This forums is for questions, answers, and discussion about First Edition rules, formats, and expansions.
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#560905
This may have been prompted by the reveal of the 2e Vidiian template, and a reminder how the one thing I like much better in 2e is the templates for personnel and ships.


In 1995, I bought my first pack of 1E. Magic was also on sale at the time. Those two are the juggernauts that are still going 27 years later. But if you pick up an average magic card now and compare to one from Alpha or Beta, it's clear the template has changes a lot.

Magic hasn't hesitated to play with the template as designs need it. On the other hand, a 1E personnel from today has the same limitations as Premier did, with he only possible differences being the restrictions box, and possibly a little smaller lore box.

So my question is two fold:

1. Has the CC ever considered stretching the templates to newer, modern designs that give them more ability to design? (Ships are the most limited. Once you add staffing, holodecks and clocking devices, there's not that much that lets a ship be special.)

2. What would the player reaction to this be? I'm not asking that the gameplay change or that the game become something it is not, but there's clearly times where the existing gameplay suffers somewhat due to lack of space to explain things clearly on verbs (like dilemmas especially), or differentiate 1 person with lots of skills from another.


Just a random question.
User avatar
 
By GooeyChewie (Nathan Miracle)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Architect
#560943
I'm primarily a 2E player. The way I see it, 1E personnel and ships still have gametext; they just offload that text onto a verb that they fetch with the [DL] icon.
User avatar
Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#560988
It was considered, quite extensively, in the early days of the CC's support for 1E. In fact, there were even mock ups of new templates that tried to keep the look and feel of 1E while giving a lot more real estate for game text. But they were very obviously based on 2E and we didn't have any buy in from volunteers, so they were scrapped. I feel like that was 12 years ago. I did a quick look for them, but I couldn't find 'em to show you. I'll dig around in my archives sometime.

HOWEVER.

I'm really glad we didn't do it. The pushback against this idea, and the fact that we broke the templates quite a bit in the early days, made us establish a strong guideline not to break the template. That made us be creative in our designs and, more importantly, keep them cleaner. If we'd changed the templates to allow for longer game text, I'm not sure we would have learned that lesson and it would have damaged the game. Plus, there's a certain charm to the existing 1E template that would be lost with an update.

Of course, that hasn't stopped us from trying new things an innovating over the years. We introduces the [Self] dilemma template, which was a big thing (though one that logically grew from existing templates). We've tried to add new keywords and icons to help out in places where they can. We've got a new variation on a Decipher template coming out in an upcoming set. So we innovate, when and where we can.

But a whole template revamp? I never say never, but I think it would require a really compelling reason and a ton of both community and volunteer buy-in. I can see some smaller changes, especially to missions and ships (the two most cramped templates by far), but only if we can keep the spirit and look and feel of 1E in doing so.

-crp
User avatar
 
By Smiley (Cristoffer Wiker)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
#561032
I would welcome it if it ever came. There are ways to evolve from the current template without losing the original 1E feel. One thing would be to just switch the position of the name and card type on Verbs for starters so you can actually know what you have in your hand without having to remember every image instead like we already do on Personnel for example.
User avatar
First Edition Creative Manager
By KazonPADD (Paddy Tye)
 - First Edition Creative Manager
 -  
1E European Continental Runner-Up 2023
1E The Neutral Zone Regional Champion 2023
#561073
boromirofborg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 11:28 am Another would be simply combining the Lore and game text box and flip their order on verbs. So if a Dilemma needed 4 lines it could have it, or not.
Isn’t that just what 2E do anyway?
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#561126
KazonPADD wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:30 pm
boromirofborg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 11:28 am Another would be simply combining the Lore and game text box and flip their order on verbs. So if a Dilemma needed 4 lines it could have it, or not.
Isn’t that just what 2E do anyway?

Sure, but you could still do it with the 1E style. Events would be very similar to Objectives/Incidents, and really, so would Interrupts as far as the look. You don't have to switch the the visual of the 2E cards.
User avatar
 
By scox (Johan Skoglund)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#561147
boromirofborg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 4:01 pm
KazonPADD wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:30 pm
boromirofborg wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 11:28 am Another would be simply combining the Lore and game text box and flip their order on verbs. So if a Dilemma needed 4 lines it could have it, or not.
Isn’t that just what 2E do anyway?

Sure, but you could still do it with the 1E style. Events would be very similar to Objectives/Incidents, and really, so would Interrupts as far as the look. You don't have to switch the the visual of the 2E cards.
But do we really want more text on Events? Going with same template will at least give that option, and one of the problems, in my opinion, with 1E is the "wall of text" issue - having templates that fits even more text is likely just going to make that worse, as it does not put as much pressure on the designers (Design & Rules) to keep the wording short and concise. There is already so much to read on cards that it slows down the gameplay. Keep it small and simple wherever possible imho.
User avatar
Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#561148
scox wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:37 pmBut do we really want more text on Events? Going with same template will at least give that option, and one of the problems, in my opinion, with 1E is the "wall of text" issue - having templates that fits even more text is likely just going to make that worse, as it does not put as much pressure on the designers (Design & Rules) to keep the wording short and concise. There is already so much to read on cards that it slows down the gameplay. Keep it small and simple wherever possible imho.
I almost entirely agree with this. Getting rid of Decipher's "rule" that we fill the text boxes was one of the better decisions we made. And I think you'll like the new thing we're doing in Project Rogue.

