Glad to see you back, Jack. I hadn't realized your trip to Greece was still going on. I was wondering if you were ok, but having the cops put out a missing persons report for Wackojack didn't seem practical.
The situation you describe is a very common feature of online bridge. Here is how it went from my point of view:
I saw that you were going to Greece and would be out of contact so I thought ok, I will take a look at Jack's profile and make up a cc to fit. I had the idea you would be back from Greece in plenty of time to discuss refinements but I was wrong, so I figured ok we will go with it as is. I was aware that some, not all, multi-Landy players, use it in a modified way over a weak NT but that's one of the things I figured we would work out. It requires that we decide what a weak NT is. 14-16 is strong, 12-14 is weak, but 13-15? When I have played conventions that vary with the strength of the NT I have sometimes played that we treat 13-15 as still being strong, sometimes I have played it as being weak.Whichever pard likes.
Another problem for online conventions is that there really isn't enough room on the cc to easily list all of the options. My description spilled over to where we would put the weak not option. Playing against a strong NT the X shows a hand that has a four card major and a five card minor, or just a five card major, or just a six card minor, or a hand with 19+ points Hard to fit all of that into the space provided.
So I figured we could make up two ccs, one for when the opps play a strong NT, one for when they play a weak NT. Of course to make that work we have to know in advance whether they play a strong or weak NT. I know acol uses a week not, at least in theory, but from what I have seen of the challenges some play a strong NT, some play a weak NT.
And that's just for the Landy.
I also put RBergen on the card. I usualy avoid Bergen unless there is time to talk of when it is on, when it is off. For example, if I open 1H, and LHO doubles, is RBergen still on ? When not playing RBergen 1M-(X)-2NT is usually played as invitational. If now 3C is invitationaL then the 2NT is presumably natural. Similarly, 1M-X-3M is generally preemptive w/o Bergen so what's happening with Bergen? I have a book, by Bergen, around here somewhere that gets into all of this. I'll look it up.
Added: I see a quick discussion of what to do over 1M- X at
https://www.bridgebum.com/bromad.phpAs mentioned, I have generally coped with these issues by just relaxing and taking online bridge as a casual game. The idea of these challenges seems to be to make it less casual. I am up for that but it will take some work.
As to what the opponents could make of my brief description of X as a really to 2C (you have a typo, saying 3C), it's true that "relay to 2C" doesn't tell the whole story so I was glad I put the cc up with the more complete description. At a f2f game it would be easy. I would double, they would ask, you would explain. At least in my case, I can talk a lot more rapidly and a lot more accurately than I can type.
Putting an agreement in place might well be a good way to spend some time. Maybe we could find a zoom time?
I hope you enjoyed Greece. I traveled around there a bit. I had read Oedipus Rex in college soI went to Delphi where Oedipus had learned that he would be killing his father and marrying his mother. For someone who grew up in Minnesota, where we thought of history as beginning around 1850 or so, it was good to see places with an ancient reference.