I see the reform of the Glossary as a three-part process, with all three parts potentially concurrent. (This is all just me speaking as a nerd, not me speaking as anyone with special behind-the-scenes knowledge of Glossary reform plans. The Rules Committee has never seen my plan, much less considered implementing it.)
(1) General Rules: The Glossary was originally a supplement to the Rulebook. Then it became the main document, because the Rulebook was never updated. Now we have an up-to-date Rulebook again. It's therefore possible for the Glossary to become a supplement again.
General rules and rulings in the Glossary that have corresponding Rulebook discussions (things like
turn and
seed phase and
Artifact) should be gradually deleted from the Glossary. Each Glossary entry deleted this way should be replaced with a cross-reference in the Glossary that points directly to the Rulebook entry. In this way, the Glossary slowly loses most of its text and becomes increasingly an index for the Rulebook.
(2) Card-Specific Rulings: The Glossary's
card-specific rulings should be scrutinized, one-by-one, to see whether the ruling still makes sense, whether it follows naturally from the card text (if not, then errata may need to be considered for the future), and whether the ruling should be generalized to a generally applicable ruling (which would take it out of the Glossary). Hopefully, a large chunk of rulings could be removed that way.
(3) Reformat: The Glossary should be
reformatted, it should be made available in both HTML and PDF format, and it should be possible to link directly to any entry in the Glossary. This, in turn, would make it easier for the 1E Card Database to link into the Glossary -- although we're never going to have something quite as comprehensive as the 2E Rules Tool, nor am I sure it would be a good thing if we did.
The reformatting should also replace the brutal icon codes (e.g. "[Holo]") with the actual icons. A robust Icon Legend should be printed at the
front of the Glossary (not the back) including: the icon itself, its actual name, its code (since codes are still used in so many places), and a direct link to the Glossary or Rulebook entry defining it. Links between different Glossary entries should become de rigueur, with cross-references no longer requiring long scrolls or Ctrl-F's, and card references should link back to their CC database pages as well.
Finally, the reformatting should include quality-of-life adjustments to column spacing, indentation, and font. (Tahoma is just not a great web font, and the Glossary font needs to be good on screens
and in print. It was the best available in 1997, but not today.)
Q: How long would this take?
There are 1046 entries in the Glossary as of a couple weeks ago.
I envision offloading general rules to the Rulebook as being (relatively) straightforward, but some of those entries are huge; the RC could reasonably only vet a few per month. But since rule entries are always by far the hugest chunks of the Glossary, even a few per month could shrink the Glossary fairly rapidly. Move the
battle and
dilemma (/dilemma resolution) entries (and sub-entries) out of the Glossary into the Rulebook, and that's 6% of the Glossary
right there.
Card-specific entries are another ball of wax. Some are easy. Some are not. Some should be fixed. Some, frankly, shouldn't; entries like
Mining Survey or
Kahlest are already clearly defined by the rules, and are as clearly worded on the cards as they can possibly be, but they are just a little confusing for players who aren't Rule Geniuses. The entries should stay where they are so players can easily find them. For the ones that can be fixed, it would be relatively easy to generalize many of them to general rules, but hard to offload them to the Rulebook without inflating the Rulebook's size (and it is already too long). Others are best fixed via Errata, but Errata is a whole 'nother department with its own approval process and its own resource limitations, so you're talking months of lead time before a card-specific entry can be fixed via errata -- and you'd best prioritize.
The reformatting would probably cost some poor idiot a
weekend, maybe two.
Cross-reference entries would be untouched. Entries that define a specific term used only on a few cards (like
in orbit or
unexamined) actually
belong in the Glossary (that's what a Glossary
is!) and would also not be seriously changed in this revision.
All told, I think it's reasonable to suggest that, if this plan is steadily followed and worked on, the Glossary reform could start very soon and complete in 3-4 years. My personal hope would be that, at the end of this process, the Glossary would be half its current length... although it could be more, it could be less, depending on what the RC finds when it gets in there. We can't set a concrete size goal; we can just define a good process and see where it leads.
Yeah, that's a while. But attempts to swallow the entire Glossary in one gulp are doomed to failure, because, unlike the Rulebook, the Glossary is not some dead text that can be resurrected by one cowboy; the Glossary is in active use every day, updated every month, Each piece of it has to be carefully moved to a new place during its reconstruction, with each step examined by a committee... or the whole game could break by accident. Much bigger fish than the CC have made that mistake and paid the price. (Otherwise, I would have rewritten it already. Thanks to those who think so highly of me, though!)
Q: Why isn't Glossary reform the RC's focus right now?
Well, I can't speak for the RC, but this is what it looks like to me:
Rather than working on overall Glossary reform, the Rules Committee has been focused for the past 18 months on fixing the Temp Rulings which accumulated over the past five years -- things like Mona Lisa, Receptacle Stones, and "humanoid."
Nobody's really taken much notice of this, but, as of
last June, when Temp Rulings first started being officially listed in the CRD, there were still 11 Temp Rulings in place. As of today, there are 3 -- and there's a new CRD coming out in eight hours.
I would imagine that "fixing five years of accumulated Glossary technical debt" is a prerequisite to commencing any reform projects.
- By Danny
- By Mugato
- By jadziadax8