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| Top Ten ST:CCG Misconceptions Part Two, #6-10 (nt) ... Taibak ... [5/ 1/99 22:17] |
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Aefvadh!
Here's the second part of my article on common rules misconceptions. 6: "If It's a Hidden Agenda, It Must Be Seedable." Not all hidden agendas are seedable and not all non-traditional seeds are hidden agendas. When I still had time to regularly review decks on the deck designs board, I would often see seeded events and objectives lumped under the heading of "Hidden Agendas." The catch is that some of the most popular seedable events and objectives are not hidden agendas. Assign Mission Specialists, Open Diplomatic Relations, and the Federation/Bajoran Treaty are all seedable. None of them have a hidden agenda icon. More often though, the reverse was a problem. A lot of players assume that if a card has the hidden agenda icon, it can be seeded. For some reason, Intermix Ratio is the card that most often falls into this category, although Assimilate Planet is up there as well. I think the misconception goes back to the First Contact rules supplement, which mentioned both seedable events *and* hidden agendas for the first time in the same sentence under the rules for hidden agendas. The key to getting past this is to realize that events, objectives, incidents, and facilities all play or seed according to their text. For instance, Visit Cochrane Memorial's text only allows it to seed, the text on Husnock Outposts only allow them to seed, Colonies have text that only allows them to play, and the text on Intermix Ratio only allows it to be played later. 7: "Is Commander Tomalak the matching commander of the Decius?" This is another case where Trek sense is extremely misleading. With the specific case of the Decius, players assume that since the Decius is AU, then its matching commander must be AU as well, meaning Commander Tomalak. However, Commander Tomalak's card makes no mention of the Decius while the Decius makes no mention of Commander Tomalak. Instead, it says that it was commanded by Tomalak - that means plain old Tomalak from Premiere is the matching commander. Similarly, players often assume that if a personnel is a matching commander of a ship, then all personae of that personnel are also matching commanders. Probably the most common example are questions asking if The Emissary is the matching commander of the Defiant (he's not). Again, the key is playing cards as written and not adding to the text. If a ship says that personnel X was its matching commander, then only personnel with the exact same name as X are matching commanders. 8: "If I have a Federation/Bajoran Treaty in play, can I download Federation personnel to Deep Space Nine with Ops?" A question of matching vs. compatible. Ops specifies that it only downloads personnel and ships to the Nor if the downloaded card is of the matching affiliation of the station. 'Matching affiliations' is defined in the Glossary to refer to two cards of the same affiliation. In the case of DS9, Federation cards do not match a Bajoran station. Treaties do not make affiliated cards matching. What they do is allow two affiliations to work with each other, it makes the merely compatible. Empok Nor puts a new twist on this problem. Neutral and non-aligned personnel do not match affiliated stations, nor do they match each other. If you commandeer Empok Nor with an entirely non-aligned away team, it stays Neutral because its affiliation doesn't change. Currently, the only Neutral ship or personnel is Spot. If there were a site that allowed ANIMALS to report to a Nor, she could be downloaded. As is, no ships nor personnel can be downloaded to a Neutral Empok Nor. 9: "Dots: Where Do They Come From And Where Do They Go?" Mot's Advice, Vantika's Neural Pathways, Tsilokovsky Infection, Fightin' Words, Brain Drain, and Discommendation are all cards that have an effect on the number of skills listed in a personnel's skill box. They all add or remove skills. However, none of them change the number of skill dots on the card. Similarly, The Sheliak makes a mission worth zero points, it does not change the value printed in the mission's point box. The misconception here is that these cards somehow alter the cards physically. In each case, they do not and the cards themselves remain unchanged. A personnel under the influence of Mot's Advice or Brain Drain still has the same number of skill dots. A mission that The Sheliak have nuked still shows the same amount of points. 10: "Can Borg Ship dilemmas be Wormholed?" This boils down to a question of card type. Namely, is a card that has characteristics of another card type, actually of that type? Again, the card type printed on the card is the sole determining factor. The Borg Ship may battle like a ship and take damage like a ship, but it remains a dilemma. As a result, Paxan Wormhole, Q-Nets, Wormholes, and other cards that only affect ships can not affect a Borg Ship dilemma. Similarly, a card played as another type is not actually a card of that type. Interphasic Plasma Creatures and Kurlan Naiskos play as events, but they remain a dilemma and an artifact respectively. They may both be nullified by Kevin Uxbridge which specifies, through errata, that it nullifies any event or any card played as an event. Well, that's ten of them. Hopefully both articles will answer quite a few questions about how the game mechanics actually work. Even so, most of the answers in here are found in either the rulebook or the Glossary. In fact, I encourage anyone with a question about how something works to check the Glossary - most of the time the answer is in there. Taibak |
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Top Ten ST:CCG Misconceptions Part Two, #6-10 (nt) ... Taibak ... [5/ 1/99 22:17]
