If by constantly you mean once every 6 months.

2 hours ago, Mep said:

How many software engineers actually write the user manual? If it isn't a tiny operation, then usually the software engineers communicate their details to the manual tech writer which puts everything together. The manual is often clunky and incomplete too.

And your point here is what? That FFG doesn't have technical writers? If that's the case, I think the failing is still very much on them.

There are really two different issues at play here. The first is what you're hinting at here - rules translation. The second is the one I'm concerned about - fundamental shortcomings in the rule design.

As I said with X-wing, it's easy to think the issues are just the former, that there's some nice, comprehensive system underlying everything and it's just a failure to communicate that system. But that wasn't the case with X-wing, and I don't believe it's the case with Destiny. Things like the new "changed the game state" rule are too left field, too ungrounded, for me to believe that this was somehow there all along and just not communicated well. FFG is, as they so often do, flying by the seat of their pants.

2 hours ago, Mep said:

BTW, this is a CCG, new stuff gets made up all the time in these games. They are anything but static.

I understand that, and I'm fine with it - if it's truly new stuff. There wasn't anything new about the potential to exhaust Backup Muscle for no effect, or play a card which couldn't meet its requirements. Honestly, it's borderline gross negligence in design not to have addressed this - pretty much every single game FFG has ever put out has had to deal with this at some point.

I have no idea who writes FFGs rules. I do know technical writing and game designer are two different skill sets. Clearly there is information loss that is occurring, which would happen if you have the game designer doing technical writing or a technical writer writing about something they don't know fully because they didn't design it. Communicating is a process, not a one time deal or a one way street and there is an exchange taking place.

A software engineer can write what they feel is a perfectly secure program and simply cannot foresee a way to hack it and neither could their software testers. The software is published and get gets hacked all kinds of ways. So yes, be it software or games, when you go from a small number of testers to millions all kinds of unanticipated things happen. It's not preventable but it is manageable. Are they really doing a bad job or are they handling the unanticipated, or flying by the seat of their pants, well enough? Their game is sold out, the secondary market prices seem to be holding well enough, so they must be doing something right.

FFG has long had a history of badly written rules needing FAQs and Updates from day of a product hitting the shelves. This has gotten better in the past few years...the current model of a Quick Play Guide combined with a RRG has been a big improvement over where they were 10 years ago. But it's clear to me that they still have issues with some basic concepts about how to present the rules of a game...where it's just as important to list what you can't do as it is to list what you can do.

Throw in a CCG format, where every card has the chance to break or change the basic rules, or even create new rules, and it becomes even more important to anticipate those corner cases and define the limits of a game.

31 minutes ago, Mep said:

A software engineer can write what they feel is a perfectly secure program and simply cannot foresee a way to hack it and neither could their software testers. The software is published and get gets hacked all kinds of ways. So yes, be it software or games, when you go from a small number of testers to millions all kinds of unanticipated things happen. It's not preventable but it is manageable. Are they really doing a bad job or are they handling the unanticipated, or flying by the seat of their pants, well enough?

https://xkcd.com/327/

Yes, there are always unforeseen events that break once you get live. If we're going to evaluate how well they're doing their job, we evaluate it by what they did manage to predict and plan for. SQL injection attacks are so standard that any developer who doesn't account for it is simply negligent. I look at the "pay a cost to do nothing" in a similar light. As I said, pretty much every single game FFG has made has the rule, many which ran into problems that caused them to add it. It's something that should have been addressed from the very beginning.

36 minutes ago, Mep said:

Their game is sold out, the secondary market prices seem to be holding well enough, so they must be doing something right.

Popularity and quality are not necessarily the same thing. Especially where the underlying rules are concerned, technical debt will accrue and cause a great many problems going forward.

Don't get me wrong - the game's still fun, and that's a good thing. But if we're going to objectively analyze the quality of the rules, these obvious misses and miscommunications are pretty big red marks.

Competitive play puts rules under a microscope, and in any competitive environment the rules are often put under a lot more unreasonable pressure than social play.

While we may discuss queues, play state and what ever else seems to be questioned, these are rather small problems in the gander scheme of things.

8 minutes ago, Amanal said:

Competitive play puts rules under a microscope, and in any competitive environment the rules are often put under a lot more unreasonable pressure than social play.

While we may discuss queues, play state and what ever else seems to be questioned, these are rather small problems in the gander scheme of things.

I'm not sure I agree that they're minor. If there are two things more fundamental to the rules than timing and effect resolution, I don't know what it is - but we've seen rather large dropped balls in both areas. But system issues bother me on a fundamental level, so...

