[Armus]

Trek - both editions - has a lot more different cards in play that vary in important ways than mtg. If you have 10 creatures in play in mtg it’s a remarkable end game combo situation, and they’re probably clones or copies. In trek we just call that “turn two”.

[boromirofborg]

I’m not convinced that keyword reminder text is a good tradeoff. You learn how the keyword works after a few uses, but it sits there unused and distracting the eyes forever.

As a game teacher it’s also possible to tell someone to just ignore that word in bold, until it matters.

That's why most of the keywords cards have variants now, and if we ever did this in 1E/2E, I'd be a big advocate for both versions of a card.

[GooeyChewie]

Trek - both editions - has a lot more different cards in play that vary in important ways than mtg. If you have 10 creatures in play in mtg it’s a remarkable end game combo situation, and they’re probably clones or copies. In trek we just call that “turn two”.

Or depending on the deck, "the seed phase."

[Pazuzu]

Parsing a rulebook: when I went looking for whether my urza can reduce the madness cost of a spell I am discarding, it took 20 minutes and 4 reddit threads. And we gave up and said no. We didn't actually find an answer.

He does indeed reduce any cost. Here is the corresponding rule highlighted by me:

601.2f The player determines the total cost of the spell. Usually this is just the mana cost. Some spells have additional or alternative costs. Some effects may increase or reduce the cost to pay, or may provide other alternative costs. Costs may include paying mana, tapping permanents, sacrificing permanents, discarding cards, and so on. The total cost is the mana cost or alternative cost (as determined in rule 601.2b), plus all additional costs and cost increases, and minus all cost reductions.

Also, everygreen reminder texts are usually only printed in Core sets, as you can see here on Serra Angel. In Standard sets only new keywords have their reminder text (usually).

My experience is that Magic is much easier to comprehend, especially if you limit the card pool. The rules are super easier. Usually questions arise when two (or more) cards interact.

To be honest, I think Decipher's Star Trek CCG (especially First Edition, but in some extent also Second Edition) is not a very good game. Their Star Wars game on the other hand is imho even better than Magic. They just messed up the power creep and card types in the end

And just to make it crystal clear: I think the Continuing Committee did a tremendous job in improving the game!

[PantsOfTheTalShiar]

Today's Friday Question is actually a challenge:

"1E is easier than MtG: CHANGE MY MIND"

I have recently been learning Magic: the Gathering, the most popular CCG. I expected this to be easy, because I play First Edition, famously considered one of the most complicated and confusing games ever made.

I realize that I have been corrupted by several decades of "1E Brain," but I've come to believe this is a crock. MtG is way harder than First Edition. Setting up a "basic" novice game of MtG involves more overhead than a "basic" novice game of Trek.

There are lots of different ways to set up a "basic" game in both games, so this depends a lot on the details.

The stack is better defined in their rules, but more complex and counter-intuitive than 1E's chronological initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle. (It's also full of weird angle shots.)

Yeah, when people say that the stack is intuitive, they're wrong. When I was teaching Magic to friends in the 00s, the stack and attacking players instead of creatures were always where the biggest misconceptions were. Other CCGs tried to simplify those things away, but they ended up being worse games. The stack is well understood because it has been embraced for its ability to create fun and strategically interesting moments. Meanwhile, I get the sense that large portions of the 1E playerbase and design team treat 1E's timing system as an inconvenience that they have to put up with, rather than a potential source of fun and strategy.

Reading MtG cards requires you to memorize fifty thousand meaningless keywords that aren't explained on the cards (trample! vigilance! lifelink! horsemanship! flash! double strike! enrage! deposit!).

It sounds like the format you're playing is "decks someone made with some of their favorite cards." That format is going to skew towards cards that are one or more of the following: 1) old/nostalgic, 2) rare/powerful/complicated, or 3) fancy (i.e. alternate prints) ; and thus are less likely to have keyword reminder text. If you played limited or with pre-cons, you'd first of all be dealing with a MUCH smaller subset of keywords, and second of all be able to read the reminder text on at least the commons and uncommons.

First Edition never went too far down that deadly path, and has since reversed course anyway, so we only have like five total "magic words" left in the game. (Guramba, Cloaking Device, Intelligence, ???) Our cards actually say what they do; Magic wants you to memorize an annex first.

Eh, magic words or not, both games have vocabulary you have to learn. Stuff like capturing, matching commanders, etc. aren't explained on any cards.

