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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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#554369
Smiley wrote: Mon May 24, 2021 10:29 am Movement. The idea that you can move and let go of a ship and then pick it up later and continue moving is just mindboggling! The memory needed to know how much was used and even worse, if there were ever too many similar ships being used for ferrying back and forth...
Are you suggesting that we change the rules so ships can't move? I mean, it would definitely lead to an increase in Near-Warp Transport and Iconian Gateway, but I'm not sure that solves the larger problem of reducing complexity! :wink:
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#554370
jadziadax8 wrote: Sun May 23, 2021 8:33 am
Ausgang wrote: Sun May 23, 2021 1:38 am Something that never made sense to me, is completely unnecessary, and probably nobody strictly enforces anymore since pretty any other card game ever doesn't have this rule. From the Glossary entry for the discard pile:
You may not rearrange or look through cards in any player's discard pile unless a card allows you to.
On a similar level, not being allowed to look through your Q's Tent, for example to read a card, feels equally frustrating and pointless.
OMG, this.

I understand not rearranging-that’s important because of cards like Nanoprobe Resuscitation, but not being able to look is just dumb.

In [2E], the discard pile of all players is public knowledge and can be examined at any time by any player. It hasn’t broken the game yet.
+1 I did not realize looking at discard pile was not allowed. Lackey can't properly implement this, anyway.

I'll also add the rule that only points that count towards winning count towards differential. The vast majority of the time the only effect of this rule is that players that don't solve a mission get an effective score of zero. So when a player that lost bad tries to find a silver lining ("At least I got 10 points from X+Y!") , it sucks to have to tell them, nope, those points don't count. You got shut out. You got the worst possible score.
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By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#554410
1. +1 vote for the not being able to look thru discard pile as the worst offender.
2. Overall I would say 1E has a lot of strange hidden information rules, many of which don't actually help gameplay. Personally, the only zones I would have hidden to both players are deck and seed piles. The ones that should be hidden to opponent are my hand, q's tent, cloaked ships. I'm not even convinced that not being able to look at opponents personnel most times is a good thing. I think it shifts the skills from strategic thinking to memory.
3. This is a bit of a stretch, and almost a lack of a rule instead of a bad rule, but I would say movement between quadrants was great in DS9, and then broke the game in Voy+. (Should be some built in way of the game to allow interaction without planning for it ahead of time, even if it's less efficient.)
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#554420
Armus wrote: Mon May 24, 2021 11:00 am
Smiley wrote: Mon May 24, 2021 10:29 am Movement. The idea that you can move and let go of a ship and then pick it up later and continue moving is just mindboggling! The memory needed to know how much was used and even worse, if there were ever too many similar ships being used for ferrying back and forth...
Are you suggesting that we change the rules so ships can't move? I mean, it would definitely lead to an increase in Near-Warp Transport and Iconian Gateway, but I'm not sure that solves the larger problem of reducing complexity! :wink:
I think he's saying that each ship should only be able to move from one spaceline location to another once per turn, which would be easier to track.
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By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#554428
yes, thank you for explaining things better than me. =)
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#554446
Also worth mentioning is that dilemma resolution is a complete mess. The fact that dilemmas get their own glossary is a big clue. A big cause of this mess is the way that dilemma resolution was shoehorned into the Initiation-Responses-Resolution framework for actions. The result is that for many dilemmas, their gametext is actually executed out-of-order, with the majority of the gametext being executed during Initiation, whereas most other verbs execute very little gametext during Initation. This makes it confusing to have any other actions happen during the dilemma encounter, whether they are responses to the encounter itself, responses to a sub-action of the dilemma (such as a random selection), or a suspends-play action.

Another consequence of the current hack job of dilemma resolution is the existence of dilemmas like Unscientific Method and Medical Crisis that are perfectly understandable if you just read them, but become confusing if you try to interpret them under the rules of dilemma resolution. The glossary tries to hand-wave this away with a section on "multi-section dilemmas" or whatever, but the root of the problem is that the dilemma resolution rules only work for the simplest of dilemmas. And additionally, some types of gametext (selections, checking requirements) by default happen during Initiation, so it doesn't really work to have those depend on gametext that happens during Resolution (stopping, killing, etc.).

