For future games, please pick one or the other. Either play race the time stamp or have a clear order of action. Had the doctor protected GP, this would have been one of those situations that should have invoked the second highlighted rule.
I am in no violation of my own established rules, other than the part where I allowed people to submit night actions early. I never intended for the Doctor's action to be a race against time. If you had highlighted the second rule, I would have shrugged and said "Fine, tell me where I gave a power to a role that I said was time sensitive?" I didn't ever give any such power, and even if I made the bad choice of including the second highlighted rule above, that doesn't really change anything.
While it is true Doc's intro/rule doesn't have a time element, you did introduce a time element in subsequent rules. A rule even the host didn't know what to do with!
An unfortunate coincidence, but as you said in the first half of your sentence, the role does not have a time element.
Had the Doc protected GP, GP should have been killed as the hit was before any possible protection. While it was implied actions should have been sent for the same night, it was never stated. Nor was the hit rejected for being sent in too early.
The final result would have been messy had the doc protected GP. By Drew own admission, my action was accepted the day before. There was a time stamp rule. It would have resulted in GP becoming Schrödinger's cat. My death was a given, but GP could have been both dead or alive when Drew decided either way. Or Drew could have just refused to open the box(throwing the day out). Had Drew asked me to resubmit, this issue might have been avoided.
Agreed, it would have been messy, but I would have ruled GP's hit invalid due to the doctor, and no matter how early you sent it in, it wouldn't have mattered because the Doctor's rule has no time limit, no matter how much you think it is implied.
Future hosts should be careful with time elements and rule(s) they don't intend to enforce and never imply rules or base them on tradition or unrelated games. Each game should be played rule wise, be separate unrelated universes with their own universal constants.
In any case, Drew decided to end the stand off with everyone involved dead.
No disagreements here. I probably should have responded to every action submitted early and told them they needed to resubmit them in the proper time, but then 75% of the players would have had their plays rejected and I didn't think anyone would be particularly happy with that result.
Perhaps the rule I mentioned about actions being processed in the order they are received should never have been stated, but as I never specifically stated what roles had time based elements, it really isn't a rule I didn't enforce, it's a rule I didn't define.
In the end, it's a bit unfortunate that there are these kinds of misunderstandings, but I don't think that my decisions are entirely unreasonable. Hopefully there won't be anymore such misunderstandings.
For future reference, I will be consistent in this decision -
the doctor's action does not need to be cast before the hit to be effective. Otherwise he would be a bulletproof vest, not a doctor.
Really though, apologies to all the players involved for this unfortunate scenario. Let's hope the rest of the game comes out clean. I am going to officially put to rest the rule where you have to submit night actions at night. If you submit them early that is okay, as long as I am clear on when you are meaning the night action to take place.