I think we developed a reputation for complexity in part because our rulebook was so disorganized.

Agreed.

(...) After all, there are like 90,000 card specific rulings in Magic, but they aren't actually collected anywhere, like in a document you can actually print out, (like our Glossary); they're just posted on database pages for each individual card, one by one. And there's bazillions of them, far more than in our rulings. We work hard to make cards say what they do, and errata cards that don't.

Magic's approach of "just look up the card to find the ruling (or a link to the ruling)" is what I'd prefer in theory, as long as its kept up-to-date. I once I tried to look up a ruling for a Magic card and it wasn't there, but fortunately I thought to look up a similar card and found the ruling under that card.

...which is another thing! Magic doesn't errata its cards when wordings get updated; it just announces a wording update and expects you to look it up in the card database whenever you need the correct wording! That's no way to run a card game! Let me print the correct gametext on my card!

The only big difference with Magic is that they don't let users print updated cards on demand, because the cards are collectables. Magic cards get errata, you play them with the updated wordings, any subsequent printings will use the updated wording, and players can still use their existing cards. But WotC's not going to say, "Okay, Black Lotus has updated wording, everyone download and print off the new version." Invisible errata can be a pain, though, which is why power-level errata is incredibly rare in MTG.

Sure, 1E has plenty of strategic complexity. We can do all kinds of cool stuff on the spaceline, even stuff that's kind of weird, and our board state evolves to a point of high complexity much faster than Magic (because a lot of our complexity hits the table in the Facility Phase, rather than in the opening turns). But our complexity is, for the most part, printed right on the cards, in a relatively lightweight rules framework.

I would argue that the complexity that hits the table in the Facility Phase is more comprehension complexity than strategic complexity (though there is for sure some strategic complexity). For me, a big indicator of strategic complexity is how long it takes to make decisions. When players are seeding their handful of seven-line Incidents, there are few, if any, decisions of consequence. It rarely even matters what order those cards are seeded in. There still aren't many interesting decisions in the first couple turns of the game. Players are using all that text to play their personnel, download the personnel they need for their play/draw engines, and possibly download a ship, but the vast majority of those decisions are simple and/or have even been made before the game began.

The big place strategic complexity comes in (also where large chunks of time are spent!) is when players decide to attempt missions: what dilemmas they might expect, who to risk and who to protect, and this becomes especially complicated when the opponent is in a position to attack.

(Note that time spent != strategic complexity when the time is spent simply trying to understand the text of cards or the current game state. In one of our recent games, I remember making some decision that hinged on the stats of your Enterprise. The decision itself was simple once I knew the stats, it just took a little time to count up your [CMD] personnel and then add your other bonus(es).)

Also, just because the "rules are on the cards" doesn't mean that players want to be reading all of those cards.

Don't get me wrong, Magic is fun. (...)

This is the most important thing, though! The purpose of introductory games isn't to teach someone the rules, it's to show them that the game is fun; to make them want to play again! You told me once about our last Block tournament, and how one of the newbies understood the game, he just didn't find it fun. P.S. Let me know if you're gonna do an FNM or Prerelease so I can crash it.

I am just coming to believe that 1E is not as hard to understand as Magic -- and, more broadly, that 1E is not nearly as complex as our community has spent decades convincing itself that it is. (I include myself in that.)

Agree strongly with the part I bolded.

To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.

I have wished for a while that Rules would spend some effort on education instead of focusing 100% on changes. But don't be too hard on yourself, because "teaching people the game" isn't just the job of Rules but also Design and the players, and they haven't been doing their (our) jobs well either.

This week's challenge: change my mind! Convince me that, no, actually, First Edition, the so-called "CCG of Kings," really is harder to wrap your head around than the current card game market leader. Prove my unhinged rant wrong!

(Or, better yet, don't change my mind, just agree with my correct takes. )

I mean your rant is actually quite hinged and you have a lot of correct takes, I'm just not going to follow you all the way to saying that 1E is easier to learn. People can learn MTG not because it's so much less complicated than 1E, but because there are so many more resources for learning at all levels: products, decks, formats, events, videos, articles; from complete noob up to pro.

[Armus]

[FranklinKenter]

The stack is better defined in their rules, but more complex and counter-intuitive than 1E's chronological initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle. (It's also full of weird angle shots.)

