Rook City updates to the Fireside Chats

Now that the Rook City update is finished and settled, I've added a whole pile of new information to the Fireside Chats thread. General discussion, commence!

So glad I finally found out about the chicken!

There are quite a few in there that are surprising changes, Afflicted Frenzy, Dual Crowbars, Spite's Flip and Supercooled Trisolvent Vat leap out to me.

I don't care what you say you can't do that in 3 parsecs.   Parsecs is a measure of distance not time.  

Dual Crowbars works somewhat like Isothermic Transducer. The final damage dealt from the first instance of damage forms the initial amount/type/irreducibility of the second instance of damage. That means you can benefit twice from damage increases.

This is pretty contrary to how this forum has understood Dual Crowbars to work. Or am I missing something. Was not expecting this one. Everything else seemed par for the course though.

Dual Crowbars is sick, and it strengthens Tiger a lot. (Since reduction will limit Crowbars)

Question: how will crowbars act when damage would put a target into negative health?  Asking this because of Fanatic's Martyr.

I really like the multiple redirection solution, well done on that.

Christopher was clear that this is a change to the previously understood ruling.

The amount of damage dealt doesn't really care about whether the final health number is positive or not. If you deal 10 damage to something with 5 HP, it's still 10 damage.

I wasn't questioning whether it was right or wrong (obviously these are official). It just came as a surprise. I'll be playing it that way from now on.

Sorry MigrantP but whomever you're speaking to, it's not Christopher.

I can tell because these three words are never used together in the same sentence.

Did you mean to say

?

Dual Crowbars is new.

The Superhuman Durability ruling implies that there is seperate timing for "would be" effects and that it is simply an exception. That is new.

So. . .

PW Haka + Fixer just got sick.

Haka of Battle + Crow Bars?

Yeah.

Guise stealing Crowbars just got much better too.

Guise + Crowbars + Bounties + Hunter&Hunted

Crowbars can pull off a pretty sick version of Sacrosanct Martyr with Bloody Knuckles.  Get an 8 damage hit? That will take out Truth.

DW Fixer + Crow Bars + Blood Knuckles.

1st instance = 6 damage

2nd instance = 9 damage.

Assuming no Dr, am I doing this correct?

yep.

I don't want to see another thread bemoaning how Fixer is underpowered. Ever. Again.

You will though, because people are stupid.

DW Fixer takes a hit though, since facing high reduction, one of his strengths, now can cause the second crowbar hit to do less damage, just like base fixer and charge.

Wooooaaaah.

And this puts some arguments to rest, doesn’t it?

Jack Handle effectively cancels the original damage, and causes a new set of damage dealing instance to all non-hero targets with the original damage amount/type/irreducibility.

…or does it? Can Fixer double-dip Grease Monkey’s +1?

I find this one confusing. Relevant text quoted:

>

When a card enters play, the following order of things occurs.

1. Ongoing effects on the card become applicable.
2. Cards that react to other cards entering play now act.
3. One-time effects on the card happen.

There is an exception to the order of operations ruling relating to reacting to damage being dealt. A card (or cards belonging to a hero/villain) that reacts to damage being dealt to it reacts before other cards do. The card dealing the damage and other interested cards happen afterwards and can be ordered by player choice.

Example: Suppose Mr. Fixer has Dual Crowbars and Bloody Knuckles in play. Omnitron has Adaptive Plating Subroutine but is not immune to anything yet. Mr. Fixer uses Strike to hit Omnitron for 3 melee damage. By this ruling, the text on Adaptive Plating Subroutine must go first and make Omnitron immune to melee damage. Then Dual Crowbars’ effect happens and Mr. Fixer can deal damage to another target. Without this ruling, you could use Synaptic Interruption and careful ordering to hit Omnitron twice before it becomes immune to melee damage.

The example sounds to me like adaptive plating subroutine effectively makes Omnitron immune to damage, and that doesn't seem correct. I assume I must be misreading something.

