Subject: MN: Re: Wild Thing

From: "Kevan Davis" <kevan@z...>
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 13:33:51 -0000

>>And this issue has come up before, with no proposed
>>solutions to the problem; I just thought I'd rattle things up a little.
I'll
>>maybe propose a fix for this evening.
>Yes, it has. Should have thought about it more definitely before.

Thinking up a fix troubles me. At first glance a simple "Upon performing
this Action, the Actioning Player skips eir next Token Collection phase"
clause seemed to do the trick, but we've overlooked the *other* problem with
Wild Stations - that you can speed quite happily around the entire board,
freely dropping Tokens, Maelbergs, Suspect Packages and whatever else.

The obvious solution (and something that certainly needs to be applied to
Walking and Stub Linking; having glanced at the rules, you can't Walk or
Link if there's no available Tube route to your destination - completely
absurd) is that we should simply say "A Wild Move is not considered to pass
through any Stations".

Which is maybe fair enough, killing both avians with a single rock, but it
means making Wilds and Homes rather powerful again; unBlockable, heedless of
Maelbergs, and the rest. I did rather like the idea of Homing only being
possible if you could plot a route, however tortuous, back there. That if
you go for a secluded residence, Players can block your path back. Tish.

>You're right, "normal" should perhaps be more explicitly defined. The
closest
>we have at the moment is the following from Rule 1.5.8:
>
> * A Piece's Move is its normal motion along LU lines, excluding all
> Action-related changes to position. This may be referred to simply
> as 'a Move'
>
>Again that troubling use of the word 'normal'... In those terms, the only
>normal Move is one which is modified only by acceleration.

Personally I read it as a "normal move" being that made during your Movement
phase, as opposed to Compass Trickery, Straddling and the like. Accelerating
somewhere is arguably just as much an "Action-related change to position" as
Wilding a few stops away.

>Personally, I think the passing through bit is worth keeping but that the
>rewards should be simplified again - those bonuses used to have exactly the
>same schedule as those for the number of lines per interchange. This has
the
>added benefit of reducing the impact of very high velocities.

No prize at all for passing more than five Interchanges is, perhaps, the
best solution; a high LV is advantage enough in itself. Expect a Proposal
about this, this evening...

Kevan

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