1E's timing system is Magic's timing system with the following augmentations:
* Every single possible effect uses the stack and every ability generates one or more effects.
* Every effect generates a "about to" window as well as a "just" window.
* All triggered abilities and replacement effects are actually activated abilities that you can't activate unless its "valid response" condition is met.

Indeed, Magic has the same initiate-respond-resolve timing cycle just formalized in a slightly different way.

I would ask: What exactly is unintuitive about Magic's timing system? With that, I feel confident that whatever that is evermore present in 1E's timing system.

Reading MtG cards requires you to memorize fifty thousand meaningless keywords that aren't explained on the cards (trample! vigilance! lifelink! horsemanship! flash! double strike! enrage! deposit!). First Edition never went too far down that deadly path, and has since reversed course anyway, so we only have like five total "magic words" left in the game. (Guramba, Cloaking Device, Intelligence, ???) Our cards actually say what they do; Magic wants you to memorize an annex first.

1E does go down that path albeit in a worse way using icons moreso than ability keywords. Countdown Icons are like Vanishing, Hidden Agendas have well Hidden Agenda, Special Download is akin to "Partners with...", The Universal Icon is like anti-Legendary and so on. However, there is no way to determine or reference what an icon is without first determining the literal keyword for that icon. You can't control-F or google for "icon that looks like the back of a card" or "yellow pyramid" or so forth, so the. Worse over, these icons and keywords in 1E are found all other the card, they can be in the title ("HQ"), card type bar ([Q] cards), left side ([AU-1E], etc.), right side, lore (traits, etc.), skill box (Gurumba), special equipment box (Long-Range Shielding), different placing depending on the card type (Cloaking Device), or granted by a card (e.g., Counterpart). That's complex and confusing. In contrast, all of Magic's traits and keywords are found on the type line or upfront in the text box.

There is also a point to remember that keywording common abilities makes the game more intuitive. Magic's keyword system is intended to shortcut expressing abilities which are already allowed under the rules. Upon reading Magic's comprehensive rules, you will find that more than half of the ability keywords simply represent a trigger and/or static ability that could be written with more words. With some basic assumptions, keywords do not impose additional rules in and of themselves.

On this thread, 1E relies far more heavily on action and descriptor keywords moreso than Magic. Magic has about 75 or so terms; half of which are basic items ("Shuffle", "Activate", "Play", "Counter", "Search" etc.) and half are rare specialized to express a more complex, yet repeating (often set-specific) mechanic more concisely ("Enchanted", "Cycle", "Amass", "Manifest", "Populate", etc.). In many cases, the later of which typically has reminder text paraphrasing what it actually means and only appears when using cards from a specific set. In contrast, 1E uses these action and descriptor keywords with no reminder text and in many cases where it either not intuitive or not eminently clear based on their English meaning. What does "staffed" mean? "Unless..."? "Nullify..."? "download"? "commandeer"? "on planet"? "occupied"? and so on.... the list is actually much much much longer than you would think...

abduct/abducted
acquire / earn / artifact
adjacent
any
anywhere
alternate universe
artifact
assimilate/assimilated
at any time
away team
beam
become
Borg /
Botany Bay
cancel ("battle")
capture/ captured / Brig / rescue
card draw
cargo run
carry / carried
cloak / cloaking device
closest / furthest / far end
collective
combo dilemma / not repeatable
commandeer
commandeering attempt
compatible
convert to space
copy / version / different
corresponding
countdown
Counterpart
cumulative
cure
current objective
crew
damage / arrows
destroy in battle
different
disabled (ships)
disabled (personnel)
disappear
discard
do nothing but
double / add
download
each turn / every turn / full turn
end your turn
enigma icon
erase
"Everything there is destroyed" / location destruction
examine / unexamined / glance / peek
exchange
exposed
for free
Gurumba
"has a Q-Flash"
helps
here / there
hidden agenda
hit / direct hit
hive
/ holograms
homeworld
humanoid
if (dilemma)
ignore
immune
impersonator / infiltration
in play "for uniqueness only"
intelligence
intruder
"just"
kill / nullify / die / cancel
land / take off
life
Long-Range Scan Shielding
mortally wounded
most / strongest / highest
native
nemesis icon
Nor
Not Duplicatable
occupied
off-line
on planet
outpost
opposing
opposite / universe
present
prevent
phasing / phasing cloak
playing an affiliation
probe
quadrant icons
quarantine
reduced
region
related
relocate (ship) / hurl
reverse
region
related
repair
report
report with crew
requirements (dilemma)
return to (hand)
Rogue Borg
same (species)
scout
seed
selection
self-controlling cards
skill-sharing
staffed
"spaceline location"
space facility
special download
stasis
station
steal / stolen
stopped
stunned
suspends play
take off
team
time travel
"Timeline disrupted in 2063"
to get past
tow
transporters ("does not have")
Transporter Skill
tribble
trouble
unattempted
universal
unless (dilemma)
use ("does not use")
you have ("in play")
your / opponent's

