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:
FranklinKenter wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 3:05 pm
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.)