The Prefect wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 3:26 pm
Armus wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 3:10 pm
Short response:
1e's , , and to an extent affiliations have spent the last decade getting woefully neglected. That's finally changing, and there should be a decent amount of new quadrant content coming out in the next 12-18 months.
However, that's the real risk of additional affiliations: the more you have, the more you have to sustain. If there's no strategic plan or manpower on what to do with these affiliations, then Under-resourced affiliations either get left untouched for a really long time and/or, you have to dilute your new sets to give a little something to everybody.
So maybe the bar to adding a new affiliation should be a little higher, since there's real tradeoffs and opportunity costs involved when you bring one in.
That feels like moving the goal post.
Resource allocation and demanding higher standards for new affiliations are two different things - unless the higher standards are instrumental in preventing the development of a new affiliation due to resource allocation concerns.
In other words, if you're saying that you don't have confidence that can effectively sustain new affiliations, and therefore we as a community need to create a high barrier for Design to overcome in order to discourage the development of said new affiliations, then that's a different argument from the one previously made. So, is that the argument that you are making?
If that is the argument being made, then as a former designer I would tell you it would be more intellectually honest to simply tell designers: no new affiliations, period. Then, none of us would have any expectation of the possibility and none of us would devote any time or resources to it. Because, even if we were able to come up with an idea so new and so amazing that everyone would universally agree that the affiliation would be great, we wouldn't be able to sustain it anyway if we did, in fact, have an unsurmountable allocation problem.
You asked for the 1e perspective. I gave it to you. There's a lot of history there that I didn't go into, but the resources concern is real. Also real: The practical limits of a new affiliation in terms of available screen material. IIRC, one of the problems the 1e crew has with
is that they've literally used all of the Vidiians that have ever appeared on screen. That forces some real creativity when making new Vidiian personnel. In some of my preliminary Design work in this area, we did find *some* workarounds, but there are practial limits.
And there's use cases even in 2e today. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't
running up against that same wall?
And actually,
is a really good use case for this whole discussion. Should it have ever been made? Maybe, maybe not. I could argue that it SHOUDLN'T have been made when it was, as it didn't bring anything new to the table.
Mouth of the Wormhole, Terok Nor took away the quadrant-hopping of
Mouth of the Wormhole, Deep Space 9 and replaced it with... nothing. There was a subset of mainly
,
, and
personnel that made up the core of the faction, but they didn't really have an identity... no mechanic (maybe dissident discard, but that was even more niche than
itself, and to operate effectively in the Decipher era, usually required a second HQ with a healthy number of dissidents), no flavor, no nothing.
And it showed. Terok Nor was probably one of the least played headquarters missions for most of the Decipher era. And why wouldn't it be? There wasn't much incentive for anyone to play it.
Now fast forward to (I can't believe I'm saying this)... Peak Performance. Say what you will about the execution of
Ruling Council but it at least gave Terok Nor something that was uniquely theirs. Even better, fast forward some more to
Balance of Terror, where Design built on
Tenuous Alliance and really fleshed out the identity of Terok Nor with the "Dilemma Mill" mechanic.
Now Terok Nor still isn't the most popular headquarters on the block, but it shows up occasionally, and makes for a nice meta curveball when it does. Add on the fact that it can benefit from the
Common suite of cards and it really starts to look like something all its own.
Now... how long did that whole process take? 11 years-ish? And of those 11 years, how many did TN sit fallow with no new support? That's really what I don't want to see.
And, believe it or not, I'm actually NOT against new affiliations as a whole, and nowhere did I say I was. I welcome the innovation a new affiliation can open up, whether it's a new mechanic, new flavor, or something else. But let's skip the 11 year stop/start of Terok Nor and instead start from a paradigm of "I'd like to see X Affiliation in the game (say, Vidiians for argument's sake). Cool. What would Vidiians look like in 2e? What would they do? How would they feel? Is there a gap in gameplay that they could thematically and flavorfully fill? etc."
Doing that sort of holistic analysis on the front end is more work, and there may or may not be the Design resources to do it - I can't speak first-hand to that one way or the other - but opportunity cost is still a thing no matter what you do. If you're designing Vidiians, what cards/mechanics/etc. for the current affiliations are you not working on?
That's not to say there's no way to do it, but I don't think I'm raising invalid concerns. You say more affiliations allow for "Whole expansions worth of story-telling and creative content that could keep the game vital and exciting for years to come - both to players and volunteers," and I actually could agree with that point, with the caveat of "If done correctly" in front of it. And that's been my whole case: doing it "correctly" involves the kind of holisitic look I described above, and if the conclusion reached is "Vidiians are a pretty color with a great template, let's give them some people, ships, and missions, and turn them loose!" then you're basically making 2003 Terok Nor. That's not going to realize that vision in the best way, if at all. Sure, those are all NECESSARY components, but they aren't in and of themselves, SUFFICIENT.
And if the answer to that Holistic analysis is "We don't have a good idea for a mechanic or identity, we just have another solver affiliation" then, that's ok too, but the best move might be tabling that affiliation and seeing if anything better develops down the road and revisiting it.
Maybe I'd be a lot less inherently resistant to the idea of new affiliations if there was an actual vision and strategy for the game from The Powers That Be, and/or if there was a known design process that was in place that enforced consideration of these types of angles. To my knowledge, none of that exists - The Director of Second Edition (@tjark) has been on record saying he wants to give his designers the opportunity to work on things they want to work on... which while admirable, does not demonstrate much of a strategic vision, to say nothing of a design process. That lack of framework and strategic direction, to me, poses the highest risk of such endeavors not being successful.
On that front, I'd love to be proven wrong.