From Equipment to Miles

by Lucas Thompson, Ambassador

13th October 2017

Early in the design process, Nathan pitched a cycle of new basic equipment. These cards were an extension of all those Premiere equipment like the Engineering PADD: all personnel present with one skill gain another skill. One of that cycle made it into the final product, but I'm not here to talk about that one.

One equipment gave personnel Anthropology - this one appealed to me because I generally feel that there should be more ways to play around Accelerated Aging. The catch is that North American Continentals has just been won by a deck that would use such a card, and I felt it probably shouldn't have access to it. K'mtar/Guidance decks are good enough already, and don't really need a way to avoid a potential counter-dilemma.

I counter-pitched a series of solutions that would make the equipment unappealing to Klingons. The ideas were things like making the dilemma an artifact, or limiting its effect to only Bajoran and Federation personnel. These "solutions" seemed clunky to both of us, and we let the idea rest for a while.

Then, Nathan had the idea to reverse it - instead of an equipment that grants a skill to a personnel, how about a personnel that gains the skill from an equipment? He counter-counter-pitched Miles, mostly as you see him here. I thought it was perfect - I'd wanted a Bajoran Miles ever since I'd seen one in a design competition years ago. Interacting with equipment is a Miles thing anyways, and gives an anti-Accelerated Aging trick to an affiliation that has been struggling with it for a long time.

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