I think we developed a reputation for complexity in part because our rulebook was so disorganized. In fact, for many years we didn't have a rulebook; we had a Glossary, which you had to study like Talmud because information was disorganized and impossible to find. A good chunk of the game, for a long time, was handed down by oral tradition, rather than by any actual black-and-white rules. This lack of organization made our pretty simple game appear mind-numbingly complicated to outsiders, but actually we just needed to write things down better. Since the CC began, though, we've been moving in that direction, and now we're doing (in some ways) better than Magic.

It still is this way, albeit, not as bad as it has been in the past. There are at least four different sources for rules: The rulebook, the glossary, the dilemma resolution guide, and "blue text." There are many cases where the totality of the rules is found in more than one of these documents. For instance, in the rulebook, it says that you can battle against opposing disabled personnel and that captured personnel are disabled; a simple logical connection (added to the fact the rulebook preface says I should not have to read the glossary if I understand what the rulebook says) yields that I can attack personnel I have captured; however, only the glossary says I can't. Similarly, the glossary says that cards "come into play only through a special Q-Continuum side deck" but its the rules that specifically say they can only be stocked Q-Continuum side deck." If one only read the glossary, one would conclude you could stock them your deck even if the cannot be played. In another example, the rules and glossary make it clear that prohibitions on attempting and solving missions are distinction, yet according to the Dilemma Resolution Guide, I Tried To Warn You ends an active mission attempt even though its game text doesn't say so.

After all, there are like 90,000 card specific rulings in Magic, but they aren't actually collected anywhere, like in a document you can actually print out, (like our Glossary); they're just posted on database pages for each individual card, one by one.
And there's bazillions of them, far more than in our rulings...

With 21 very specific exceptions codified into the official rules themselves, there are no "card specific rules". Those "90,000 card specific rulings" in the gatherer database simply reënforce the exisiting interactions between the card text and the rules. The Magic rules and card templating are designed in such a way that one can design most any potential card and the rules already determine comprehensively how the card works. With that, you don't need any card specific rulings and you do not ever need to print them all out. Indeed, those "90,000 card specific rulings" are typically generated when the card is released in the expansions release notes, and generally copy-and-paste the relevant mechanics' clarifications into the ruling database. You can find the same clarifications over multiple cards sharing the same mechanics- cards that copy spells have common clarification; cards with flashback; cards that meld; cards that have megamorph; cards that double damage; etc.

This is a good time to mention something: 1E has a horrible habit trying to "appear simpler" by "putting things on the cards" and/or reducing entries in the efforts to For a concrete example, Abandon Ship! used to clarify what qualified as "reduced" explicitly in its entry, now it unapologetically refers readers to the "attribute modifiers" and lets them figure it out for themselves instead of answering the question directly in the entry (let alone the fact that is is only one of two cards that uses the conditional "reduced"). Yes, it is redundant, but this is a case where more could be less in a good way and where less is more in a bad way. To emphasize the effect of deleting an removing entires, the entry for Harness Particle 010 used to emphasize that the 10 points added with Resistance Is Futile was doubled; this was removed for being "redundant" with the "modifiers" rule, but then later, it was ruled and codified that it doesn't because the modifiers "don't happen at the same time" (which is quite frankly something I don't understand). Similar things happened with The Trial Never Ended: there was a lot of effort to "put the mechanic on the cards." Charlie even alluded to the length of the glossary entry as one of the motivating factors for the expansion. In the end, the change resulted in lots of errata and card text changes but still have unresolved questions (e.g., do cards go to your point box; can you download from "face-down" cards in a side deck, etc.) and perhaps more unintended consequences. And the gameplay additions could have been added without all of the errata and changes. I fail to see how the juice was worth the squeeze or even if it made things "simpler." I am sure there are dozens of examples where entries of the glossary were removed out of an effort of "simplicity" that have actually resulted in more confusion.

