Design Log: Stardate 12.04.2002

Making the Leap to Second Edition

One thing that just about everyone has discovered since the Second Edition rulebook went online is that a lot of old assumptions from First Edition just don't apply any more. The rules have been streamlined and many old concepts have either mutated into something new, changed from rules-based to card-based, or disappeared altogether. Typical questions on the message board start with, "I can't find anything in the rules about..." Usually that's because the rule they're looking for is a First Edition concept that doesn't have any meaning in Second Edition, or else it's implemented by a card. Here's a sampling (by no means comprehensive) of the things that have changed or disappeared:

Compatibility issues, treaties, and house arrest have been swept away. If you can get the cards into play, they're compatible.
Facilities with built-in (rules-based) reporting abilities and vulnerability to attack no longer exist.
Battle no longer has automatic rules-based consequences or requires a "leader."
Downloading is always to hand – it's a way to get to a card easily, not to play that card for free.
Affiliations and species are now clearly separated (e.g., the word "Klingon" means a species; a [Kli] icon means an affiliation).
Lore has no gameplay functions, but is purely for "flavor." Gameplay functions have been transferred to species, keywords, and other game text.
Personnel skills and ship equipment have no built-in functions. Want to use your ship's Cloaking Device? Look for a card that lets you use it – it does nothing on its own.
Arcane dilemma resolution rules are a thing of the past: the dilemmas themselves tell you exactly what happens, who's stopped, and where the dilemma goes. (In fact, most dilemmas now read remarkably like the entries in my old Dilemma Resolution Guide...)
Spacelines no longer exist as such, and ship movement has been streamlined.
Sticky timing concepts like "at any time" and "suspends play" are gone, gone, gone. The cards tell you when you can use them, with three basic terms: "when," "while," and "Order."

So what's a veteran First Edition player to do? To begin with, throw out your old preconceptions from First Edition. Don't assume that just because you could – in First Edition – start shooting at your opponent's ship at your whim, you can do the same in Second Edition. You can't, because you need to use a card that will allow you to start an engagement. As a general rule, if the slim rulebook doesn't tell you how and when you can do something, it's a safe bet that you can't do it at all – unless a card explicitly says you can. And second, you can read my upcoming series of Design Logs that will cover key changes to gameplay concepts.

The key is in looking at Second Edition, not as a pile of new rules that say "the old rules don't apply any more," but as a streamlined set of rules with very little that you have to "know" or "remember," because almost everything is on the cards. If you approach Second Edition with the attitude that it's wonderful not to have to remember the differences between dilemma conditions, cures, and nullifiers – or refer to a Dilemma Resolution Guide to find out what the cards mean (as opposed to what they say) – you'll make the leap to Second Edition in no time.

Kathy McCracken
Major Rakal
Star Trek Intelligence Officer

December 4, 2002

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