by chadpbrown
Maybe? It's always possible to find a place where a specific reminder would clarify a particular case, but in an exception-based game like Apocrypha, there are a couple major dangers to adding reminder-clarifications. One, it tends to make everything extra long, which makes it harder to learn the rules in general. Two, an exception-based game takes the general approach "these are the default rules, and they apply _unless you're told otherwise_. In that world, it becomes very tricky to be clear when a particular segment of text is a clarifying reminder of the default rules versus when it is an example of being told otherwise.As another design-peek-behind-the-curtain, we ran into that issue pretty frequently in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. PACG started with a single standardized structure for scenarios -- locations work like this, the "clock" works like that, and you do these things every turn. When we wanted to add more variety to scenarios, we had to tear down more of that standardized structure and then build up more supporting text to cover the corner-cases that popped up. Since PACG was trying to do all of this in the effect text of a single card, this became pretty painful. Compounding this effect, we discovered pretty quickly that players preferred much more variety in scenario foundations. (Roughly, our original PACG campaigns featured 1 "oddball" scenario per chapter of 5 scenarios.) This lead us to print some frankly ridiculous cards with sub-1-cm-tall "art boxes" (not that there were better solutions available at the time).
Apocrypha, partially as an attempt to learn from those lessons and apply the results, used a booklet rather than a single card for this purpose (which also let us increase the flavor and story elements). It also lead us to the "structure" cards, where rather than a single standard scenario foundation, we could assemble a small host of standardized parts, then assemble a mission from those parts, then add special refinements via the storybook. The upsides of this approach should be obvious, at least if I'm describing it well enough. The downside, as you're seeing here, is that we built a large number (~100) of highly varied missions, and the rules/cards to support it, all before we could really gather widespread feedback on the approach.
In the end, this is one of the big reasons that the "Chapter Mission Summaries" on BGG are so helpful! (Thanks again to everyone involved in making them!)