Carrion Crows & First Strike Strikes (Not Anaesthetic Touch)

Rulebook wrote:

When a minion or retainer takes damage (either from a strike or from other means), he must burn blood or lose life, as appropriate (see Damage Resolution, sec. 6.4.6).

That covers "environmental" damage.

I still don't see why Juggernaut is intentionally being obtuse about this whole thing. The rules are pretty clear. There are many rulings, which are *interpretations* of the rules. They are the specific examples of the rules being applied. That's their entire purpose. They exist so the rulebook does not have to be clogged with thousands of special cases.

Jeff,
That is how a minion 'takes damage' not when Environmental Damage must be queued in a Strike Resolution. Again, there is a gap in the rules.

I am being "obtuse" because the RULES are not clear. The players playing the game for a long time might have been 'told how it works' and given a non-rule non-ruling way to cover the gap in the rules, but the gap is still there.

The entire General Rulings section of this website is not a "How does card X work when card Y is played?". They are not sorted by cards. They are sorted by "new rules". Those are in effect, amendments to the rules. Why are they still a whole page of amendments?

Maybe to reinforce the 'rulings bloat'...

Card by Card Rulings
Cards with names:
A to F have 6569 rulings
G to O have 4776 rulings
P to Z have 6538 rulings
Total: 17,883 rulings

ARDB says that there are (excluding Danse Macabre cards):
1392 crypt cards
2148 library cards
3540 cards

There are on average: 5.05 rulings PER CARD only in the Card-by-Card Rulings.

There are also 104 General Rulings. (Note: There are around 25 rulings dedicated to Combat and Damage Resolution alone. Suggesting that these two also account for a possibly 25% of Card-by-Card rulings AND that they are the worst defined parts of the game)


All in all there are: 17,897 rulings.

We can probably kill 104 of those as a minimum by improving the way the rules are written. I'd make a really conservative estimate that we would reduce the total of rulings by something like 5,000 rulings by amending combat, defining environmental damage and a handful of other rules-based solutions.


AaronC,
To that I reply: Scare off the vultures. If they don't care where the carcass may lay, I do.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

That is how a minion 'takes damage' not when Environmental Damage must be queued in a Strike Resolution.

You said above, "Putting environmental damage as a class into the rules..." I am simply pointing out that it is covered already.

As James pointed out initially, and as I reiterated, the "queue" is actually "simultaneous".

Obtuse wrote:

Again, there is a gap in the rules.

I am being "obtuse" because the RULES are not clear.

The rules are not clear...TO YOU. Sure, many people initially have to figure out what this or that actually means. The learning curve is steep. But the rule book covers those situations which you are trying to desperately to claim that it doesn't. You are really just wrong here.

Maybe to reinforce the 'rulings bloat'...

Actually, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot here. Go ahead. Yup, go ahead.

Card by Card Rulings
Cards with names:
A to F have 6569 rulings
G to O have 4776 rulings
P to Z have 6538 rulings
Total: 17,883 rulings

No. You are completely and utterly wrong here. Those numbers are "hits", as in "views" of the rulings pages. The actual number of rulings is much, much less. I'm not gonna bother counting.

And, if you actually read some of those rulings, you'd find that they are simple clarifications. Back in the day, people would ask questions and then, as a courtesy, the rulings guru of the time would issue the clarification.

I'd say that 50% of the rulings fall into this category--something that the rules already cover, but that perhaps received several queries on the online forums before.

I'd say another 40% or more are just poor card templating. Many of those have been fixed in subsequent printed versions of the cards, but the old rulings have to stay because the old cards exist.

The remaining 10% (probably even less than this) are rulings which are important. They are covered by the rules, but they are esoteric enough that they make good case studies, and are therefore worth explicitly handling.

Anyway, I'm going to check out of this thread now. You will respond to this because you have to have the last word. Have fun with that.

The queue is not simultaneous. Things at equivalent points in the queue are simultaneous. There is a 'queue' because the exceptions cause an order. Environmental damage (damage not from minions) has no place in the order of when they should be applied to a minion in the rules.

In the "Strike Resolution Step" which is the part we are talking about... (not how damage is resolve but how and when damage is applied) the rules contain nothing to explain when a non-strike should be handled. Non-strikes have no 'speed' and no position in the 'queue'.

As I have challenged you and James to show:

Q: Where do the rules explicitly deal with this?
A: There are some obscure rulings and a lot of 'tradition' buried out there in a Google-group that is not maintained and probably only appears in Google Searches because Google is an information pack-rat.


Both you and James are missing the thrust of the argument, and I am not surprised that its subtlety was wasted on your excellent analytical mind. James however, seems to respond to any attempt to reduce the scattering of the rulings into the actual rules as if it were the equivalent of depicting Mohammed in a cartoon.

I am not saying at any point that the way we have been playing Carrion Crows is wrong. Please, actually read through the thread. I haven't actually challenged the ruling itself. I am fine with the fact that environmental damage should be resolved at the same time as normal strikes.

My challenge is "Where do the rules actually tell someone who hasn't been playing for 10+ years this information?"

Why should new players begin this game being told "You only need to read the rules and the cards, except for this entire separate document to explain the rules and a large number of additional rulings on top of those, and even more things you will have to Google for...". What is wrong with updating the rules so they are transparent, clear and versatile? So that a player can just read the rules and the book.

How should new players realise that S:CE will ensure that Carrion Crows damage is not done if the rules don't tell them how?

As a corollary to that, I also ask, how should new players know which damage is 'from the minion' and which is not, so that they can play cards like Street Cred?