#444665
Reasons not to be nervous about what Project Babylon will do:
* It's an Exploratory Design project. Ever seen an Exploratory Design project make it all the way to release? You have not. These are moonshots, and the CC designates them exploratory from the get-go because it recognizes the difficulty of getting them to press.
* The specific mandate of Babylon is to gather data -- not to act on it. The final deliverable, we are told, is expected to be a report addressed to the 1E department, not a card file.
* Babylon will be testing all kinds of things. Jjh's idea will definitely be on the list. So will, I expect, ALL of the ideas raised in recent public threads, from minor rules changes to some of Proconsul Neral's radical suggestions. They will be tried out and Babylon will find out whether they work and are fun, with an open mind all the way.
* If Babylon says, "We would like these rules changes and these errata," well, now Babylon has to have a word with Rules and Errata and convince them. Inter-departmental coordinated efforts require wide buy-in and tons of effort.
* Design is *intensely* conservative, and other departments even moreso. Decipher introduced a new card type, on average, about once a year, and broke templates routinely. The CC has introduced a new card type, on average, never, and even minor template variations are met with massive and sustained internal backlash. (One of several examples: at one point in Delenn, we wanted to mark a certain group of Doorways as "special", so we put lore on them, Q-card-style. Response from the rest of Design was intensely negative; it never reached testers.) The CC is not so conservative about power level, since it still wants to make good cards, but, when it comes to fresh or remixed mechanics or templates, it is demonstrably easier to convince a synod of Catholic bishops to change Church doctrine than it is to convince 1E staff to change a precedent. This is, in many ways, a strength, since Decipher was far too quick to innovate and break things, and it killed the game. The CC's caution is why the game is in the best shape ever, despite zero money and a shrinking player base. But it also protects frustrating and game-sapping things like the 1998 implementation of Nors.
In short, I personally wouldn't worry that Babylon will go too far in addressing the Nor Problem. I would worry more about the possibility that, in the face of these obstacles, Babylon will do nothing at all about the Nor Problem. But I also have confidence that the team recognizes these challenges going in, and will do its darndest to produce a really killer report. Where it goes from there, we will see.
That's probably the last I'll say about Babylon for the foreseeable future, because I dont want to step on toes once work on the project gets going.
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