So when a rule text says "you", it refers to the ship, right? So we should be able to replace any instance of "you" with "the ship this upgrade is equipped to", right?

Then, let's read Recon Specialist's text. "When you perform a focus action, assign 1 additional focus token to your ship." So "you perform" is "this ship performs". But then you have the possessive "your ship". What's that, "this ship's ship"? You can't have "you" referring to the ship and then "your" referring to the player in the same sentence, FFG!

And sometimes "you" disappears entirely. Like, Hotshot Co-Pilot (by the way, why Co-Pilot is hyphenated here, but in Mercenary Copilot it's not?): "When attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able." When WHO's attacking? The way this is written, not specifying neither "you" nor "this ship", it seems to work every time any ship on the entire board, enemy or friendly, is performing an attack. (There's a FAQ that incidentally clarifies it, but the wording didn't get an errata. The actual meaning of the card was never in discussion of course, but the wording very much is).

Blame English.

Well, the "you always refers to the ship" is not entirely accurate. "You" sometimes refers to the player of that ship.

And, yes, it drives me crazy, too. But this all goes back to this: X-Wing's phenomenal popularity as a competitive game was a big surprise. The game was not created with the robustness and rock-solid foundation needed for a serious competitive game, and it's showing more and more cracks. I tend to give FFG credit: within the limits of the original expectations for the game, they've done a really good job, IMO, morphing it into something with competitive coherence. (But the "within the limits" part of that is pretty important.)

"When attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able."

These are the ones that drive me up a wall (there are a lot of pilot abilities that read like this). In plain English this literally means that when the defender is attacking with a primary weapon, he must spend 1 focus token if able. How can the defender be attacking?

2 minutes ago, Helias de Nappo said:

"When attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able."

These are the ones that drive me up a wall (there are a lot of pilot abilities that read like this). In plain English this literally means that when the defender is attacking with a primary weapon, he must spend 1 focus token if able. How can the defender be attacking?

There are worse examples to illustrate the problem. Fortunately between the old hands on the threads, the FAQ and being able to submit questions directly to FFG most questions can be answered fairly easily. There are some exceptions though.

This card is a mess. According to rules as written it only functions for the ship he's on due to the 'you = the ship' rule.

24 minutes ago, KommanderKeldoth said:

This card is a mess. According to rules as written it only functions for the ship he's on due to the 'you = the ship' rule.

Yes, but, at least he places the RAW useless tokens on your other ships

In before some kind of Youngster upgrade for sharing crew between Ships ^^

8 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

Well, the "you always refers to the ship" is not entirely accurate. "You" sometimes refers to the player of that ship.

And, yes, it drives me crazy, too. But this all goes back to this: X-Wing's phenomenal popularity as a competitive game was a big surprise. The game was not created with the robustness and rock-solid foundation needed for a serious competitive game, and it's showing more and more cracks. I tend to give FFG credit: within the limits of the original expectations for the game, they've done a really good job, IMO, morphing it into something with competitive coherence. (But the "within the limits" part of that is pretty important.)

Nope. you *always* refers to the ship, when it appears on pilot and upgrade cards.

FFG's templating is dire to nonexistent, but they are consistent on this point (except on Jabba and the since-fixed Palp errata).

And yeah, HSCP is a mine of poor language, both the card and the FAQ clarification.

I really wish they actually used proper templating and keywords, it would make the game so much easier to understand and so much more difficult to misinterpret.

8 hours ago, Kumagoro said:

So when a rule text says "you", it refers to the ship, right? So we should be able to replace any instance of "you" with "the ship this upgrade is equipped to", right?

Then, let's read Recon Specialist's text. "When you perform a focus action, assign 1 additional focus token to your ship." So "you perform" is "this ship performs". But then you have the possessive "your ship". What's that, "this ship's ship"? You can't have "you" referring to the ship and then "your" referring to the player in the same sentence, FFG!