Adaptive Plating Subroutine makes Omnitron immune to certain types of damage. That's what the card does. Are you looking at Omnitron or Omnitron-X? Their Subroutine's are different.

I am looking at Omnitron. I think you misunderstood my question or I stated it badly: It looked like it was saying that Omnitron's immunity kicked in before the damage was applied, but I see upon rereading that it only says it kicks in before the second instance of crowbar damage.

I may be new to the game but I am clear on which deck is which.

I at first read it that way

which made me reread in dismay

but damage happens before

what triggers lie in store

so damage still happens, okay?

The wording which tripped me up was " Mr. Fixer uses Strike to hit Omnitron for 3 melee damage. By this ruling, the text on Adaptive Plating Subroutine must go first and make Omnitron immune to melee damage."  They don't mean 'first' as in 'before the damage', they mean 'first of all the triggers that happen after the damage has been dealt'.  Does this make sense?

EDIT:  Ninja'd

Yep, that's exactly how I misread it too.

Also:

Shock Rounds text is adjusted to say “The first time that card’s power is used to damage a target, Expatriette deals each non-hero target 1 lightning damage. After that power is used, destroy this card.” This clarifies that the lightning damage only happens once.

Okay, I know what you want, but that is still ambiguous. What if I read it that "the first time that card's power is used to damage a target - on a per target basis, ..." a la the way Combat Stance and Flame Barrier are supposed to work? It might be better to say "the first time each target" vs "the first time any target," or some wording that adds disambiguity. Or even, "The first time..., Expariette deals each non-hero target 1 lighting damage, then destroy this card."

Shock Rounds have been in our house rules for a while, because while Expatriette is an awesomely reliable dealer of small amounts of damage, she doesn't really have any awesome game-changing slam-dunk moves. So we let her Shock Rounds re-trigger.

I read that as striking all non-hero targets with one lightning damage, which with buffs can be quite effective.

Hmmmmmmm. I don't know if it's a consequence of this

Unload?

Hollow Points?

Expat rocks the damage, because her ammo is essentially a one-shot that boosts your power instead of adding small damage.  4 damage to 3 targets with 2 cards is dang good damage for a turn.  She is mostly solid damage with ammo fueled boosts giving better turns and Unload turning in serious damage.

I agree in principle...she's so slow to draw cards, though, that you can't reliably expect her to have those things at your disposal. I've easily played games where she never sees ammo at all.

If a card is damaging the X lowest HP targets, and in the middle of doing that a new lowest HP target appears, the targeting does not change. The originally chosen X targets are damaged. If one disappears in the middle, the damage fizzles and does not re-target.

I would suggest rephrasing "the damage fizzles" to "the damage to the missing target fizzles".  We're talking about (often) multiple targets here, and any that *don't* disappear do still take damage, right?

1.    Ongoing effects on the card become applicable.
2.    Cards that react to other cards entering play now act.
3.    One-time effects on the card happen.

That strikes me as needlessly complex.  It would be much simpler to just make step 1 be "Text on the card takes effect." and have no step 3.  While one can easily construct an edge case where this makes a different outcome, I don't see any cases where it would cause an outcome that seems (to my intuition) wrong enough to make the added complexity worthwhile.

Expatriette’s Ammo cards can be played without a gun in play. If that happens, the Ammo card is destroyed.

I thought it went directly to the Trash, having never really entered play, and thus not triggering either "card enters play" or "card was destroyed" effects.  Has this changed?
 

If an ammo card is next to a gun card and the gun card is destroyed, the ammo card remains in play.

Uh, why?  Expatriette has enough trouble getting ammo cards out, so why make it so easy for one to end up in limbo?  She has many means of getting ammo out of her trash, but *none* for recovering an ammo card that gets detached like this.  It would make more sense to me to errata the ammo cards to say "If the Gun card this is next to is destroyed, so is this card."

