There's universal agreement that a 1E videotape learn-to-play series is essential, but nobody ever finds time to
do it. I've volunteered for at least one of these initiatives.
Eventually, somebody has to just go and pull a Lucas Thompson and
do it instead of waiting for official sanction. If you make a good learn-to-play series, it'll
get sanction. Heck, even if you make a bad learn-to-play series, it'll probably get sanctioned as long as it's better than the nothing we currently have.
I think there should be more official support for easier step-in solutions. They should become easily visible on the website. Perhaps... it pains me to say... even a much shorter "pre-beginner's" version of the Rulebook...? Bring back the Premiere rulebook (really thinking outside the box here), with an accompanying portal that emphasizes that it's a sandbox version of the game? Or -- much-preferred -- retool the current, fantastic Rulebook into having a real simple version for true beginners, and rename the current Beginner layout into Novice or Intermediate.
I think there's a risk in providing
too many entry points into the game. When a player first encounters our game, they're overwhelmed by the game. The goal of most new-player interactions should be, basically, to reduce that "overwhelmed" feeling to a manageable level, helping newbies feel smart, capable, and well-supported.
However, if there are too many different entry points (too many different formats, rulebook options, rules sets, card pools), we end up making new players overwhelmed all over again -- not by the game itself, but by the difficulty of sorting out all the different entry points!
There is currently a
Beginner's Rulebook. (There's a PDF of it as well.) Even the existence of
that alternative entry point is not well-known, because the current website doesn't really give us the space to explain things. (The new website is something I need to be working on much more than I have been.) I think that adding a
second Beginner's Rulebook, with a slightly different name, which would be equally or even more difficult for a new player to actually find, would cause more confusion among new players than it solves. You'd end up with some newbies trained on the Beginner's Rulebook and others trained on the "True Beginner's Rulebook" and not even realizing that they're missing different parts of the game.
The current Beginner's Rulebook
does exclude Borg rules, Time Locations, Hologram rules, Tactics, and Q-Icon cards, exactly as you suggest.
It
also excludes Artifacts, Tribbles & Troubles, Sites, multi-affiliation cards, dual-personnel cards, persona replacement, cloaking, capturing, commandeering, infiltration, mirror opposites, countdowns, probing, loaded skills, relocation, landing, cross-quadrant movement, the cumulative rule, the vast majority of the dilemma resolution rules, and a bunch of other rules that you simply don't need to know when just starting out and can work out for yourself.
The Beginner's Rulebook
does include native quadrants, special downloads, doorways, incidents, objectives, and the
icon rule, because those are so integral to the game I didn't think players could effectively play any modern card pool without knowing about them. I also thought that not telling new players about native quadrant / AU restrictions would lead to deep disappointment and frustration when they built decks around that and later found out that their decks don't work under the full rules. Frustration is not a feeling our new-player path should engender.
I made all these decisions about what to include and what to exclude pretty much on my own, based on my own judgment about what is "core" to the game and what isn't. My target audience was all newbies, but specifically TNG Block players. (TNG Block was the active block at the time I started the Rulebook.) As far as I know, this aspect of the Rulebook was not closely scrutinized when it was approved. So I'm open to the suggestion that it struck the wrong balance between "explaining the core game" and "being easy enough for newbies to understand." I'm open to the suggestion that the Beginner's Rulebook should exclude a few more things, and include a few other things. But I think the approach of having
another Beginner's Rulebook, only this time even simpler, would do more harm than good (although I realize that the idea comes with only the best of intentions).
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