And sometimes "you" disappears entirely. Like, Hotshot Co-Pilot (by the way, why Co-Pilot is hyphenated here, but in Mercenary Copilot it's not?): "When attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able." When WHO's attacking? The way this is written, not specifying neither "you" nor "this ship", it seems to work every time any ship on the entire board, enemy or friendly, is performing an attack. (There's a FAQ that incidentally clarifies it, but the wording didn't get an errata. The actual meaning of the card was never in discussion of course, but the wording very much is).

Imagine that at an early state of development, X-Wing was a game for more than two players, where every player controlled 1 and only 1 ship. Each player was the pilot of their ship, so to speak.
Then all of sudden, that "you" and "your" makes sense. Nowadays you could say that the text is addressed directly to the "pilot" of that ship.

Jabba is just a typo.

Hot-shot copilot is a work of art, where the card has confusing text because it omits the "you are" in
"When [you are] attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able"
and the FAQ entry for this card states one thing and the opposite at the same time by using the inherent ambiguity of English grammar to create what cannot be anything less than poetry!

8 hours ago, Hawkstrike said:

Blame English.

We really don't need to blame English at all. Using "you" to talk about a ship the card is attached to is just such a bad idea.

English can be super clear if you want it to be.

25 minutes ago, DodgingArcs said:

We really don't need to blame English at all. Using "you" to talk about a ship the card is attached to is just such a bad idea.

English can be super clear if you want it to be.

It doesn't matter what word it uses as long as every game term is correctly defined in the manual.
If the manual defines "you" and "your" as to refer to the ship, not the player, then it's just fine.

The problem comes when the card texts uses terms that aren't defined at all (like it happened with "immediately". After 4 years, they finally admitted that the word has no meaning in game terms), or they use obviously ambiguous constructions. Natural language (any, not only English) is ambiguous and the same sentence can mean many different things depending on the interpretation.
To express game mechanics like rules and upgrades, you need to limit the language you use to a subset of it that doesn't lead to ambiguity. You need to "mechanize" the language.

Look at this FAQ of Hot-shot copilot:

When attacking a ship with Hotshot Co-pilot equipped , the defender must spend the focus token after the "Declare Target" step and before the end of the "Modify Defense Dice" step.
When defending against a ship with Hotshot Co-pilot equipped , the attacker must spend a focus token after the "Declare Target" step and before the end of the "Modify Attack Dice" step.

What is the bolded part in both sentences? A sustantive complement to "a ship"? Or is it a circunstancial complement to the verb? I other words, that can be read in two different way:

• When attacking a ship that has Hotshot Co-pilot equipped...
• When attacking a ship while you have Hotshot Co-pilot equipped...

The natural language accepts both meaning for the text in the FAQ. Most people (that don't play this game) would assume that the "with..." applies to the thing that is immediately closest to it, that is "a ship". But then the card would be absolutely negative for the player that equips it. It would be a buff to his rival.

Since we know that it would not make any sense to have such a card, then we might take the second meaning, that wouldn't be so obvious for most people. But this is supposed to be the FAQ explanation to clarify the text in cards!!!

Is it really that hard to read and re-read the text in a card and try to remove the ambiguity from it before releasing it? FFG has proved once and again that they have serious problems with this, given the growing size of the FAQ.

If they ever release an X-Wing 2, then they really need to mechanize the wording in the rules, upgrades and abilities texts.

1 hour ago, Azrapse said:

If they ever release an X-Wing 2, then they really need to mechanize the wording in the rules, upgrades and abilities texts.

employ someone with a grasp of the English language.

7 minutes ago, Stevey86 said:

employ someone with a grasp of the English language.

Eploy a good technical writer would be better.

Precision of language is a slippery slope into the world of the Giver. Did you want the Giver? Because that's how you get the Giver.

all this does make me wonder if FFG's lawyers use the same poor writing while drafting official documents and such.

And how long did it take them to completely clarify that Tractor beams cause target ships to suffer obstacle effects and exactly what those effects were? Three FAQs? FAQing awesome job guys.

