Design Log: Stardate 08.01.2003

What Mode Is Your Mission?

One of the problems in First Edition with missions was storyline. Nearly all of the "missions" in the television series were of course seen from the Federation point of view. And while arguably a plague could be cured or a stellar phenomenon investigated by many (if not all) of the affiliations without sacrificing storyline, there weren't all that many "missions" that would logically be undertaken by the Borg or the Dominion, or for that matter even the Ferengi – they all had other goals to focus on. Aside from the storyline hangup, these Johnny-come-lately affiliations (along with the Cardassians and Bajorans) were effectively shut out of the large number of missions released in the pre-First Contact sets, because it was never anticipated that there would be other affiliations beyond Federation, Romulan, and Klingon.

In First Edition, the designers worked around that by using objectives to allow the Borg to assimilate planets or set up transwarp gateways, the Dominion to conquer a planet and establish a foothold in another quadrant, or the Ferengi to set up trading posts, usually with a different set of requirements appropriate top the objective. The original "goal" of the mission and the affiliation icons were ignored for their purposes. That more or less took care of the storyline problem, but had two drawbacks: first, it was kind of boring to use the same old requirements for everything; and second, it perhaps unfairly hampered these affiliations by requiring them to use up extra seed slots or card plays just to attempt (or scout) a mission that could be solved by other affiliations without further ado.

Enter a new Second Edition concept called "modal missions," which let you have your storyline and simplicity in a single package. While most of the action seen on-screen was Federation point-of-view, there was almost always at least one other affiliation involved in any given story. So why couldn't a mission location represent different goals (or different approaches) for different affiliations, with different requirements to match the goal or approach? In effect, a modal mission combines the "alternate requirements" applied by a First Edition objective with the mission itself, yielding the desired storyline effect without saddling anyone with the need for another card play. Harness Omega Particle is just such a mission. In that story, the Federation (Janeway) wanted to destroy the Omega particle, while the Borg (Seven of Nine) wanted to harness its power as the embodiment of perfection. The primary affiliation that can solve this mission is Borg (also Non-Aligned), with a suitable set of requirements; but the mission's game text also allows Federation to solve it with their own set of similar, though not identical, requirements. (Either set of hefty requirements yield an equally hefty 50 points for solving it.)

Rescue Prisoners of War, a space mission, is aimed primarily at Cardassians, Federation, Klingons, and Romulans, all affiliations whose members were being held captive by the Dominion, and requires Intelligence, Navigation, Programming , Transporters, and Cunning to pull off the rescue. But the Dominion had a completely different agenda at that location – to hang onto their prisoners by brute force – and so they are permitted to attempt and complete this mission using Exobiology, Leadership, Security, Treachery, and Strength. Note that, because you don't have to have the mission requirements present when you attempt a mission, you could attempt with a mixture of affiliations without declaring which requirements you're using. For example, you could attempt Rescue Prisoners of War with a mixed group of Dominion and Cardassian personnel, and after clearing the dilemmas, complete it using either set of requirements that you could meet, as long as there was at least one personnel of the correct affiliation present. (If all your Dominion personnel had been removed from the attempt, though, you wouldn't be able to use the Dominion's requirements to solve it.)

Another way to look at modal missions is that you're getting "two missions for the price of one". The designers could have made two separate missions at the same location, with the same title and different subtitles, to fit the different affiliations. But that would have taken up many more slots in the set that could be better used for other gameplay, and the missions wouldn't have been nearly as versatile.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

August 1, 2003

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