Design Log: Stardate 07.01.2003

A little over six years ago, I got an email from a fellow STCCG player and card reviewer who went by the unlikely handle of "Mot the Barber," proposing a collaboration on a joint 10th installment of my Romulan Reviews and his Useless Card Reviews. "Mot and the Major's Useless Romulan Review #10" was the beginning of both our friendship and our joint and separate journeys through the ranks of Ambassadors, World Championship Finalists, prolific card extra writers, playtesters, rules gurus, tournament judges, and Decipher employees. I am very pleased to welcome as a guest writer for this final installment of the Star Trek CCG All Good Things Design Log series that same Mot the Barber, who now designs (under the unlikely name of Evan Lorentz) the very cards that he used to review.

– Kathy McCracken (Major Rakal)
Star Trek CCG Intelligence Officer

Salon, and Thanks for All the Snips

by Evan Lorentz ("Mot the Barber")
TCG Studio Designer

For just 40 cards, there's a lot I could say about All Good Things... But it seems appropriate, given the screen name I often use, that I talk about one card in particular, In for a Trim.

I've been going by "Mot the Barber" online since early 1996, months before the release of Q-Continuum. Briefly, in case you haven't heard the story, I was posting for the first time on the Decipher BBS, and I wanted to have a cool handle that would make people notice my post. A friend of mine near the keyboard rifled through my card binder and selected Mot the Barber for me. Okay, maybe not "cool," but definitely strange enough to get noticed. I eventually was "noticed" enough to become a playtester, so that all worked out pretty well, I guess.

One of the things that I thought would be cool about being a playtester would be that I might get to find out what the ultimate resolution of the "Barbering joke" was going to be, started with Mot the Barber and Mot's Advice, and continued on Barber Pole after I'd selected my handle.

By that point though, Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh (the original designers of Star Trek CCG) were no longer involved in the design of expansions. They'd moved on, and they'd taken whatever plans they had for Barbering with them. Through Bill Martinson (lead designer at that time), I heard second-hand what he thought they'd had in mind:

ARTIFACT
MOT'S SCISSORS
If you have Mot the Barber, Mot's Advice, and Barber Pole in play, "trim" your opponent's score in half (round down). Discard artifact.

Well, true or not, it seemed an interesting idea. But remember this concept was dreamt up roughly around the time of Q-Continuum, when only two more sets (Holodeck Adventures and All Good Things...) were planned to follow. Even as of First Contact, so much had changed about the game that this concept had developed a number of problems.

We now had Assign Mission Specialists to let you start the game with Mot. There was the Q's Tent to easily access the parts of the combo. There were a lot more ways to get "negative points," making it possible for you to actually trim a player's score upward. There was Q's Planet to make getting the artifact far easier than originally intended. There was the Borg affiliation, which would be immune to the point loss – unless the card were amended to include them, in which case it would very likely put a Borg player in a no-win situation.

All of this, and the fact that even Bill didn't seem too sure this was what was originally planned for the Barbering conclusion. In any case, the designers had big enough issues on their plate, adding Deep Space Nine, the Bajorans, Cardassians, and Ferengi to the game, and so much more. Barbering was put away, and didn't emerge for many years.

Fast forward to 2000, and the beginning of development on Enhanced Premiere. (By this point, I was an employee of Decipher, though not yet a full-time part of the design team.) You may be interested to know that the "Warp Speed" concept was not the original plan for Enhanced Premiere. At first, the product was going to be very much in a similar vein to Enhanced First Contact – some fun and powerful cards that "might have been in" Premiere. Once the idea of a fun and fast-paced rules set for Star Trek CCG was hit upon, several cards in development were scrapped and replaced with cards to make that format possible (like the combo dilemmas and missions with built-in outposts). One of those scrapped cards went a little something like this:

INCIDENT
"BARBERING"
Seeds or plays on table. Once per game, if you have Mot the Barber, Mot's Advice, and Barber Pole in play, you may "snip" open a sealed Premiere expansion pack. Score the points in each point box of each card, then place all those cards out-of-play.

Basically, the line of thought was that Add Distinctiveness from Enhanced First Contact was a prototype for an "open a pack" card that we would do in any "Enhanced" product we would release for Star Trek, and that the Barbering wrap-up would be the pack opener for Enhanced Premiere. And it seemed kind of neat that you would get 45 points if you were lucky enough to pull a Borg Ship, or even 15 for Cytherians or 10 for Barclay's Protomorphosis Disease. Still, the whole idea was probably too random (read: not reliable) for most players, and it may have been just as well the idea got pushed aside for Warp Speed.

From there, Star Trek CCG launched into Voyager territory, so for two sets, Barbering was not given another thought. Then along came Holodeck Adventures. (By now, I was a full-fledged member of the TCG group, and had worked on several Star Trek sets.) What a great place to tie up Barbering, we figured. Lots of people would be expecting some fulfillment of broken links, since the set itself was something of a broken link, releasing six years after it was originally announced. Barbering went through several minor twists during development of the set, but the general core of each version looked like this:

INCIDENT
I'M A BARBER, NOT A MIRACLE WORKER
Seeds or plays on table. Barber Pole and Mot's Advice play for free; once per game you may download one. Each turn, each Barbering personnel may share one skill (two if Barber Pole in play) except Miracle Worker, from another personnel present. If you have Barbering in play and opponent has >50 points, you may discard incident to choose up to half the cards in your draw deck to "trim" (discard), then reshuffle.

A lot going on here – but I guess we figured we owed it something big after the long wait. Part one of the card was a souped-up version of an idea mentioned very late in the design of Enhanced Premiere, with the thinking that whatever tied up Barbering should actually make use of the skill (unlike the predecessors, which named the various card, but left the skill itself irrelevant). Part two of the card was loosely formed around the concept that if you were "late in a game" (which we took as your opponent having 50 or more points), you could improve your critical upcoming draws by thinning out your own deck of cards you didn't want.

Neither one of these ideas really went over well, though. The first part of the card was extremely convoluted and could be a real tracking nightmare with enough copies of Mot's Advice in play (or even worse, the Borg Queen with a selected skill of Barbering). The second part was just too "high concept," having little practical functionality. There weren't enough things you could do in thinning your own deck, and in many games there would only be one or two turns between the time you became eligible to use the text and the end of the game. It just wasn't the "right" conclusion for Barbering. Again, the card was cut, and again, it sat out for a set, as The Motion Pictures dealt exclusively with imagery from the Star Trek films.

But then All Good Things... arrived, and we no longer had any choice. We couldn't wait for a later set. We couldn't have another design fall short. We had to find something that worked. In the end, we decided that the "deck trimming" gag was a good fit for Mot, but would be far more interesting if it cut into your opponent's deck. We did achieve the goal of having the skill itself matter, not just the named triad of Mot-related cards – in fact, we had to go in and add the very humorous "non-(Borg) Barbering" qualifier to the text after our playtesters exposed a truly unpleasant Borg deck strategy. And we also got to dig a bit into the verb-heavy strategies that had become popular and dominant.

And so, about nine years after Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh first put "Barbering" on a Premiere card, it now finally means something. Maybe now that my online namesake has a whole possible deck type centered around him, it won't seem as strange a choice to First Edition players. And even though the name was picked for me specifically to be strange, it just wouldn't be a fitting wrap-up to the First Edition without it.

Happy trimming!

Related link:
Chat with the talkative Bolian about all things barbering, on the All Good Things Message Board Thursday, July 3,

July 1, 2003

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