13 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

this all goes back to this: X-Wing's phenomenal popularity as a competitive game was a big surprise. The game was not created with the robustness and rock-solid foundation needed for a serious competitive game

I agree. And if we look back at the first years of Magic: The Gathering, they had no templates and their wording was at times utterly ridiculous. It took some time (and the arrive of some key people like Mark Rosewater) for them to become aware that the game needed a rigorous templating.

So we can absolutely forgive FFG for making the same mistake in its early going. Which means, back in Wave 1 or 2. It's 5 years later, though. They shouldn't be having the same problems. Hotshot Co-Pilot was released in late 2016, for God's sake.

13 hours ago, Helias de Nappo said:

In plain English this literally means that when the defender is attacking with a primary weapon, he must spend 1 focus token if able. How can the defender be attacking?

I decided to interpret the sentence with "attacking" not referring to the defender, because it's defined as a defender to begin with so it can't be the one attacking. The result is bad English, but still very far from the intended meaning: "when [someone is] attacking..."

2 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Eploy a good technical writer would be better.

A good proofreader would already be a great help.

And by the way, most of the issues stem from the insane choice of using "you" to signify the ship. I imagine it's Jay Little's fault? Sometimes a compact, technical term is needed to save space on the card. But was "this ship" so much longer than "you" to justify this choice? I don't think so. I'm looking at cards right now, it seems to me pretty much every single one of them could easily accommodate "this ship" in place of "you".

14 hours ago, Hawkstrike said:

Blame English.

if only we spoke machine code

Can we turn this in the thread where all the wrong, weird wording is collected? Because I'm just skimming through my binder, and I keep finding stuff like:

Ysanne Isard . "At the start of the Combat phase, if you have no shields and at least 1 Damage card assigned to your ship, you may perform a free evade action." So "you, O ship that has Ysanne Isard equipped, have no shields and at least 1 Damage card". Therefore "your ship"... Wait, which ship is this one now? Again with the ship's ship?

Mara Jade . "At the end of the Combat phase, each enemy ship at Range 1 that does not have a stress token receives 1 stress token." At Range 1 of what? Sure, at Range 1 of Mara Jade. But a robust template wouldn't leave it to the common sense of the reader, because if you just read it mechanically, it calls for ships being at Range 1 of something else . (Or maybe even all ships, since any ship is always at Range 1 of itself).

Systems Officer . "After you execute a green maneuver, choose another friendly ship at Range 1. That ship may acquire a target lock." So "another" as opposed to which one? No ship has been referenced so far in the sentence. See how by just replacing "you" with "this ship" we would even get a better-flowing language?

And that was just by closely reading the first 9 cards on page 1!

14 hours ago, Helias de Nappo said:

"When attacking with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able."

These are the ones that drive me up a wall (there are a lot of pilot abilities that read like this). In plain English this literally means that when the defender is attacking with a primary weapon, he must spend 1 focus token if able. How can the defender be attacking?

Well, it doesn't necessarily mean that "when the defender is attacking," though it is one acceptable interpretation. English is, like most other languages, rife with syntactic ambiguities . This occurs when a sentence could be read in one of two completely different ways, and both readings fall within the rules of the language.

Think of newspaper headlines as a common (and sometimes humorous) source of this:

Mad Cow Kills Farmer with HIV
this sentence has a few ambiguous readings:
(1) An angry cow kills a farmer who has HIV
(2) An angry cow kills a farmer by giving the farmer HIV (this one is good for some laughs)
(3) Mad cow disease kills a farmer who has HIV
(4) Mad cow disease kills a farmer by giving the farmer HIV (most people wouldn't even think about this one, because it is so intuitively nonsensical)

We use common sense and context to quickly and correctly interpret the technically ambiguous headline of "Mad Cow Kills Farmer with HIV" as (3), without necessarily even thinking about the other possible meanings.

