Inceptor & Mal/Str cards

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Legendre wrote:

So now to address your question, which is a good one: if the first clause gives you carte blanche to play the cards,

It doesn't. That's the point. Your bizarre, continued assertion that you can read half a sentence and divine the meaning of card from that means that Eyes of the Serpent makes me unblockable, because I can read half a sentence too.

Now you're just being obtuse.

Are you seriously telling me that you can't tell the syntactic difference between an "unless" clause that modifies an imperative and a conditional "as if" clause?

Legendre wrote:

Are you seriously telling me that you can't tell the syntactic difference between an "unless" clause that modifies an imperative and a conditional "as if" clause?

No, I'm telling you that your entire line of argument is a complete and total farcical bag of nonsense.

There is no rule in V:TES that means you can read half a sentence for one card and the whole sentence for another. Read the whole sentence (indeed, the whole card!) for both, irrespective of any use of the conditional, imperative, pluperfect, perfect, future perfect, subjunctive, passive, impersonal, past historic, present, or imperfect.

Are you seriously telling me that you can't read a whole sentence?

"Laughs heartily, as if this thread were comedic" would allow me to laugh if it weren't, right? Or only if there were? Crap, now I'm deeply confused. I should know better than to return to the forum after an extended absence.

I guess the object of the lesson is just laugh until someone tells me it's not permissible, then continue laughing anyway.

There's a difference between the language of Inceptor and the language of Eyes of the Serpent. With Inceptor, the second part of the relevant sentence, "as if he or she had the Discipline required (if any) at superior," suggests a situational clarification of the first half, "This vampire may play other copies of these cards." My language is a bit imprecise; I'm trying to suggest that it could be read as a non-necessary clarification concerning discipline cards in particular rather than a necessary clause. With Eyes of the Serpent, the second half is necessary to give the first half its meaning.

Anyway, even if this is ridiculous, I agree entirely with Legendre's basic argument, which is that "rtfc" is generally a bad response to give here considering the incredible complexity of VTES on the one hand and the English language on the other. The game doesn't have the precision of a science, and we shouldn't pretend that it does.

Sometimes you just have to say your piece, drop the mic and walk away from a thread. Some people won't get it and that's OK.