record Aks also figured out the 13 odd characters independently of Kieros' discovery. I may have originally suggested the 1000 simple words but I never followed through and essentially spent most of my time quitting and then casually sloping back to the postmake like a junkie needing one last fix. Aks is 100% responsible for the solving of rule 2 and I'm almost kind of happy I'm 100% responsible for us never figuring that shit out.