We use context all the time to simply rule out most possible interpretations and resolve syntactic ambiguity, which is surprisingly common in the language. In this case, " When attack with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able " is easily resolved by such contextual clues, namely that in X-Wing attacker/defender is very clearly defined such that the defender can never be performing an attack. So, while there is technically an ambiguous instruction, like most cases of syntactic ambiguity it is immediately and easily resolved by quick intuitive inference.

So, my take home point is that I'm okay with FFG relying on the same basic resolutions to syntactic ambiguity that define how we interpret our language, especially on cards where text-space is at a premium. Sometimes, ambiguity in game rules is a legitimate problem because there's no clear way to resolve it without knowing what the designer intended. Consider the Star Trek Attack Wing Card, Borg Missile : "If this attack hits, place one [stress token] beside the target ship AND destroy one of its active shields for each [hit] or [crit] result." The ambiguity here is that this could mean that for each hit/crit, you place a stress token and destroy a shield, although it could just as correctly be read to say that you place 1 stress token if it hits, and then for each hit/crit destroy a shield. Either reading is technically correct, and there's no way to resolve it without knowing the intent of the card (especially since, while it sounds very powerful, either reading fell well without the power-level scope of ST:AW cards, which made X-Wing upgrades all look like a 10pt Expose). But this isn't the situation with something like HSCP, because there is only one way to resolve the ambiguity given that defenders can, by rules definition, never be attacking.

It helps to actually read the rules as well; the rules for instance which specify that a ship is always friendly to and at range 1 of itself.

If you're going to criticise FFG for not using templating and keywords properly, you could at least pay proper attention to the ones they DO use properly.

There's a lot to criticise in the way X-Wing cards are written, but all three of those are perfectly clear if you read them in the context of the keywords the rulebooks define.

49 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

It helps to actually read the rules as well; the rules for instance which specify that a ship is always friendly to and at range 1 of itself.

If you're going to criticise FFG for not using templating and keywords properly, you could at least pay proper attention to the ones they DO use properly.

There's a lot to criticise in the way X-Wing cards are written, but all three of those are perfectly clear if you read them in the context of the keywords the rulebooks define.

I'm sorry, which post are you replying to here? It helps to actually quote. Does "all three of those" refer to Ysanne Isard, Mara Jade and Systems Officer? Where did I say they weren't clear? And what a ship being friendly to and at range 1 of itself (which is mentioned in my post anyway) has to do with anything?

If you're going to criticise a post, you could at least pay proper attention to what that post says.

Just now, Kumagoro said:

I'm sorry, which post are you replying to here? It helps to actually quote. Does "all three of those" refer to Ysanne Isard, Mara Jade and Systems Officer? Where did I say they weren't clear? And what a ship being friendly to and at range 1 of itself (which is mentioned in my post anyway) has to do with anything?

If you're going to criticise a post, you could at least pay proper attention to what that post says.

Yes, those three.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be criticising the clarity of wording on those cards.

If not, what ARE you criticising? Just them being oddly worded? They;'re oddly worded *because* they're using keywords rather than natural language. That's where 'a ship is always frinly to and at range 1 of itself' is relevant - because they have to specify 'another friendly', because just saying 'a friendly' includes the ship itself, and 'another friendly' is shorter and more elegant than 'a friendly ship other than you' or 'a friendly ship other than this ship'.

I don't see what the problem is with 'you' and 'your' referring to 'the ship that has this upgrade equipped'. Like, at all. It makes the wording a little less natural than it could be, but makes it unambiguous. Proper technical writing would do that.

The things that bug me are things like smattering in words that look like they should mean something ('immediately' being the key offender here), wording which is ambiguous unnecessarily where a very short amount of extra wording would clarify (HSCP), wording which is just confusing (Targetting Synchronisers) and repeatedly adding new timing steps to sequences without properly defining how to resolve them (a whole bunch of things in Wave 8).

It's entirely possible I've mistaken what it is you're arguing. But you called Isard, SysOff and Mara 'weird, wrong wording'. They may be weird, but they're not wrong, they work according to the core rules of the game and the keywords they define.

