Re: Damage immunity

[quote="Boris The Blade" post=32751How is that my fault?[/quote]

It's not your fault, but then and here it seem exactly as complex as before, while needing some additional rules changes. (and I don't have a trix handy, but if the reminder text became false, how it is an improvement in clarity ?).

I believe so because having to know the (relativiely intuitive) rule about bleed being successful that you would add and having to know the (for me intuitive) ruling for trix is equal for me. In both case, if I were to play trix six month from here, it would be reading rulings about trix that would correct me, not knowing the rulebook, simply because it is still an easy to miss subtelety.

It's common place that the creator of a rule find it perfectly clear ; still, I tend to find most try to be at best equal in complexity, and way too often vague, unclear, and/or difficult to understand.

What I notice is that most of discussions on this thread are about unclear texts from HttB edition. This edition's cards are very badly worded thus creating lots of confusion and misunderstanding.

Only usable when a bleed against you is successful. The bleed burns no pool

This construction suggests that there is a window for a reaction card, between bleed being successful and removing counters. Is there a step? Can I play, say, Hide the Heart or Telepathic Counter in that step reducing a bleed to zero, while still making action successful?

Let's say A bleeds B. C plays Major boon on A's bleed burning, say 2 pool, then B's minion plays Strix and enters combat with A's minion. Isn't that a bit confusing situation. I'll remind that Major Boon is master card and it is understandable that it can be played whenever conditions are met. Strix is not...

See, lots of unnecessary confusion...

Major Boon
Type: Master
Master: out-of-turn. Boon.
Put this card in play when another Methuselah is successfully bled. Not usable if you control the acting minion. Modifiers to the bleed amount may be played after you play this card. You burn pool for the bleed instead of the target Methuselah (must be at least 1 pool or this card is burned). When you are successfully bled, you may burn this card to have that Methuselah burn pool instead of you.

This isn't the latest cardtext, so all your following discussion is moot.

That not being the latest cardtext only shows how deep problem is. So joke is on you.
We're talking here about new players not understanding rules, cardtexts, mechanics, not about crappy text on one out of 150 cards from edition poorly written...

My point is that you need to adjust rules to some of the card texts so you wouldn't need to rewrite all of them to be understandable to a beginner. Nobody wants to play the game with 200 pages of rulings, well except maybe lawyers.

Have you tried to count how many rulings are written for HttB edition only? Beginning with Striga and Maleficia's unclear definition, over the Pocket out of Time, Outside the Hourglass, to Strix... and who knows what other bizarre situations await us.

Ohlmann wrote:

It's not your fault, but then and here it seem exactly as complex as before, while needing some additional rules changes. (and I don't have a trix handy, but if the reminder text became false, how it is an improvement in clarity ?).

The ruling on Strix (the fact that a bleed that burns no pool can be successful) is counter-intuitive. Nothing can help that except a reversal. My main point is not that. My point is: at least get the core rules clean and simple and move the goofy points as exceptions on cards, so that when people do not find a written rule they can be confident that most simple solution will be the right one.

I believe so because having to know the (relativiely intuitive) rule about bleed being successful that you would add and having to know the (for me intuitive) ruling for trix is equal for me. In both case, if I were to play trix six month from here, it would be reading rulings about trix that would correct me, not knowing the rulebook, simply because it is still an easy to miss subtelety.

Then again, the main point was not the Strix ruling itself but how it hurts common sense and being able to guess a ruling for immunity to damage. Intuitively, it seems obvious that if the target is immune to damage, then it has not been inflicted, and Pascal's ruling is explicitely that intuition is right. But what if someone at the table is not convinced? Then you have to start guessing how it can work (because it is not written anywhere), and that is actually the same as doing Pascal's job if he wanted to specify how it works in the rules.

Reyda started to talk about damage prevention/reduction, but does Immunity work like that? Immunity preventing the damage feels wrong because in that case Immunity would be trumped by unpreventable strikes like Blood Sweat. There is currently no irreducible strike but one might get printed someday if Nephandii become enough of a nuisance, so the same guess also applies to Immunity reducing the damage to 0. So Immunity does not seem to act on the damage itself but only on the receiving end. The damage is inflicted as is but somehow not taken. Maybe something like "this vampire does not need to burn blood to heal damage" (works for non-aggravated damage only).

So the question boils down to: if the damage is inflicted but not taken, does it count as successfully inflicted? Once again, the answer is not written anywhere so we have to guess, and when you guess you search for something you can relate to. In that case, the closest known situation is the Strix ruling and for that ruling, the rule 6.1.1 (not Strix card text, the rule itself) states that as long as the bleed amount was not modified, the bleed is still successful. So if the rule to determine whether damage is successfully inflicted is not supposed to work like the rule 6.1.1, it has to be written somewhere: because of the bad wording of the rule 6.1.1, we need a ruling on immunity to tell us that we don't need a ruling If the rule 6.1.1 was changed to a more simple and intuitive wording and the effect of Strix migrated to its own card text (or scrapped at all), then this problem would not occur: Strix would be one more exception and having an exception does not change the understanding of the general rule.

Everyone here agrees that we want simple and intuitive core rules. The rule 6.1.1 does not live up to these expectations, and the only reason some people fail to acknowledge it is because of the chronological aspect. Rule 6.1.1 was written long before Strix so some primitive part of the brain must tell you that the culprit is always the new guy. It is not the case here. The bad wording is in the rule, it has always been there, just it was not exploited before Strix.

Ankha wrote:

So instead of correcting errors in cards, you'll adjust the rules so all the cards with their current cardtext fits in it? you'll just move those 200 pages of ruling to the rulebook.

That is exactly what the rule 6.1.1 currently does: it is twisted so that it can encompass the Strix ruling instead of leaving it aside as an exception. It was not done in that order and not on purpose, but the end result is the same.