Rules Update, December 2020

by James Heaney, First Edition Rules Manager

7th December 2020

Happy December! Today is the first Monday of the month, which is the scheduled day for rules updates.

It's also the last Monday of the year! That used to be a big deal, because we updated the Glossary every January. This would have been the final batch of changes included in that update. But now we update the Glossary every month, so no big deal. Enjoy Christmas!

There's no big headlines this month, but I'll go through the rulings in order from most relevant to least relevant.

Monthly Rulings

Here's what's covered in this month's Recent Rulings Document.

---

Battle forces must be fully compatible

When you fight a space battle, either on attack or defense, you get to choose which force (or group of ships plus their crews) will participate in the battle on your side. Everyone is aware that the ships in the force must be compatible. For example, if your opponent attacks your Romulan-affiliation ship, your other Romulan-affiliation ships and Non-Aligned ships there can join the defense, but your Federation-affiliation ships there can't (unless you have an appropriate Treaty that makes them compatible).

However, not everyone realizes that this applies to the crew, too. If your opponent attacks your Non-Aligned Zibalian Freighter (currently crewed by Non-Aligned and Romulan personnel), your Non-Aligned Combat Ship can join the defense if it is also crewed by Non-Aligned and Romulan personnel... but, if it's crewed by Non-Aligned and Federation personnel, you're out of luck. The Federation crew will insist on sitting on the sidelines, because they can't involve themselves in a Romulan affair (again, unless you have an appropriate Treaty).

This has been a rule since forever. The existing does not work with Glossary entry details how it works for Miles O'Brien (Fajo Collection), who is incompatible with Cardassians (even with a Treaty). But the battle rules did not make it clear. Now they do.

And, if you didn't know this rule, don't feel bad: neither did I! This all started because I made a motion in the Rules Committee to delete the rule about Miles O'Brien, and the rest of the team corrected me.

---

"Here" and "present," refined

"Here" usually means "at this location," but there's always been some exceptions: on facility cards, on site cards, and on cards which play on site cards, "here" could mean two other things (both of them slightly different from each other). This caused some heartache on the forums this summer during an discussion about whether Arne Darvin's special skill worked for Klingon ships reporting to the location.

We've now compressed all the different exceptions to "here" into a single, simple exception: on a site card, a facility card, or a card that plays on a facility or site, "here" means present with that card.

This slightly expands the group of cards covered by the exception, because "cards played on a facility" were not previously included. For example: if you and your opponent each have an outpost at a location, and Omega Particle destroys your outpost, the old rule was that "destroys all ships here" covered all ships at the location, including ships docked at opponent's outpost. It will now instead destroy all ships docked at your outpost plus all undocked ships at the location, but ships docked at opponent's outpost will survive.

While we were working on this, we noticed that the present rule didn't actually say what it meant to be "present" with a ship, facility card, planet, or cards played on them, so we cleaned that up as well: you're "present" with a ship or facility or planet's surface that you are on, and with cards played on them. Ships are present with any site or facility with which they are docked (and with cards played on them).

Ships, crews, and Away Teams are always considered present with a space location -- which is kinda weird, but isn't new (it's why Ocular Implants works at a space mission), and we haven't found a good enough reason to change it.

---

Duplicate personas are only checked once

What happens if you use a Clone Machine to bring a bunch of extra copies of personnel into play, but then your Clone Machine is on a facility that gets blown up? What if you report a second copy James T. Kirk using Aid Clone Colony, but Aid Clone Colony is destroyed by Supernova (courtesy of Bashir Founder)? Answer: chaos! A strict reading of the rules suggested that, as soon as your clone-enabling card was destroyed, all your clones had to be immediately discarded -- and, no, you didn't get to choose which copy to erase, you had to remember which one was the original and which one was the clone.

This potential for insanity, though remote, was a serious concern for the old Errata team two years ago, which was considering fixes to Clone Machine and Delta Quadrant Spatial Scission. We reached a consensus on a fix, but never put together the wording for it, and the Errata team entered a period of instability shortly thereafter. As part of my "close out unfinished business" Rules initiative, we resurrected this issue a few months ago, and we've now hammered out the fix. It involves LOTS of tiny wording tweaks to the persona rules, but here's the upshot:

You only check for persona duplication when entering play. If, later on, the card that allowed you to play a clone blows up, nothing happens to your clones already in play. You just can't play any more, or replace ones who die. (Note that persona swapping either copy of a cloned personnel is still illegal; you do NOT want to run DQSS in a Kyrian Memorial deck.)

(Most of this doesn't matter to OTF players, since all "cloner" cards are banned right now, except for Aid Clone Colony. But the Rules Committee supports Open as well!)

---

"Corresponding", refined

A concerned citizen pointed out that Assignment: Earth uses the phrase "corresponding time location." Everyone knows what that means, but the rules did not actually define it; they only defined "corresponding spaceline location." We ended up rewriting the whole entry for "corresponding," because it was kind of messy, but it means the same thing -- now with "corresponding time location" defined as well.

---

Unresolved Temporary Rulings

We're still talking about Seek Hidden Reliquary, so the temporary ruling that you have to seed the artifact at a planet still stands.

The temporary ruling that timed games are won by the player with the highest score (even if the score is 0 to negative points) is expected to remain in place until the scheduled Organized Play Guide update in February 2021.

Rules Soapbox: A Name For Everything And Everything With Its Name

There are a few concepts in the First Edition rules that just don't seem to have the right name.

For example, "valid response" is a phrase that is supposed to answer a question ("Can I play X against Y?"), but instead simply raises more questions ("What makes this response valid? And what happens to an invalid one?")

The game's four-gender system has two oddities in it: there's male and female, which seem straightforward enough... and then there's "neuter" and "GENDER IS IRRELEVANT" (for Borg). (No, those last two are not the same.) "Neuter" comes from a throwaway line by Lal in "The Offspring," but it has never been a common English term for what Lal was describing, at least not outside this card game.

The legal names of the 1E dilemma types are "Planet", "Space", and "Space/Planet", but most players refer to the last group as "Dual" dilemmas (or, more rarely, "Eithers").

The [EE] icon is officially named the "Enterprise-E" icon, and old forum grognards will remember that the name (and since-deleted "fluff" definition) of the icon actually led to Kathryn Janeway (The Sky's The Limit) losing the icon, and thus a lot of her playability.

You know what all four of these names have in common -- besides feeling just a little bit "off" to a lot of players? None of them are printed on any cards. No card says "neuter." No card says "valid response". Lots of cards use the Enterprise-E icon, but none of them call it that. That means these concepts could, in theory, be renamed without errata and without editing the underlying rules at all.

The Rules Committee thinks there might be some value in renaming some of these sorts of things. Not changing their functionality, but just changing their names to be a little more descriptive. No cards would change, no gameplay would change, and you the community would be free to continue referring to game concepts by whatever you want to call them... but it might make our rules documents a little easier to read if "Space/Planet" dilemmas were called "Duals," it might make our rules discussions a little simpler if the term for "valid response" actually told you something about what makes a response valid, and it might bring our rules into closer alignment with ordinary English language if the game's "neuter" gender were called... I dunno, something else.

So this is something we're exploring. You may hear more about it in future updates. It may even become a more regular feature of our monthly updates, like the slow Glossary-to-Rulebook migrations. Or it may fizzle out! That happens, too.

---

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!

Discuss this article in this thread.

Back to Archive index