-crp
User avatar
 
By boromirofborg (Trek Barnes)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#561152
scox wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:37 pm But do we really want more text on Events? Going with same template will at least give that option, and one of the problems, in my opinion, with 1E is the "wall of text" issue - having templates that fits even more text is likely just going to make that worse, as it does not put as much pressure on the designers (Design & Rules) to keep the wording short and concise. There is already so much to read on cards that it slows down the gameplay. Keep it small and simple wherever possible imho.

That's fair. I would say Dilemmas certainly could use more room for clarity at times.

For Events, I would say the space is needed because there have been times that Incidents were used instead of events specifically because of the room. This means that they by default were invulnerable to counterplea from Kevin/Quinn/Etc.

That's a good thing if that's the intent (saves a line of text) but as a rule more counterplay options are better then not.

Bleed Resources comes to mind (because I was working on a [Maq] deck recently) as an example that to me, should be an Event except it's too long. So it gets to be something that's harder to interact with. (For good and bad.)

Blue Alert! is another big one that should be an event (because the other shuttle cards were) and isn't because they needed that smidgen of extra text.
User avatar
First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#561157
scox wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:37 pm But do we really want more text on Events? Going with same template will at least give that option, and one of the problems, in my opinion, with 1E is the "wall of text" issue - having templates that fits even more text is likely just going to make that worse, as it does not put as much pressure on the designers (Design & Rules) to keep the wording short and concise.
There's a push and pull here, and it depends on what you mean by "short and concise":

On the one side, there's definitely a trend to move away from filling in the box with just one more ability, and that's a very good thing.

On the other, a lot of the recent threads can be boiled down to "the card would be a lot clearer if there was one more line worth of words". :D
User avatar
 
By rabyte
 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#561245
I was thinking about that recently, too. But I guess you are right, we have [2E] and if we modernize the template too much, some older players might not like it because we would lose the 90s flair. :wink:

However, especially after reading through this old thread by @bardez, I started to redraw the template with vectors only (fyi using Affinity Designer). Why? Vector graphics can be zoomed without quality loss and look much better when printed. I have to clarify though that the fonts currently are in vectors in the expansion PDFs, but not in the card database. Apart from the reasons mentioned in that 2018 thread, I think there are two more reasons in favor of vector graphics
  • Having a redesign of the TrekCC website in mind (it will come at some point :borg: ), the way to tackle it will be “mobile first”. Vector symbols will be much easier to scale and read on different screens.
  • Same for Lackey. If there should every be another tool running solely in the browser (think JavaScript with phaser.js framework -> anyone interested?) it would be helpful being able to scale the images on the virtual table
  • I just like the maximum print quality :)
Also, I found the old (text) boxes on the cards to be somehow inconsistent. For example, some have round edges, some have effects/shadows simulating embossing to the inside, some have old school 3D effects simulating kind of a “box” effect to the outside. The “skills box” in particular seems weird to me, it has a sharp corner on the top left and a rounded on the right. Also, the lightning on all the metal effects is inconsistent. Text boxes have light from the top left, the outside image frame from the bottom left, the card frame…I don’t even know, all over the place ^^.

So, my question is, is there any interest in an all vector template at all? It will look slightly different for sure. I tried to make a showcase. Even though it is not really done yet (the metal gradients will need a lot more work), I thought it might fit here :)
Image Image
(left: new, right: old)

Alternatively, it would be easier to only redo the icons and clean up some minor things in the pixel template (for example, white see-troughs at the image frame, pure CMYK for the border (K=100%) – currently I think it is 400% ink. Maybe the logos only in vector…sorry I am starting to waffle.
By the way, for my showcase I recaptured the image from the HD version of the show and then increased the sharpness even further with the help of Topaz AI, it turned out so amazingly clear, I was so happy :D.


(edit: inserted old/current card image)
Last edited by rabyte on Sat Sep 04, 2021 9:30 am, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
 
By Iron Prime (Dan Van Kampen)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Moderator
#561361
That is purdy.

If memory serves: "back in the day" they actually mocked up frames in metal materials and photographed them to create parts of the cards . That may explain some of the inconsistent effects, lighting, and edges. :cross:

Hey all, we are running a "Warum-up" fo[…]

Still a few weeks left to get registered for the f[…]

Still a few weeks left to get registered for the f[…]

1EFQ: Game of two halves

Or maybe keep your unsolicited snark to yo[…]