Rules Update, December 2022

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

5th December 2022

Happy December! Today is the first Monday of the month, a day for a regularly scheduled rules update. As always, If you just want to know the bottom-line rulings and changes, I've highlighted them in bold blue font. (There's only one this month.)

Monthly Rulings

Let's go over this month's Recent Rulings Document.

Dilemma Resolution Cleanup

Our problems began, as they usually do, with Disgraceful Assault.

In August, we received a question about Disgraceful Assault. I believe the question came from Europe, but I have misfiled the original PM and can't give proper credit. Thanks to whoever you are for asking!This card looks so simple, but presses so many slightly weird rules buttons.

The question was: if the first effect of Disgraceful Assault destroys the attempting ship, does Disgraceful Assault resolve and discard, or does it reseed?

The Rulebook seemed to indicate "it reseeds." The Glossary, using very slightly different wording, seemed to indicate "it discards." When the Glossary and Rulebook conflict, the Glossary controls... but they really shouldn't conflict at all. This is not the first time we've seen small but significant disagreements between the dilemma resolution rules in each document, either.

Deeper down the rabbit hole we went. When, exactly, should a dilemma reseed after it is revealed? The rules weren't altogether consistent on this. The Glossary suggested that, if you encounted any effects from a multi-effect dilemma, the entire dilemma resolves even if there's nobody left to face it. At the same time, though, the Glossary informed us (via a very old ruling on the card Elim Garak) that, if a personnel encountered a dilemma but was able to dodge it so there were no valid targets, it reseeded. But, on the other hand, if there were simply no valid targets present, the dilemma resolved! This was pretty tangly.

So we made two small changes this month, which, together, add up to a fairly big change.

1. We defined exactly when you should reseed a dilemma if nobody is left to face it: reseed the dilemma if the dilemma has not yet had any effects. Otherwise, resolve the remaining effects as though it were being faced by a crew or Away Team with zero members.

If the dilemma has had any effect, resolve the entire dilemma, as though it were being faced by an empty ship or crew. (Note that Cyrus Redblock kills and Squire's Rule stops arenot effects of the dilemma.) For example, if your ship is destroyed by the first effect of Disgraceful Assault, you will also check if the remaining crew has 2 SECURITY and Transporter Skill (it doesn't), your opponent cannot select anyone to kill (because there are no valid targets), your crew is stopped (but that's okay because they're already dead), and the dilemma is discarded (because it says so). On the other hand, if your one-person crew is killed by Climbing the Ranks, resolve the rest: your empty crew doesn't have STRENGTH > 24, so it reseeds. On the third hand, if you bug out of a mission attempt with [DL] The Gift after a dilemma is revealed, but before it has effects, it reseeds automatically.

To fit together neatly with this and the rest of the dilemma resolution framework, we also reversed the old Elim Garak ruling. If you manage to give a dilemma no valid targets, good for you. Starting today, if Elim Garak faces Armus - Skin of Evil alone, avoiding Armus's random selection, Armus will whiff and discard, not reseed. Finally, we extended the new ruling to other cards like Garak (such as Pel), something that had never been officially clarified before.

Does that all make sense? If not, let us know in the forum thread attached to this article. I don't want to hear people abusing bugouts to discard dilemmas that shouldn't discard under this ruling.

2. Since this isn't the first time that the Glossary and Rulebook dilemma resolution rules have shown tiny but problematic inconsistencies, we decided it was time to stop trying to support two parallel-and-supposedly-identical sets of dilemma resolution rules. We went through the dilemma resolution rules line by line, figured out all the differences, updated the Rulebook to be 100% complete and accurate... and then we deleted the Glossary entry for dilemma resolution. The Glossary and Rulebook entries have already been slowly converging on each other, as we've edited large pieces here and there to be consistent, but now it's finished.

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 not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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