Design Log: Stardate 08.14.2003

Not-So-Solitary Confinement

Product champions who attended the Comic-Con or Gen Con volunteer summit and saw Brad DeFruiter's presentation that included So Many Enemies, and everyone who meandered over to the Star Trek Online CCG website last Friday to see the Murder Investigation spoiler, have already gotten a glimpse of a new dilemma theme the designers have been calling "confinement dilemmas." Nicknamed after the first of the lot (alphabetically), Confined to Quarters, these dilemmas have in common the random selection of three personnel, who are all stopped if any of them has a particular skill or other specific feature.

In the case of Confined to Quarters, that skill is Leadership. For History Repeats Itself, the key skill is Anthropology. Murder Investigation and So Many Enemies hit Security and Treachery respectively. ("There were several other dilemmas with other skills that didn't make the cut," said designer Brad DeFruiter – "this time.") Load up on one of these skills – for mission (or dilemma) requirement redundancy, or because you want skill multiples for other purposes (for example, the 3 [Rom] Treachery you need for Unseen Manipulations) – and you increase the chance that you'll lose three personnel from your mission attempt.

But the feature that will get the three stopped doesn't have to be a skill. Dressing Down will "confine" your three personnel if any one of them has a cost of 1 – so if you've been relying on "weenies" for cannon fodder, you could suddenly find them a distinct liability. It's easy to see how this concept can be extended to any characteristic, such as Strength above a certain cutoff, or a particular keyword, or personnel without a staffing icon. "It could apply to many different strategies that we might want to rein in," said Brad. Maybe I won't load my deck with so many Assassins – I don't want to give them any ideas!

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

August 14, 2003

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