I also hate the idea of having to socially paper over bad rules. This happened with GW for decades, and players had to build up entire alternate rule sets of social niceties that caused more strife than anything else I've ever seen in gaming. I don't expect this to get that bad, but I'd rather avoid it completely.

A rule book is probably the worst way to learn how to play a game. While they maybe necessary, games are usually based on math and visual information. Written descriptions fall short compared to a good visual tutorial.

Anyways a few people nick picking over the rules isn't this game's problem, it is supply, supply and supply. Everything else is pretty solid even if a few things need a bit of tightening.

2 minutes ago, Mep said:

A rule book is probably the worst way to learn how to play a game.

How does the first person learn then? Where are these omniscient people who explain the rules never having read them? The players are teaching the devs at this point and that is flat out sad.

There are tutorials on youtube for those of us that didn't make it to gencon or FFG's worlds. I posted the best one already in this thread.

IDK, I am both dyslectic and suffered a TBI and I had no issues learning this game and can correctly read the rule book. They are clearly doing something right. We all have things in life we suffer, clearly.

What's wrong with having a comprehensive rule book?

5 hours ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

What's wrong with having a comprehensive rule book?

To be fair, design is a very iterative process. Over time these issues will be resolved.

Most of these issues should have been caught in testing; imagine majority were. The fact is we, as a group, are much larger than the development team. We also have a different viewpoint.

Because of that we will uncover the garbage they missed.

On 2/8/2017 at 4:02 PM, Mep said:

A rule book is probably the worst way to learn how to play a game. While they maybe necessary, games are usually based on math and visual information. Written descriptions fall short compared to a good visual tutorial.

Anyways a few people nick picking over the rules isn't this game's problem, it is supply, supply and supply. Everything else is pretty solid even if a few things need a bit of tightening.

But we're not talking about learning how to play the game. We're talking about when this game gets big, really big, Magic-level big (and it should since it's super fun and popular), and it's the finals of a tournament where the winner gets thousands of dollars, and some "corner case" happens. At this point, "I saw this one video tutuorial" isn't gonna cut it. We need precise, well-defined, and comprehensive rules, in text, to address that situation.

Heck, we'll need a comprehensive, easy-to-understand rulebook to even get to that point.

Edit: oh and also, btw, people learn differently. Giving me a rulebook to read is by far the most effective way for me to learn the rules of a new game. I've actually had people try to talk at me and I've just stopped them and asked for the rulebook.

It comes down to how people learn. Some people can learn just by reading things, others are visually learners and need visual aids to help, such as video tutorials. They are all good methods of teaching the game. This is why I feel a flow chart will be coming to explain how all this works since the written description, which is clear after viewing the visual aids, is not clear for many who haven't. Often it doesn't come down to how you write something but rather how you visually present it. Anyone who's ever done hard technical writing, especial for something like patents, knows the written material is worth only so much and the visual aids are worth only so much but the combination of the two must fully convey what is trying to be said. The real problem with the rules is they are devoid of visual information.

One thing they really need to do is list all the key words, defined them all on one page and have those key words in Bold print on the cards themselves. A small bit of visual information can make a huge difference.

I hear you. We do all learn in different ways. My point is that my concerns are less about teaching the game and more about the minutiae and corner cases that NEED to be addressed in a clear and consistent manner, because that's what matters in a competitive environment. Nobody is going to read the rules and think that you get 3 resources at the end of each round instead of 2. The core mechanics of the game, however, are confusing as written, and if this game is ever going to be competitive, that's a PROBLEM.

And to add to that - since I know some people take issue with the notion of competitive play - it's been widely observed that competition is critical for the long term health of a game. At the end of the day I think all of us here want Destiny to succeed, we just see them doing it in different ways. I agree that this game needs a much tighter rule set in order for that to occur.

A real test for a good game is whether someone can play Solely by reading the rulebook. Several games fail this test

2 hours ago, amrothe said:

A real test for a good game is whether someone can play Solely by reading the rulebook. Several games fail this test

I don't if "good" is the right word. I think Robsion Cursor and Merchants and Mauraders are good games. Both of those games have ambuguity in the rules. Robison has a player FAQ that votes developer rulings on the ambiguous and parts.

Being able to follow the rules per design intent after reading through the rules is a sign of a good rulebook.

There are even great games sans rulebook.

Sometimes good is synonymous with quality, and sometimes it's synonymous with entertainment. I didn't enjoy Rogue One, so I didn't think it was good. I did enjoy Batman vs Superman, despite a severe distaste for the DC universe. I think that FFG is, overall, a quality company deserving of our brand loyalty, but they tend to suffer from having their resources split in too many directions. I think Destiny lies somewhere in between; it is an enjoyable game that risks becoming a bad (i.e., not good) one if the designers aren't more cautious about how they approach future proofing the rules.