In our electronic age, there is little reason to remove or change a glossary entry unless it is actually wrong or otherwise confusing. Indeed, that is the philosophy of "all of those individual rulings." They don't do any harm by being there, they are created anyways for the release notes when they are released, so why not put them on the webpage for all to see?

Hence, comparing the number and quantity of "rulings" between 1E and Magic is not a far comparison at all. The release notes for Magic are designed to preëmptively answer the most common questions from cards that are not completely evident from the text itself to a novice (e.g., the type of player that would play at a prerelease) based on another consolidated authoritative source that is comprehensive. 1E does not do this nor attempts to do this. Worse, 1E actively reduces or eliminate entries in an effort to "be simpler;" that is anything but.

... We work hard to make cards say what they do, and errata cards that don't.

I am not going to say that you don't, but it is pretty hard to beat Magic with a full time team dedicated to rules.

With relatively rare exception (and even with the exception of creature types), the Oracle card text follows the spirit of the original printed card within the current rules. Occasionally, a card is errata'd to bring the card into line with modern rules or templating. Objectively, you do not need to ever "reprint" your card.

Now some may point out that Magic made some blanket errata when augmenting the rules for newer card types (e.g. Planeswalkers). They changed "target creature or player" to "any target" and made all Planeswalkers Legendary. Of course, that could be confusing and does not do what the original card says, but at least the changes are consistent. In contrast, 1E has been making similar changes for example, by changing references to "outpost" on one-shot effects to "facility" (e.g., Bayron Buildup and Go Back Whence Thou Camest), but these changes only occur when one gets around to them and if one thinks they are appropriate. That's more confusing. 1E should change all references of one-shot effects referring to "outpost" from the PAQ era to "facility."

Overall, I would say Magic has less than 15 cards with what we would consider "major" or "moderate" errata. In constrast, 1E has approximately 100 cards that have abilities that were never on the original card in the first place or lost abilities that were on the original card. Q does not discard dilemmas, The Next Emination has a countdown box, etc. In terms of individual card changes, that's definitiveily more confusing and more complex than anything Magic is doing.

Sure, 1E has plenty of strategic complexity. We can do all kinds of cool stuff on the spaceline, even stuff that's kind of weird, and our board state evolves to a point of high complexity much faster than Magic (because a lot of our complexity hits the table in the Facility Phase, rather than in the opening turns). But our complexity is, for the most part, printed right on the cards, in a relatively lightweight rules framework.

As alluded earlier, "print[ing it] right on the cards" does not necessarily make the game easier to learn, more complete or less complex.

Also, I would suspect that every element of Magic's rules has a more complicated analog in 1E. Here are just some examples:

Magic has a deck and optional side decks using cards specifically dedicated for that side deck (e.g., schemes, contraptions, attractions, and vanguard avatars), but those side decks are rarely played and intended for casual variants; and even so, those cards work just like similar cards within the rules. In contrast, 1E has five different side decks with four card types that are allowed in general play, and most of them use cards unlike other cards within the rules (The opponent plays your cards, Tribbles play uncontrolled, Tactics are there own beast and Dilemmas get downloaded when they are ordinarily suppose to seed).

Magic has card status tapped/untapped, 1E has "stopped/"unstopped"; however, the effect of being stopped is far less clear or intuitived as compared to being tapped in Magic. Further, 1E has the other statuses (a state of an object not otherwise continuously granted by another card, typically indicated by the physical state of the card) present in Magic- these include phased/disappeared, face-up/face-down, and flipped/unflipped, but 1E has many more including disabled, captured, in stasis, cloaked, phased, lost, etc. This is to its locational status (e.g. where it is with respect to the spaceline) and relational status ("aboard" or "on").

Magic and 1E both have battle, but in 1E there are two distinct types of battle; one of those battle types uses an entire dedicated card type (tactics).

...which is another thing! Magic doesn't errata its cards when wordings get updated; it just announces a wording update and expects you to look it up in the card database whenever you need the correct wording!
...
That's no way to run a card game! Let me print the correct gametext on my card!

They update the official wording of the cards, announce them, add them to the database and if appropriate, use the updated wording on physical copies when they are next printed. If that isn't errata, I don't know what is. To add, that is almost the exact same thing 1E does.

Nothing is stopping you from printing the "official game text" on the card and using it. But again, you really don't need to.

