Rules Update, March

by James Heaney, First Edition Rules Master

2nd March 2020

Happy March! The Rules Committee has lots to tell you today! We've got a new release model, a big batch of rulings and updates, some good news about the Dilemma Resolution Guide, and a little bit about what we actually do on the Rules Committee. So let's get right into it!

New Release Model

Let's start with the big news: we are retiring the Current Rulings Document, effective immediately.

The current rules release process has been largely unchanged since 1997: rules and rulings are released monthly in a "Current Rulings Document". This document lists specific modifications and additions to the game's official rules compendium (the Glossary), and is intended to be read as a Glossary supplement. Then, roughly annually, all the new rulings are compiled into the Glossary. This allows players and judges to print out a Glossary once per year, while keeping up with current rules and rulings with a single shorter printout once per month. That saves a lot of paper and ink costs, because the Glossary is huge. This was a great system -- for 1997.

There are serious weaknesses in the monthly CRD/annual Glossary release cycle. Players routinely forget about rule changes they can't find in the Glossary. Lots of people ended up asking us last year how many self-controlling dilemmas each player can have on the table at once. (As many as you want, since May 2019.) Even Rules Committee members sometimes forget to check the CRD! We discovered a case last month where we issued a ruling in 2019 that conflicted with a ruling we'd issued in 2017, because we hadn't double-checked our own CRD (which was in the process of getting merged into the Glossary at the time). Worse than that, because the CRD is an extremely precise list of specific modifications to the Glossary, it's virtually unreadable unless you also have the Glossary open at your side and know exactly what you're looking for. Forum user DiscoveryRox nailed it a couple months ago: the CRD isn't a rules document; it's pseudocode for a rules document.

It's 2020. We have WiFi. Most tournament players look at rulebooks on their phones now. We don't need to keep ourselves on this treadmill just because, 25 years ago, Decipher had to contend with out-of-control rules bloat over a dial-up Internet.

So we're done. From now on, the Glossary and Rulebook will be immediately updated with all applicable rules and rulings when they are released. Release day will be the First Monday of every month or, sometimes, on the release date of a new expansion set. The Glossary and Rulebook will always be kept up-to-date, so players will no longer need to consult a supplemental document.

However, there are still players out there who print their rules, and good for them. We will continue to support them. In place of the traditional Current Rulings Document (or CRD), we will now publish a Recent Rulings Document (or RRD). At first glance, the RRD looks like the CRD by any other name: it's still a very detailed, precise list of Glossary changes. The difference is that those changes are already made in the Glossary, so you don't need to look to the RRD to find them.

The other difference is that the CRD gradually accumulated entries all year long, with each month bringing new updates until it was merged into the Glossary and erased each January. This forced all printout-based players to an annual update schedule. The RRD will be an all-new document every time it is released. If a T.D. wants to keep doing what she's been doing, printing out a fresh Glossary only once every year, she can keep doing that. She just has to print out the new Recent Rulings Document each month and keep the old ones until she reprints her Glossary. By December, she'll have one Glossary (from January) plus 12 short rules sheets (one from each month). In January, she prints her new Glossary and starts anew. But there's no longer anything magical about the 12-month cycle. Our T.D. could just as easily move to a 6-month cycle, or an 18-month cycle, or no cycle at all. As long as she collects and saves all the RRD's, she's in good shape.

This begins right now. The Glossary and Rulebook have both already been updated with all the rules and rulings we are announcing this month. Which brings us to...

Monthly Rulings

Assuming the publish process ran correctly, the inaugural Recent Rulings Document can be found here. Let's go over the highlights together.

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Present

A few months ago, a big forum thread opened up asking whether personnel are present with themselves.

The Rules Committee has carefully researched this question and concluded that, yes, personnel in First Edition are present with themselves.

We've adjusted the definition of "present" in the Glossary and Rulebook to make this crystal clear in the future, and we've replaced the now-redundant Glossary entries for D'Tan, Kahlest, and Secret Agent Julian Bashir with simple cross-references.