8 hours ago, Mep said:

It comes down to how people learn.

Rodney Smith - Watch it Played. He did a lot of the Plaid Hat videos, which is now an Asmodee subsidiary, so he is only one step removed from FFG.

Yeah, I've seen a few of the Watch it Played videos. Learned Descent from them. Another entertaining channel is Shut Up & Sit Down. They may not do the best job of explaining the games but they are probably the most entertaining.

It's 2017 and people still don't play Monopoly right. It is also 2017, so the old fashion rule book is obsolete. Though FFG needs to not depend on 3rd parties and make more videos themselves explaining their games. Even still, the rule book needs to be comprehensive and I feel about 90% of everything that needs to be covered is covered in the rule book. However, a fair amount of people just don't get it, despite most of the information being in the rule book. So clearly written media isn't cutting it. It is however good to fall back on and should be comprehensive even if it isn't fully educational.

The nice thing about FAQ is they provide a lot of examples of things, and people do learn from examples.

I feel the way this threads question was ruled was pretty intuitive. We played by the ruling from the very beginning. Nothing added in version 1.1 of the RRG caused us to doubt the way we were playing it. Version 1.2 added the queue and it still didn't give us pause on the interaction between Rey a Holdout Blaster and Jango. I wasn't swayed by the counter arguments in this thread either and remained certain we were playing it correctly. Still, more than one person was insistent that it was played differently than the way we were playing it, so clearly the RRG can use some work on this issue.

What I am finding somewhat troubling is that a couple of the people I disagreed with in this thread have been asking some really tough questions in other threads about the interaction of SotR cards and Awakening cards that don't have answers that are intuitive to me. I haven't yet been able to muster the Willpower to dig into the RRG to see if I can come up with an answer either.

I really hope FFG gets a grip on streamlining the rules. I don't want to spend more time searching the RRG for answers than playing the game every time a new set is released.

People can learn the basics of play from watching videos, but they'll never learn all the ins and outs of the rules. Especially in a CCG, where the framework is critical for fitting all the crazy effects, you simply couldn't cover it to sufficient depth in any reasonable amount of time.

Its also absolutely atrocious as a reference. "Wait, can Finn include red hero weapons in his deck? I think they hit that in episode 7, around the 48 minute mark, right?"

Good for teaching. Useless for creating the kind of understanding which goes into answering questions like this one.

8 hours ago, Starbane said:

I feel the way this threads question was ruled was pretty intuitive. We played by the ruling from the very beginning. Nothing added in version 1.1 of the RRG caused us to doubt the way we were playing it. Version 1.2 added the queue and it still didn't give us pause on the interaction between Rey a Holdout Blaster and Jango. I wasn't swayed by the counter arguments in this thread either and remained certain we were playing it correctly. Still, more than one person was insistent that it was played differently than the way we were playing it, so clearly the RRG can use some work on this issue.

What I am finding somewhat troubling is that a couple of the people I disagreed with in this thread have been asking some really tough questions in other threads about the interaction of SotR cards and Awakening cards that don't have answers that are intuitive to me. I haven't yet been able to muster the Willpower to dig into the RRG to see if I can come up with an answer either.

I really hope FFG gets a grip on streamlining the rules. I don't want to spend more time searching the RRG for answers than playing the game every time a new set is released.

I've come to start thinking of actions as a currency rather than a timing window, mostly as a result of this thread. It makes the ruling a little more palatable, but I would still argue that there are some major issues with the intuitiveness of the other timing windows in this game. It seems like they're jumping through hoops to make the queue as different from the stack as possible, and a consequence of that is some fairly bizarre interactions.

1 hour ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

I've come to start thinking of actions as a currency rather than a timing window, mostly as a result of this thread. It makes the ruling a little more palatable, but I would still argue that there are some major issues with the intuitiveness of the other timing windows in this game. It seems like they're jumping through hoops to make the queue as different from the stack as possible, and a consequence of that is some fairly bizarre interactions.

Yes, that is exactly how I think of them. Actions are the currency of the game not resources. Resources are an additional cost to some actions you perform. For me that led to the separation of actions from abilities and effects.

In my opinion the RRG supports this notion by explaining actions in Part 5: Game Structure, while abilities and effects are explained in a timing section titled Part 7: Abilities.

IIRC I first started talking about actions this way publicly during the discussions of Sith Holocron, but I really came to that conclusion after my first couple of plays. Hopefully that thought process can help others find it more palatable.