Oh, wait.  Is there actually a situation that can destroy a gun instead of an ammo card that isn't due to players being perverse and/or dumb about their choice of resolving ambiguities?  I don't think there is.  Nevermind...
 

For the second instance of damage, Dual Crowbars is only restricted from selecting the target that was the final result of the first instance of damage (after all redirects).

Is this a general change to how targeting multiple targets works? I was under the impression that you couldn't re-choose the *initial* target, but you *could* re-choose a target that ended up getting damaged earlier due to redirects.  Is this still true in general, or not?
 

This is how it has always worked, as was known from the Informant ruling. If it changes, there will be a lot of practical differences, namely how easy it would be to deal with the Informant.

Ongoing text refers to what was earlier called static effects.  The order has been known, because of the ruling that sucker punch would not destroy the Informant before she caused a villain card play.

Dual Crowbars triggers when Mr. Fixer deals damage to a target, you don't select two targets, the original target is unimportant because it only cares about the damage dealt and what target was dealt the damage.

Thanks for the clarifications; those both make sense to me now.

I've updated the (unofficial) Damage Dealing Timing spreadsheet with these rulings.  The biggest change was splitting what was step 20 into 20 and 21.  Added a new note on step 3 and clarified wording on various steps regarding the applicability (or not) of Fixed Point.

I have the same question.

Dual Crowbars is different from most

The old rules aren't entirely toast

I'd like to say why

but I think I won't try

to explain in this limerick post

Basically, the way Dual Crowbars works (or at least the way it works now), is a damage response that triggers off of the damage he deals.  This is different from most cases of multiple damage - it's more like Combat Stance and fellows than anything else.  So normal multiple targets still work the same way, with the initial target being the one off limits.

The key is how it i worded, (funny that it finally fits the effect) "when Mr. Fixer deals damage" is looking at the reduction of hp.  "To one other target as well" is dealing with the target that lost hp, so it doesn't care who thevoriginal target would have been, only who lost hp and how much they lost.

IMHO the Dual Crowbars ruling is a bad one and should instead follow the same path that was taken for Shock Rounds: reword it to make it work in a simple, intuitive fashion. This change makes Dual Crowbars so powerful that, strategically, it overshadows all other Tool/Style. Each +1 that he recieved transforms into a total of +3 with Crowbars.

It's funny, back when I wanted to buff Fixer I ignored rulings on how Dual Crowbars and Jack Handle worked (and Shock Rounds for Expat). It's flashy to play it once or twice but as a character he became dull when some cards were just so much more powerful and verstatile than the rest of the deck. Some time later I  went back to playing him as was ruled back then. I guess now I'll go back to ignore official rulings again.

The other tools are still great, depending on the situation.  Use crowbars when you need to hit two targets hard.  Use Pipewrench to tank, Tire Iron for REALLY pesky damage reduction (without alternating tiger claw) or to avoid at 0hp effects.  Use Jackhandle to hit all the things.  Use Hoist Chain when you need to reduce AoE damage or healing by dealing damage. 

However, for those people who really want Mr. Fixer to do a ton of damage, they can now go the Dual Crowbars approach.  And everyone can be happy (or not?).

Jack Handle also seems to benefit from a double buff in the latest set of clarifications. Suppose Mister Fixer has the Handle and Grease Monkey Fist in play:

Fixer deals 1+ 1 = 2 damage to a target.

Cancel that damage.

Now, Mister Fixer deals 2 + 1 = 3 damage to all non-hero targets.

Goodbye, Grand Warlord Voss’s entire army!

It does not. It cancels the original damage before you even select a target who you would damage to.

But here
https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/dealing-damage-timing-clarification-6047
Don’t we have to get as far as step 3, “determine if damage is dealt,” to trigger Jack Handle’s “when Mister Fixer would deal damage” effect? That comes after the modifiers.