58 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

We use context all the time to simply rule out most possible interpretations and resolve syntactic ambiguity, which is surprisingly common in the language. In this case, " When attack with a primary weapon, the defender must spend 1 focus token if able " is easily resolved by such contextual clues, namely that in X-Wing attacker/defender is very clearly defined such that the defender can never be performing an attack. So, while there is technically an ambiguous instruction, like most cases of syntactic ambiguity it is immediately and easily resolved by quick intuitive inference.

You missed the issue (and also quoted the card wrong). The defender is not the subject of "when attacking", because, as I said, being the defender means you're automatically defined as the entity that is NOT attacking. It remains to be defined what is such entity, i.e. what "when attacking" refers to. Common sense says it's "you", yet the absence of an explicit subject and the common use would make you think the implicit subject is "anyone". And that's clearly not the intended meaning of the card. So the card is written badly, as there's no reason for the subject not being specified. Let's call it a typo, but it's a typo that stems from the absence of a strong word templating system.

Quote

So, my take home point is that I'm okay with FFG relying on the same basic resolutions to syntactic ambiguity that define how we interpret our language

No, FFG shouldn't rely to the resolutions to syntactic ambiguity that are found in a newspaper article, because the cards are not simple information , they convey rules , the language should be used in the same non-ambiguous way that we use for lawmaking. And it's pretty easy to do, other games did it, MTG did it in a way that's entirely unbreakable even with the many thousands of interactions that game has (as opposed to the dozens we have in XWM).

Quote

"If this attack hits, place one [stress token] beside the target ship AND destroy one of its active shields for each [hit] or [crit] result." The ambiguity here is that this could mean that for each hit/crit, you place a stress token and destroy a shield, although it could just as correctly be read to say that you place 1 stress token if it hits, and then for each hit/crit destroy a shield. Either reading is technically correct, and there's no way to resolve it without knowing the intent of the card

Of course there is a way! "If this attack hits, place one [stress token] beside the target ship THEN for each [hit] or [crit] result destroy one of its active shields." There, zero ambiguity. Was it that hard? Besides, once a hard templating system is in place, you use punctuation, word position and prepositions always in the same way to convey always the same constant meaning. In MTG's card rule text, using a comma rather than a period could change the card's function entirely.

1 minute ago, Kumagoro said:

You missed the issue (and also quoted the card wrong). The defender is not the subject of "when attacking", because, as I said, being the defender means you're automatically defined as the entity that is NOT attacking. It remains to be defined what is such entity, i.e. what "when attacking" refers to. Common sense says it's "you", yet the absence of an explicit subject and the common use would make you think the implicit subject is "anyone". And that's clearly not the intended meaning of the card. So the card is written badly, as there's no reason for the subject not being specified. Let's call it a typo, but it's a typo that stems from the absence of a strong word templating system.

No, FFG shouldn't rely to the resolutions to syntactic ambiguity that are found in a newspaper article, because the cards are not simple information , they convey rules , the language should be used in the same non-ambiguous way that we use for lawmaking. And it's pretty easy to do, other games did it, MTG did it in a way that's entirely unbreakable even with the many thousands of interactions that game has (as opposed to the dozens we have in XWM).

Of course there is a way! "If this attack hits, place one [stress token] beside the target ship THEN for each [hit] or [crit] result destroy one of its active shields." There, zero ambiguity. Was it that hard? Besides, once a hard templating system is in place, you use punctuation, word position and prepositions always in the same way to convey always the same constant meaning. In MTG's card rule text, using a comma rather than a period could change the card's function entirely.

I really think we ended up talking past each other there, which happens.