The Rules Committee wishes to express its great thanks to the Errata and Art teams, who received our request for Anhaica errata just a few days ago, but somehow made it happen in time for today. Anhaica's special skill now reads: "ENGINEER, Physics (if with a different personnel)".

With the erratum, Anhaica's special skill will now activate only when he is present with a "different" Maquis. That means he needs to be present with another Maquis personnel... and that other Maquis cannot just be a second copy of Anhaica.

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Q Who? Cleanup

In the wake of Q Who's release, there were some questions raised in both public and private channels about how some of the stranger cards in the set worked, especially the Consume objectives. We issued a batch of minor clarifications answering these questions, which ended up affecting the entries for artifacts, facilities, personnel - seeded, and scouting locations.

The TLDR version: Yes, you can use Strategic Base with the uncontrolled outpost downloaded by Consume: Outpost. Also, once you have an uncontrolled outpost at a location, you can't download another -- so be careful with those A Change of Plans!

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Unloaded Icons

"Unloaded" icons are icons with no built-in rules. They are referenced by other cards. The Glossary has always treated these inconsistently: the Barash icon had a Glossary entry, for example, but the Orb icon did not.

Now that the Glossary has a centralized Icon Legend, the concept of "unloaded icons" will be explained there, where all the "unloaded" icons are already listed. All of the individual "unloaded icon" entries have now been deleted. For similar reasons, we also deleted the KCA and TE entries (Maquis never had one), as well as the Quadrant icon entries.

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The Hollanders

Far back in the mists of time, Decipher declared that Eli Hollander and Frank Hollander would be considered "any Data," even though the lore on the Hollander cards and the "any" rule doesn't really support that. Our best understanding is that this was done so that the Hollanders could use Data, Keep Dealing. But Errata recently fixed that problem, so we no longer need this bodge.

Both entries are deleted today, and the Hollanders are no longer considered "any Data."

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Miscellaneous Cleanup

We integrated last month's "bluetext" temporary ruling about Empathic Touch into the rules by rewriting actions - step 3: results. We believe our ruling was already implied by that entry, but our rewrite makes it much clearer how the timing there should work.

We deleted a few other entries that simply weren't needed anymore -- keywords, 30/30 rule, cannot be stopped, and preventing stops -- and, after reading a forum thread about how hard it is to find out whether Hugh could target Borg-affiliation ships, we added some useful cross-references.

Add it all up, and we deleted 25 Glossary entries this month, while shrinking 3 more down to mere cross-references. On the one hand, it's the lowest of low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, that's 3.6% of the Glossary gone in a day.

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PDF Layout

Thanks to everyone who participated in our public call for feedback about the Glossary PDF layout. It is clear that there's a sizable contingent of players who liked the more compressed, Decipher-style layout... but an even bigger contingent preferred the new, spacier layout. For the time being, we are only able to support one layout in the PDF print, and, given majority opinion, it will be the spacier one.

However, we aren't going to forget about the 40% of players who prefer a tighter layout with a lower page count. I intend to post instructions on the forum, in that thread, for how you can change your print settings to get a smaller Glossary. And we do have long-term plans to bring back the compressed Glossary layout as an official alternative option. We just need a few things to happen first.

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Bugs, Etc.

We've been continuing to clean up bugs, typos, and broken links in the new Glossary. Most notably, this month, we added alt tags to all the images, which will improve accessibility while also making it easier to copy-paste Glossary entries into the forums. Please continue to let us know about any bugs, typos, broken links, or other issues you find in the new Glossary. We're certain there are still more.

Dilemma Resolution Guide

The Dilemma Resolution Guide has been stuck between a rock and a hard place for a long time now. On the one hand, we on the Rules Committee have struggled to find the time and manpower internally to keep it up-to-date... or even correct its numerous errors. Just this month, we noticed that the DRG's Dal'Rok entry gets the answer to a common question exactly wrong! (The Glossary has it right.)