What happens in the app?

Exactly as I said.

'k.

Seems like we are getting more and more card-specific rulings that might run against the overall general rulings. At least that phenomenon must be obvious to MigrantP… I wonder how big his if-else structures are getting!

Well for the damage forum topic keep in mind it's not official.  It's just put together by members of the forum to try to get a consistent idea.   Christopher chimed in about one time DR but not much else.

Except the first post, that’s official.

Christopher reviewed that first post? 

Yep, before I posted it.

Yeah, thats kinda the entire point of these fireside chats. New rulings always are going to override old ones.

I think clarification rulings are fine; I’d just rather have a unified set of general principles than a general principle plus a whole bunch of very specific exceptions. The Jack Handle thing I mentioned is a great example - it’s like the Handle’s phrase “would deal damage” means something different than the phrase “would deal damage” does in most other contexts, when you have to count out the modifiers to determine whether something is going to deal damage or not - such as with Absolute Zero’s equipment.

I may be misremebering (I don't have time to go through all my cards) but most other instances of "Would deal damage" are in fact "Would be dealt damage".

In fact I can't think of another card that reads "When X would deal damage"

There are 6 such cards

1. Jack Handle
2. Hippocratic Oath
3. Rebounding Debilitator
4. Twist the Ether
5. Smoke Bombs
6. The Hippo

Thanks. Bluedarky’s right, though, I was mentally lumping together all the occurrences of both “would deal damage” and “would be dealt damage,” and treating both as applying at step 3 of Pydro’s timing post.

Thanks. Clears it up for me.

Just to cover an edge case here, if Fixed Point lets you get Jackhandle and Crowbars in play, your initialdamage would be changed to all target damage, and each Jackhandle hit would trigger Crowbars for that specific target and HP reduced.

Also, with redirection, say apostate's orb, a hit against the orb would cause you to be unable to target the Orb with the extra Crowbar hit, but if you targeted another relic it would still redirect to the Orb and damage it a second time.

As for my thoughts on the ruling, I actually prefer it the other way.  I can see the fun of it, but it lowers the value in high reduction games.  For example:

Fixer with crowbars attacks Apostate's Orb at -2 taken with charge. The first hit deals 1 damage, the se ond deals 0.

It will work that way with bitter strike as well.

I also am not a huge fan of PW Haka and HoB getting double use.  But it doesn't break the game, just makes his other tools more situational.

Remember that Mr. Fixer has Alternating Tiger Claw for high reduction games and did poorly before without it.

My opposition to the new Crowbars is almost exclusively linked to my love of tough fights.  I get bored in fights that are stompfests, the matches where it feels like the heroes are competing to see who owns the hardest.

So I tend to dislike things that reward you for already doing awesomely, and prefer things that help you deal with nasty situations.

Dual Crowbar has never been my favorite tool, I like Hoist Chain and Tire Iron better.  Now Fixer has a Taiaha/Shockwave Hybrid, it works great, but it rewards you for stacking bonuses, and that isn't my cup of tea at all.

It might be ruled that when Jackhandle "cancels" the attack and creates a new one it could nulify the 2nd swing of crowbars.

Or I could see a ruling where you resolve the Jackhandle then choose one additional target for the "2nd swing" of crowbars calculated from the damage dealt to the first target you hit with Jackhandle.

Or it ends up being effectivly the same as we thought it worked before, where it would create 2 swings of Jackhandle, possibly with the damage of the 2nd swing being based off the first target hit with the first swing.

Or the App will automatically crash on purpose if that situation ever happens to avoid a ruling on this edge case.

Most Advanced Modes will still poop all over Crowbars most of the time.

The ruling we previously had was you'd basically hit all non-hero targets twice. Going by that, i'd say you'd hit the first target, then Dual Crowbars would interrupt to hit all non-hero targets based on the damage dealt to the first target, then continue to hit the rest of the non-hero targets.