I agree that adding "you are" to the attacking/defending clauses of HSCP would be better for consistency's sake, but there's no need for interpreation's sake to do so--the card's intent in that regard is clear (though I agree the whole "must spend a Focus if able" is a bit vague and could use some clarification, but that's a whole different issue). I'm sure that FFG templating is pretty tight on cards with a lot of text (and HSCP skewed toward the higher end of text, at least before Wave 10 and it's paragraph-long cards came along). They probably had to decide between keeping a "you are" as part of both clauses and running with a smaller font, or dropping it off and keeping the standard font size, perhaps. If that was the decision, I'm okay with the later because there isn't any ambiguity in the final card because the implied "you" is there (ie, the card doesn't refer to friendly ships, so therefore only applies to "you" the ship to which it is attached).

I agree that wording in games must seek to avoid problematic issues where the card's playability cannot be resolved without an insight into designer intent (e.g. an official FAQ or errata). I don't think the absence of "you are" from the HSCP text's commits this sin, though, which is why I provided the ST:AW example where there was a problem that prevented the card from being playable until ruled upon by the designer (and of course I agree that Borg Missile needed to avoid the ambiguity and that there were many ways in which the designers could have worded the card to be clear and non-ambiguous (such as the one you noted). As an aside, ST:AW was a terrible game with lots of production issues, not just limited to defective models and low-quality or missing components, but also included many many cards which were unclear or problematically ambiguous.

14 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yes, those three.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be criticising the clarity of wording on those cards.

If not, what ARE you criticising? Just them being oddly worded? They;'re oddly worded *because* they're using keywords rather than natural language. That's where 'a ship is always frinly to and at range 1 of itself' is relevant - because they have to specify 'another friendly', because just saying 'a friendly' includes the ship itself, and 'another friendly' is shorter and more elegant than 'a friendly ship other than you' or 'a friendly ship other than this ship'.

I don't see what the problem is with 'you' and 'your' referring to 'the ship that has this upgrade equipped'. Like, at all. It makes the wording a little less natural than it could be, but makes it unambiguous. Proper technical writing would do that.

The things that bug me are things like smattering in words that look like they should mean something ('immediately' being the key offender here), wording which is ambiguous unnecessarily where a very short amount of extra wording would clarify (HSCP), wording which is just confusing (Targetting Synchronisers) and repeatedly adding new timing steps to sequences without properly defining how to resolve them (a whole bunch of things in Wave 8).

It's entirely possible I've mistaken what it is you're arguing. But you called Isard, SysOff and Mara 'weird, wrong wording'. They may be weird, but they're not wrong, they work according to the core rules of the game and the keywords they define.

I wasn't clear, then. I'll rephrase.

Ysanne Isard . It first uses "you" to refer to the ship ("you have no shields") then "your" to refer to the player ("your ship"). Using keywords means using the same keyword always with the same meaning. "You" either is the ship or the player, it can't be both in two instances within the same sentence. If "you" is keyword for "this ship" then every instance of "you" and "your" should be able to be strictly replaced by "this ship" and "this ship's", respectively.

Mara Jade . The issue is not specifying "at Range 1 of you". Since we have a rule that says that every ship is at Range 1 of itself, then every ship can always be said to be "at Range 1", satisfying the somehow opaque condition of the card. Even if we didn't have that rule, "at Range 1" could mean at Range 1 of anything if it's not defined through a specific second term. The card is written wrong because it omits to specify "at Range 1 of you" (or "at Range 1 of this ship" if we agree that "you" is a terrible keyword). The fact that we understand how it functions doesn't mean it's written in the best of ways from a hard templating point of view that doesn't leave anything to chance.

Systems Officer . This is minor, but since "you" is used as a keyword for "this ship", it happens that the actual occurrence of the word "ship" out of keyword is treated as if there was a previous instance of the word in the sentence, yet there isn't one. The issue comes from the fact that "you" is not a good pronoun for a third person entity. If it was "this and another ship", then the determiner "another" would qualify the first pronoun as a ship (it would still be bad technical English, by the way). "You and another ship" is legitimately weird.

As said, these were literally the first cards that jumped at me from a random 9-card page. I'm pretty sure there are many, many worse offenders. I think it's telling that these are actually cards nobody ever had a problem understanding, yet they should still be re-written if a serious templating system were ever to be employed.