In this regard, the big differences between 1E and MtG are: 1) Magic's errata have a minuscule effect on the card and the game, so players except for absolute rules experts do not make a big deal about any changes issued to the cards. 2) They don't provide an "updated physical copy" of the card unless it gets reprinted; this is simply one of the caveats of making a physically marketed game.

I am just coming to believe that 1E is not as hard to understand as Magic -- and, more broadly, that 1E is not nearly as complex as our community has spent decades convincing itself that it is. (I include myself in that.) To the extent that we still find it complicated, that's more because of bad communication by the rules documents (and thus the Rules Committee) than because we're doing anything especially Byzantine.

By almost any measure 1E is more complex and harder to learn than Magic- indeed, as illustrated several times, every aspect of Magic does exist in 1E, but in almost all cases, is more involved.

I would agree that 1E is not as complicated as it looks, but it is still more complicated than Magic are requires more intentionality to learn, master, and become an expert in the rules. Maybe not an order of magnitude harder, but still harder.

Other points:
1E's "basic" rulebook is 32 pages in text compared to Magic's 9 pages. 1E needs a shorter, simpler, basic rulebook

1E's rules lack a truly comprehensive system for handling abilities. Part of the perceived simplicity of 1E's timing system is that, quite frankly, it isn't comprehensively-defined. A huge portion of Magic's rules are dedicated to determining, with precision, how spells and abilities are handled- which is why it looks complicated. Examples of this nature are alluded to in my first "21 questions" thread.

1E doesn't have any apparent beginner-level decks. There should a nice simpler package with decks and scripts that teaches the game while showcasing the 1E experience with. I would go further, I make it so that every expansions was designed around two balanced competing decks- this way player do not have to invest in building interesting decks and there could be cards designed for the scenario that may not otherwise be interesting in typical constructed play.

[BCSWowbagger]

On the other hand, I have gotten exactly what I hoped for out of this thread: long, detailed arguments about where 1E falls short in comparison to Magic and where it excels. This is what you get when the Rules Manager asks a good 1EFQ.

I gots a regional tomorrow and have been preparing for it this week (while trying to get Project Parachute and Project En Garde approved, while playing in the Online Regional, while preparing the June Rules docket), so I haven't had much to say in recent days, but I've enjoyed these replies a lot -- even the ones I disagree with.

[Armus]

On the other hand, I have gotten exactly what I hoped for out of this thread: long, detailed arguments about where 1E falls short in comparison to Magic and where it excels. This is what you get when the Rules Manager asks a good 1EFQ.

I gots a regional tomorrow and have been preparing for it this week (while trying to get Project Parachute and Project En Garde approved, while playing in the Online Regional, while preparing the June Rules docket), so I haven't had much to say in recent days, but I've enjoyed these replies a lot -- even the ones I disagree with.

Happy for you tho.

Look, I'm as guilty as most nerds (if not moreso!) when it comes to Wall o' (the Wisp) text posts. But as I've said many times on here in various contexts, if I wanted to play Magic, I'd go play Magic.

I been there. It's been literally a quarter of a century, but I been there. Still haven't felt much pull to go back.

So I begrudge nobody their nerd discussions/debates/shitpost fests, just that I'm clearly not the target audience for this particular one.

[jadziadax8]

I tried Magic about 20 years ago. Picture me as Drusilla saying, "Bored now."

I've since come to the conclusion that the reason I didn't care for it is it was too simple. Gimme Trek (any flavor) any day.

[PantsOfTheTalShiar]

Also James, I think the big thing is that you had 20 years to learn 20 years of 1E mechanics, while now you're trying to learn 20 years of MTG mechanics in like 1 year.

[BCSWowbagger]

There's far more in this thread than I'm probably ever going to manage to respond to. Don't be too surprised if I bookmark this thread and respond to some comment six months or a year or three from now.

One takeaway for me is that 1E rules need to be better specified. They're getting easier to find, they're getting easier to read, but they aren't comprehensively covering all cases, and that's a big problem for a set of rules -- a problem that makes itself felt as complexity or confusion. It makes players feel dumb when it's actually the rules writers who are dumb.

One aside point:

1E has a horrible habit trying to "appear simpler" by "putting things on the cards" and/or reducing entries in the efforts to For a concrete example, Abandon Ship! used to clarify what qualified as "reduced" explicitly in its entry, now it unapologetically refers readers to the "attribute modifiers" and lets them figure it out for themselves instead of answering the question directly in the entry (let alone the fact that is is only one of two cards that uses the conditional "reduced"). [...] I am sure there are dozens of examples where entries of the glossary were removed out of an effort of "simplicity" that have actually resulted in more confusion. In our electronic age, there is little reason to remove or change a glossary entry unless it is actually wrong or otherwise confusing.

