Rules Update, April 2022

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

4th April 2022

Happy April! Today is the first Monday of the month, a day for a regularly scheduled rules update!

If you just want to know the bottom-line rulings and changes, I've highlighted them in bold blue font.

The Big News: Nothing!

This is a quiet month. Not much going on here.

Monthly Rulings

Scoring Points from a Point Box

Back in September, we had to make a temp rulingabout how Federation Flagship: Recovered interacts with the bonus point box on Borg ships.

To resolve this, we considered making some fairly large changes to how the "point area" works. For example, in Premiere, the point area was less of a mandatory area and more of a useful reminder, so we considered making it optional to place a card in your point area. We looked at a few other possibilities as well.

Yet, in the end, we just went with the simplest answer, the answer that was already somewhat implicit in the rules and which we had already based our September ruling on: when you score points from a card with a bonus point box, you score the points no matter what. If the card is diverted from your point area (by Fed Flag: Recovered or maybe You Can't Kill the Captain), then you still get the points, but just have to keep track of the points by some other means until the card is finally discarded. (Thenit finally arrives in your point area.)

Persona replacements are simultaneous

There's a card coming out soon that depends on the little-used persona replacement rule. Meanwhile, Rules has been trying to figure out ways to make it easier to deal with dual-personnel cards, which have some weird interactions with persona replacement. So we took a fresh look at the persona replacement rule and came away with some minor clarifications and a rewrite.

All persona replacements on your turn are simultaneous. When you have done your replacements, you must have all the same personas in play that you did at the start of your turn -- no more and no less. That means you can replace Dixon Hill with Galen, but you can't replace Dixon Hill with Data & Picard... at least, not unless you also have Carlos (or another version of the Data persona) present and can exchange him as well.

Likewise, you can exchange Sisters of Duras for Lursa and B'Etor individually, but you have to exchange both personas, not just one of them. If you really want to get crazy, you can do some wild chains like exchanging Jadzia Dax + Sons of Mogh <=> Worf & Jadzia + Kurn, or even (brace yourselves) Data & Geordi + Jean-Luc & Beverly + Mr. & Mrs. Troi + Lwaxana Troi <=> Geordi La Forge + Data & Picard + Beverly & Will + The Trois. If you pull that off in a sanctioned tournament game and take pictures, I will personally mail you $5.

Arguably, you've always been able to do this. However, now that we've cleaned up the text and made all persona exchanges on a turn happen simultaneously, it should run a little smoother.

(P.S. Everyone, including everyone in Design and Rules, informally calls persona replacement "persona swapping." But the rules say "replacement," and this is an Official Article, so I'm saying "replacement", too.)

Error Corrections Delayed

Several errors in the Rulebook/Glossary have been brought to my attention over the past six weeks. Normally, I tackle these in the very next rules release. This month, for various reasons, I didn't get them done. (A couple of them were too large to run through by myself, and will need Committee signoff.) Next month, I should. If you've alerted me about rules doc errors in the past few weeks, rest assured I haven't forgotten them.

(If the corrections aren't in May's release, though, definitely come bug me, because I may have forgotten.)

Rules Soapbox: Technical Improvements

The bulk of my work this month was actually spent behind the scenes, writing new code and fixing database entries.

You remember the Glossary-to-Rulebook project, where we were gradually deleting duplicative rules in the Glossary and linking back to the Rulebook? You may also remember that that project is on hold until certain technical changes are in place. For example, when the Glossary says, "See Rulebook: Ship Battle," that's not very useful because the Rulebook isn't alphabetized. Instead, the Glossary really needs to say: "See Rulebook 7.4.3: Ship Battle." Also, we really REALLY want a rule change database. That way, players who don't religiously read monthly rules updates can find out at a glance what's changed since they last played (even if they last played in 1996!), and players scrolling through the Glossary can see whether they just remembered wrong or if the rule really did change on them.

We're not quite there yet, but we're getting much closer.

Meanwhile, as happy side effects of this project, we did get some very cool new features this month:

* The Glossary is now fully loaded into the database, meaning easier maintenance and (marginally) faster load time.

* The 1E Card Database now correctly provides a link to a card's Glossary entry (if it has one). (Take a look at Lack of Preparation for an example.)

* The 1E Rules Tool is now online and isgradually getting built out, so we are starting to get "related Glossary entry" links for other, generic Glossary entries as well. For example, the Card Database page for Orb of Prophecy and Change now links not only to the Orb's official Glossary entry, but also to the entry for "anywhere." Pretty snazzy! But the Rules Tool still has a lot of manual data entry to be done and does not cover all terms yet.

* The 1E Errata Database got some minor improvements and now we have the complete errata history of each card printed directly on their database pages.

So, all things considered, a pretty snazzy month. Maybe next month I'll finally figure out how to cram the Rulebook into the database without breaking everything, too. Then we'll really be cooking with replicators.

See You Space Cowboy...

Thanks for reading! As always, please let us know if you see any errors, typos, or obsolete text in the rules documents.

And be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if you're not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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