Design Log: Stardate 02.19.2003

The Personnel Department, Part 2

Last design log, we looked at how the top half of the personnel cards had changed (card titles, uniqueness, classifications, and species) between First and Second Editions. But there's a lot more packed into the lower half of the card, which is the subject of today's log. For the sake of variety, I'll use a different pair of cards to illustrate the changes. (I'll bet you were wondering when I'd get a Romulan into these articles, weren't you?)

The Lure of the Lore

As with other card types, personnel no longer have separate lore and game text (skills) boxes. The lore hasn't disappeared, but has been moved to the bottom of the combined text box, where it can use any space not needed for the character's skills and abilities. But more important for gameplay than where it's located is what's in it – or rather, what isn't in it, namely, gameplay-relevant characteristics. My January 6, 2003 Design Log, Caution: Unloading Zone, talked about the features that were "unloaded" from the lore, like species, gender, ranks and titles, and matching commander status. As we saw yesterday, species has been diverted to its own "box" under the card picture; gender is no longer utilized for gameplay purposes, and the rest are now keywords.

Without the constraints of having to shoehorn gender, species, military rank, and bartender/cook/dabo girl occupations into three lines, our designers can actually say something interesting in the lore, and can even use relevant quotations from the scripts, something nearly impossible in First Edition.

Keywords are the Key

Besides improving the lore, this also improves gameplay: you don't have to figure out if the lore is "close enough" to allow a character to be considered an admiral, member of the Romulan underground, matching commander, or one of the 30-odd other gameplay-relevant characteristics (most of which only became relevant several expansions after the character was printed). If a personnel is an assassin for gameplay purposes, he'll have the Assassin keyword. If he is to be considered the commander of a ship, he'll have the Commander keyword. And so on. Note that this also means a complex character could have as many keywords as necessary – you're not limited to whatever can be crammed into those three lines of lore in coherent sentence fragments.

So Vreenak's title of Senator becomes a logical keyword, and is no longer necessary in either his lore or his card title. And rather than a dry recital of facts, his lore becomes a quote which tells us something about the man and his opinions.

Skilled Labor

The other big chunk of text that's in the text box is of course the character's skills and abilities. "Abilities" is a new term in Second Edition, but not a new concept: abilities encompass what used to be known as "special skills" (which included special downloads). Now, a card that refers to a character's skills means just that – skills, not abilities. There's no need to have a rule to tell us in what circumstances "skills" includes or excludes special skills, because there is no such thing as special skills.

Interestingly, Vreenak has inherited from his First Edition incarnation exactly the same (regular) skills (though not in the same order). Many characters have seen alterations to their skill sets, notably the transfer of the classification into skill form (which didn't happen with Vreenak because V.I.P. isn't a skill), but Vreenak appears to have been just right to begn with. His ability, however, is quite different from the old special skill; while the old Senator Vreenak had a special download for a Romulan treaty, the new Vreenak gets a "mess with your opponent's hand" ability. Makes quite a difference when the designers have more than two lines to work with for skills!

It may at first appear that one of Vreenak's skills has changed, but it's in name only; the Romulan-specific Tal Shiar skill has been merged with Klingon Intelligence, the Cardassians' Obsidian Order, and the Federation's Section 31 to yield a non-affiliation-specific skill of Intelligence that can have the same uses without requiring cards to include a laundry list just to refer to what is essentially the same skill.

A few other skills have changed names and/or merged: Astrophysics and Stellar Cartography are merged into Astrometrics, Computer Skill is now Programming, Transporter Skill is Transporters, and Empathy has become Telepathy. Most of the changes were to make uniformly single-word skills.

Sneakier, Dumber, and Weaker?

The bottom-of-the-card change is a bit more subtle because visually there's no difference other than the elimination of the blue-green-red boxes for the attributes in favor of the affiliation-color background for all three. The three attributes are still called Integrity, Cunning, and Strength and appear in the same order on the cards. The difference is in the values – overall, personnel attributes appear to have dwindled, with Vreenak, for example, dropping from 7-8-5 to 4-6-5. No, he didn't really become more devious or dumber; the designers just devised a rational system of personnel attributes on a fixed scale of 1 to 10.

Whereas some attributes in First Edition, particularly Strength, just seemed to keep going up, Second Edition attributes are thoroughly planned. Designer Evan Lorentz says they developed "mini-essays" describing the charcteristics expected of a personnel with an Integrity of 3, a Cunning of 9, or a Strength of 7 – each of the 10 levels for each attribute. "For example, a character who would try to get away with something if he thought nobody was looking would be a candidate for an Integrity of 4," says Evan, "And he could have Treachery, but wouldn't necessarily. On the other hand, any Integrity above 4 won't have Treachery." What would be an example of a personnel who might be assigned Integrity 4? "Tom Paris from the very early days of Voyager, or your 'typical' Romulan, would likely be a 4."

It turns out that's not quite the slur on Romulans that it might seem, as Evan says the typical "normal" personnel attributes fall in the range of 4, 5, or 6, with an overall average slightly over 5. So a typical Romulan with Integrity 4 isn't all that bad – you have to be exceptionally lacking in morals to merit a 3 or less, and a veritable paragon of virtue to hit 7 to 10.

(All this applies only to what will actually be printed on the cards, by the way – it's still possible to raise an attribute above 10 with appropriate equipment or other cards, and they can be reduced to zero as well.)

Away With Away Teams

Two last items aren't anything that appear on (or disappeared from) personnel cards, but rather have to do with the disappearance from the rules and other cards of a couple of terms referring to personnel. First, you may have noticed a lack of references to "Away Teams" and "crews". These were pretty arbitrary distinctions that didn't accomplish much other than generating FAQs. For example, Away Teams used to be only on planets – until it became possible to board an enemy ship, and we realized that "crew" wasn't an appropriate term for a boarding party. And then there were the Space/Planet dilemmas that apparently only affected the Away Team (thus needing errata), and the Genetronic Replicator that only kept your personnel from breathing their last if they were planetside or – oddly enough – aboard your opponent's ship, but not aboard your own.

So the designers decided that it didn't make any difference what you called them. A dilemma would affect your personnel who were attempting the mission. If it was a planet mission, they had to be on the planet; if it was a space mission, they had to be aboard your ship. Other cards would affect your personnel "present". So the group could be defined without needing to be called a crew or an Away Team.

The second term in this category is our old favorite, "reporting for duty." In First Edition, personnel, ships, and equipment were "reported", while other cards were "played." Of course, reporting just meant "playing a personnel (ship, equipment) card." Why have two terms, confusing new players into thinking there was something unusual about playing a personnel card? So personnel cards are now "played" just like other cards, and "reporting" is no more.

More FAQ Attrition

Today's tips for First Edition players jumping the divide to Second Edition:

Savor the flavor, but when it comes to gameplay relevance, ignore the lore. The meat is in the keywords.
Skills are skills, and abilities are abilities, and never the twain shall meet.
Your Romulans aren't more treacherous, Klingons dumber, or Feds punier than before; they just top out at 10 instead of the sky being the limit, so the scale is compressed.
The rules police won't come knocking on your door if you say you're beaming up your Away Team, or if you nostalgically exclaim "Worf, reporting for duty!" as you slap the card on the table. But you may get some very suspicious looks from the newbies.

Although it's really hard to say just how much these changes, plus those discussed yesterday, would let us leave out of the rules (besides the obvious glossary entries, a lot of 1E card-specific rulings exist just because of the eliminated/simplified concepts), a very rough guess is 4 to 5 pages.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

February 19, 2003

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