On the other hand, the DRG is a very popular resource with players, and the mammoth job of getting it fixed is something we hear about a lot. Jon Carter made substantial progress during his term, both by writing new entries and loading old entries from the Decipher DRG into the CC database, but everyone agrees there's still a long way to go before the R.C. and the community have a DRG we can all be happy with. So now we need to figure out: what's the next step?

Happily, a couple of community members made this a lot easier to figure out.

Jarrod Cafaro (Takket) and Tim Mirkes (tlmirkes) each independently contacted me during the past month to volunteer to help bring the DRG into 2020. The Rules Committee has talked it over and decided to gratefully accept their help. Jarrod and Tim will be working on different sections of the DRG, double-checking old entries and writing new ones, all under the supervision of the Rules Committee. They'll be starting on the project this week, as soon as I send them the instructions. How long will it take them to do the entire DRG between them? I have no idea. All I know is that the DRG's 25,000 words long, roughly as long as Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory... and it's going to need to be significantly longer to accommodate all the new cards that have been made. So a huge thanks to Jarrod and Tim, and I'm looking forward to starting work with them.

While Jarrod and Tim are working on the actual content of the DRG, the Rules Committee and I will be not just looking over their shoulders to verify the rules, but also working to tidy the document up in other ways. You may recall that the old Decipher DRG including the actual gametext of each dilemma alongside the explanation. It also looked good, which the current DRG does not. We aim to start addressing these issues now. In the end, we hope to have a modern DRG worthy of Kathy McCracken herself!

We've already added a couple of gentle reminders to the front matter of the DRG. We're reminding all players that the DRG is a play aid, not an authoritative rules document, and that the Glossary should always be checked first and is always correct when it conflicts with the DRG. We've also produced a new "very short summary" of the general dilemma resolution rules, which we hope will help players avoid having to dive deep into the DRG for routine questions. This is all just a start, and Jarrod and Tim will be the ones really doing the heavy lifting—but I find myself feeling more optimistic about the DRG than I have in years! Thanks again for your help, guys!

Rules Soapbox: How We Operate

From time to time, I'm going to use this space to tell the community a little bit about what the Rules Committee is thinking about. Today, I just want to clarify exactly what the Rules Committee actually is, how it works, and what my role as Rules Manager is.

Since Jason Winters started the "dAnswerMan" account in 1994, the 1E Rules Manager position has changed a lot. During the prosperous seven years of Jon Carter's rulesmastership, however, Carter cemented a system that serves the game well. The Rules Manager today is not a Rules Dictator, as was the case during parts of the Decipher Era. Nor is the Rules Committee a democracy, where important issues are decided by tense 5-4 votes, as was the case during parts of the CC Era.

The Rules Committee today is a small team that operates by consensus. Nine times out of ten, after brief discussion, we unanimously agree on stuff. Then we just have to figure out who's writing the official text. If we don’t agree, then, nine times out of ten, we postpone action and continue discussing it until we reach a consensus. Consensus doesn’t mean we always wait for complete agreement. Consensus simply means that, unless there’s an emergency, we keep working until we arrive at something we can all accept as a reasonable settlement. Goodness knows the Rules Committee has sometimes issued rulings I disagree with, and that will still happen sometimes even now that I'm Rules Manager. Wikipedia has a great explanation of the consensus model, and our current team really works hard to achieve it.

In this model, the Rules Manager’s function (outside emergencies) is to set the agenda, facilitate discussion, and publish conclusions. The consensus model, with its emphasis on deliberation, compromise, and getting it right the first time, has saved the game from more than one terrible mistake, including some bad ideas I myself proposed. It has led to the Glossary actually shrinking over the past few years—the first time it has ever done that—and it has led to unprecedented consistency and clarity on new cards. Jon handed down a good system that I'm planning to keep.

So, when people ask me what's going to change in Rules now that I'm Rules Manager, I often have to say I don't know! Of course, I have some ideas, but I have to build a consensus on the team before those ideas can come out into the world. That's the main reason I couldn't announce the end of the CRD last month: I needed this month to propose it to the committee, talk it through, and make sure the Committee consensus supported it before going live. Happily, it did!

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Thanks for reading! 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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