I was working on a proposal for this back when I had time for a stupid card game in my life, but the basics are that the "target" of a dilemma encounter should be the crew/Away Team that encounters it, and thus the only thing that happens during Initiation is choosing whether a Dual dilemma is encountered by the crew or the Away Team. Then the Resolution of the dilemma involves actually executing the various gametext actions in order (though still with a few exceptions such as Nullifiers).
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#554448
^ Oh, goodness, all that is correct. Writing the dilemma resolution section of the Rulebook was the hardest part of the Rulebook, and it's not particularly close.

For its part, the dilemma resolution entry in the Glossary is not just the longest entry in the Glossary; it is almost twice as long as the second-place finisher. This should not be the case.

Would love to read any notes you have on that proposal you were working on. All fresh thinking about dilemma resolution helps stimulate my brain in healthy directions. (But I wouldn't want you to put work into it if you don't have anything handy. Like you said, we all have limited time and the most important thing is actually playing.)

***

I am really loving this thread. Every single answer has been unexpected and illuminating. I expected way more complaints about dual-personnel random selections and the [BB] icon. Most of the stuff you guys have mentioned instead wasn't even on my radar!

(Except Guramba and Phase Cloak. I do definitely have a list of loaded rules and what I'd like to do to them if we could figure out how. :) )

So thanks!
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#554452
BCSWowbagger wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 3:31 pm
Armus wrote: Mon May 24, 2021 11:00 am
Smiley wrote: Mon May 24, 2021 10:29 am Movement. The idea that you can move and let go of a ship and then pick it up later and continue moving is just mindboggling! The memory needed to know how much was used and even worse, if there were ever too many similar ships being used for ferrying back and forth...
Are you suggesting that we change the rules so ships can't move? I mean, it would definitely lead to an increase in Near-Warp Transport and Iconian Gateway, but I'm not sure that solves the larger problem of reducing complexity! :wink:
I think he's saying that each ship should only be able to move from one spaceline location to another once per turn, which would be easier to track.
We've, since 2014, used dice IRL to signify the part of printed range already used in a turn. Modifiers are not counted in this. Thus far, this system works splendidly. It' a bit cumbersome to translate to Lackey, with the counters; but certainly doable.
Of course, it's not very innovative, and Smiley might of course have thought of sth similar himself; but personally, I'd hate to see the fun -- and rather unique -- element of unlimited moves per turn, go. :twocents:
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 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#554457
If I get to throw a rule in the fire, I'd punt the gender rules (and the species one if I can sneak it in). They're messy and really just fart in the face of Trek's whole thesis of "it's the future where we're more advanced etc blah blah".
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Moderator
#554469
AllenGould wrote: Wed May 26, 2021 9:41 am If I get to throw a rule in the fire, I'd punt the gender rules (and the species one if I can sneak it in). They're messy and really just fart in the face of Trek's whole thesis of "it's the future where we're more advanced etc blah blah".
True, except that Trek still has plenty of romances (almost all of them heterosexual) and when Tucker got pregnant, it was more or less played for laughs.

And wasn't there a TOS episode that deliberately kept Uhura off the bridge since she would've been the highest-ranking person there?
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 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#554474
nobthehobbit wrote: Wed May 26, 2021 1:57 pm True, except that Trek still has plenty of romances (almost all of them heterosexual) and when Tucker got pregnant, it was more or less played for laughs.
There's also a bunch of episodes where people wake up, but we don't have an pile of poorly-defined mechanics around people taking naps and targeting "well rested" personnel. ;)
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 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#554549
boromirofborg wrote: Tue May 25, 2021 12:09 pm 2. Overall I would say 1E has a lot of strange hidden information rules, many of which don't actually help gameplay. Personally, the only zones I would have hidden to both players are deck and seed piles. The ones that should be hidden to opponent are my hand, q's tent, cloaked ships. I'm not even convinced that not being able to look at opponents personnel most times is a good thing. I think it shifts the skills from strategic thinking to memory.
I've played a lot of card games and I can't think of a single one, even from this "early era" ccg design, that was so weird about hiding information about what cards are in play. Just utterly baffling to me.
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Community Contributor
#554555
BanditKeith wrote: Thu May 27, 2021 1:24 pm I've played a lot of card games and I can't think of a single one, even from this "early era" ccg design, that was so weird about hiding information about what cards are in play. Just utterly baffling to me.
It's not unheard of, but all the examples I can think of are a bit more deliberate (Morph in MTG, Bluffs in B5CCG, hidden movement in AvP), and a card is either visible or not - there's not an issue with only seeing part of a card at any given moment.
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