I want to speak to this because it's come up a couple of times, and I'll probably need to speak to it again at some point.

Some instances where Glossary entries or other rules text was streamlined has indeed been because of the impulse you describe: a pursuit of "simplicity" that's achieved by minimizing the number of distinct rules and rulings that we have. There has been a mindset around 1E that we can make the game easier by (basically) just deleting words. That's a mindset I've shared in the past -- enthusiastically. (Zinno always cautioned me against it.)

In my defense, at a certain time in the game's history, I think there were actually good reasons for this mindset. There's more to be said about that, but not here. (Maybe a Rules Soapbox.) However, circumstances have changed a lot over the years, and there is no longer good reason for the Rules Committee to try and make the Glossary as short as possible as fast as possible. If a ruling is helping people understand what a card does, leave it in place.

Yet we still delete Glossary entries, probably more often than we add them! Let's skip past your example of Abandon Ship!, because the Glossary edit you're describing happened in 2002 and I can't really speak to Decipher's motivations for it. But we last made major Glossary deletions just seven months ago, in December 2022, and in the process greatly reduced the Elim Garak entry (which used to be much longer), plus we effectively deleted the longest and maybe the best-known Glossary entry in history, dilemma resolution. So, Abandon Ship! aside, we're clearly deleting Glossary stuff. What gives?

Well, as of last November, there was an explanation of dilemma resolution in the Rulebook, and there was another discussion of dilemma resolution in the Glossary. These two texts were very different, but they conveyed almost identical information. That almost ended up being a problem. First, there were little bits and pieces of rulings that only appeared in one document or the other, but not both. Second, there were subtle wording differences that, in corner cases, led readers to one conclusion while reading the Rulebook, and to the opposite conclusion while reading the Glossary. (The specific issue that forced our hand was what happens to a dilemma if the attempting crew or Away Team disappears mid-resolution, but, if it hadn't been that, it woulda been something else.) We needed to reconcile the two entries.

In theory, we could have reconciled them while keeping them both. We would have just needed to update the Rulebook with all the Glossary information and the Glossary with all the Rulebook information, while standardizing wordings for corner cases. Doing that would have been slightly more than double the work, which is a strain on a team that frankly doesn't have all that many volunteer hours to go around. Still, you could make the argument that preserving this Glossary entry might have been worth the extra work...

...except we know, from unhappy experience, that having two very different texts explaining the same rules is very hard to maintain, in the long run. It's almost inevitable that there will be small but (in unforeseen corner cases) significant differences between them, and we'd just have to keep doing this heavy lifting every time someone discovered one. That's too much for us.

In short, having identical dilemma resolution rules in two places is not maintainable for our team. We don't have the manpower. I don't think that's the only reason it's a good idea to put generally applicable rules in the Rulebook and remove them from the Glossary, but it's a strong practical one.

Elim Garak's Glossary entry got streamlined for a related reason. His entry used to include a ruling on how his special skill worked. Only... the ruling in his card entry did not seem to match up with how the dilemma resolution rule described the exact same special skill -- and, the thing is, we didn't even realize this separate, contradictory ruling was out there until we were deep in research. We ultimately updated the ruling and we put the updated ruling in selections.

We could have kept a copy of the updated ruling in Elim Garak's entry. Instead, we updated Elim Garak's entry to cross-reference selections. We did this because we knew that, if we ever tweaked the selections ruling again, we would forget to update Elim Garak's entry (or at least one of several entries that depend on that same ruling) -- exactly as we had already forgotten Elim Garak's entry until we were deep in research on dilemma resolution rules. Our forgetfulness would lead the rules to contradict, which is pretty bad.

A better Rules Team with more members and more hours could presumably maintain copies of the same ruling on 3 or 5 separate card pages, but that isn't us. As a result, we generally keep any given ruling in exactly one place. If the ruling applies to only one card, that place can be the card entry. If the ruling applies to multiple cards, it goes somewhere else -- maybe a more general Glossary entry, but ultimately probably the Rulebook.

So when a Glossary entry gets deleted or streamlined today, and there's no clarifying errata involved (which is a whole separate discussion I won't try to get into tonight), it's not generally because of a fixation on "simplicity" at the expense of clarity -- at least not these days. It's generally because we know our limits, and we don't believe we can do a good job maintaining a single rule or ruling in more than one place (perhaps additional reasons, but that one for sure). We plan to continue removing Glossary entries that, for example, cover material already covered in the Rulebook, and pray to the gods of proofreading that we don't accidentally introduce the very bugs we're trying to avoid when we do so. (We do, sometimes, screw up the merger, but we take comfort in the fact that those errors are one-offs, not permanent ongoing issues, as they would be if we tried maintaining two rules texts in parallel.)

On the other hand, when a Glossary entry is merely redundant with gametext (not other rules text), that's not a problem, in my view. We used to remove Glossary entries if they simply repeated the card more slowly, because we deemed them unnecessary. I don't think we've done that for quite a while. (Correct me if I am wrong about that.) I actually like those entries! I think explaining the gametext more clearly is what the Glossary is ultimately for.

We even added a purely explanatory, clearly unnecessary Glossary entry recently, for Life's Simple Pleasures... although I'll admit that some members of the Rules Committee are still uncomfortable with doing that as a general practice. (The Glossary still has too many places where the entry contradicts the gametext -- for example, when Genetronic Replicator says the 2 MEDICAL can't be dying themselves--and some on the R.C. are understandably uncomfortable with adding entries that explain gametext without removing, or at least signposting, entries that defy gametext.)

I hope this gives some insight into the decisions we've made to remove or streamline redundant Glossary entries, even in this electronic age. The "simplicity equals brevity" mindset has been true in the past (me included) (and I think there were defensible reasons for it at the time), but now it's more about the maintenance costs of keeping the same rule or ruling in multiple places over the long haul. I hope it makes more sense, even if you still disagree.

To emphasize the effect of deleting an removing entires, the entry for Harness Particle 010 used to emphasize that the 10 points added with Resistance Is Futile was doubled; this was removed for being "redundant" with the "modifiers" rule, but then later, it was ruled and codified that it doesn't because the modifiers "don't happen at the same time" (which is quite frankly something I don't understand).

This is just an example you were using to explain your main objection, and I think I understood your main objection, so this example is just a side issue... but it did confuse me, so I wanted to follow up.

I can't find evidence that the first two steps of your example actually happened. From the documents I checked (Glossaries 1.7, 1.8, 1.9.3, 1.9.4, 1.9.5, 1.9.6, and the current 2.4.6), the Harness Particle 010 entry never clarified that the 10 points added with RiF were doubled. That clarification was never removed for redundancy, as you said it was, because the clarification never existed in the first place.

The Rules Committee did eventually rule on the issue in the 2011, and that ruling did eventually make its way into the Glossary (in 1.9.5, dated 2018), where it still lives today... but I believe Rules made a thorough search for any prior rulings at the time of the ruling, couldn't find any precedent then, and I can't find any today. Had the R.C. found contrary precedent, I'm confident it would have ruled the other way.

That said, you've been around a lot longer than I have, and I may simply be looking in the wrong place, which is why I wanted to ask: did I miss something here? If so, what?

(P.S. The ruling is that HP010 doesn't double RiF because they RiF aren't "simultaneous." As you note, this doesn't actually make a lot of sense; the modifier order rule doesn't say anything about simultaneity.

But, at the time of the ruling, in 2011, the doubling rule did say that it only applied "when numerical values... are simultaneously modified", and Rules Master Jordan ruled accordingly. When the doubling rule was later rewritten as the modifer-order rule, the "simultaneity" thing was dropped. "Simultaneous" seemed to imply that you applied modifiers in chronological order and only used the Set-Add-Multiply framework if the modifiers were all simultaneous, which... well, we thought that was both against precedent and bad design. But, when the "simultaneity" thing dropped out of the rule, nobody thought to go back and revisit the ruling on Harness Particle + Resistance is Futile, which had depended on that concept!

I'll tell ya: I did final Glossary drafting for both the HP010 entry and the modifier order entry, but it was years apart, and the connection never occurred to me until you made me go looking for it just now. So HP010 is actually maybe a decent example of why maintaining an ever-evolving set of rules and rulings is hard, and why we want to keep them in as few places as possible, so we don't accidentally screw them up in one place by updating them in another.

...And now I guess I need to go add HP010 to the Rules docket for July or August, because I'm not sure that ruling should remain on the books given changes in the underlying rules.)