I don't think that can work like that Ronway.  It doesn't respond to the first damage dealt, it responds to him dealing damage, so why wouldn't it respond to the other hits?

The Crowbar damage used to make sense, adding a second target to the attack, but it doesn't work like that anymore, and it would react to Jackhandle dealing damage, not turn it into 2 attacks.  If jackhansle can affect Crowbars added hits it will be ridiculous.

We have a while till the problem shows up in the app, as only Guise, Fixed Point, and The Sentinels can make Fixer deal damage to multiple targets before applying either Crowbars or Jackhandle.

But it does raise questions:

1.  Guise takes Jackhandle and then copies Squall, will jackhandle cause that attack to be any different?

2.  Guise takes Crowbars and copies Squall, how does Crowbar react?

2a.  Does that reaction vary from Crowbars+Jackhandle?  If so why?

3.  Guise borrows Jackhandle and copies Exorcism, does it change it to one all non-hero target attack or two?  Would F6 Wraith's power work the same?

Those are the best ones I can think of.

I honestly have no clue what the answers will be.

How? Fixed Point makes the tool in play indestructible, but playing a new tool doesn’t destroy the one in play. It returns the old tool to your hand.

Jackhandle "cancels" the first attack totally and replaces it. It would cancel Squall entirely and do the Jackhandle "all non-hero targets" thing. So it would end up being the same thing.

This might be reason to think that Jackhandle could "cancel" out the Crowbar attack somehow. Not saying this is how it works, or should work, but I'm just kinda throwing noodles at the wall here.

Indestructible cards can't leave play by any means, which is why you can't Into the Stratosphere indestructible villain cards

If something is indestructible, it can't leave play by definition. It's not just about "destroy" effects. Check out the glossary for the definition of indestructible.

Have fun!

I'm not sure what you're asking here.

I will update the wording on this to include the actual damage being dealt, etc. so it's more clear.

Personally I thought the original wording was fine and unambiguous (with the exact same interpretation, that the lightning damage only happens once). I'll bring this back to Christopher.

That's a bug. Fixed in the next update.

Yes, I can tweak the wording there.

1.    Ongoing effects on the card become applicable.2.    Cards that react to other cards entering play now act.3.    One-time effects on the card happen.  

It's complex, but has to be that way or some weird things happen. It may not happen in tabletop play which is fine. We've learned that in the video game, if something weird can happen, it will happen to someone.

Expatriette’s Ammo cards can be played without a gun in play. If that happens, the Ammo card is destroyed.  

I don't know if it has changed, I just know what it is.

If an ammo card is next to a gun card and the gun card is destroyed, the ammo card remains in play.  

Why = because Christopher said so.

For the second instance of damage, Dual Crowbars is only restricted from selecting the target that was the final result of the first instance of damage (after all redirects).  

No, it's not a change, just a clarification of Dual Crowbars in case anyone didn't know. Most of the things in the post are re-iterating existing clarifications, not changes. They are answers to questions we asked Christopher.

If Jackhandle replaces crowbar's added attack, then wouldn't we get a ton of all target attacks with both?

I can't imagine crowbars only reacting to the first damage dealt by a multi-damage attack, that doesn't fit anything in the wording.

Not really. Almost always we are aiming to discern a rule that is consistent between many cards, and that's what comes out.

And that's not how we program =)

I don't know. I'm sure we'll have a lot of interesting questions to ask Christopher about Fixed Point!

I want to see the list of questions mini-expasion 3 creates.

I was trying to ask at what point does the Jack Handle cancel the original attack and determine how much “that much” damage is. Is it before or after damage modifiers apply?

If it was after the modifiers, you could get some similar effects to the dual crowbar.

Someone answered me above - at least, they answered what happens.

Ronway was correct. It's before anything happens.

Great! Thanks a lot! That just encourages him!

Ronway, Ronway, he's our man; If he can't name it, no one can*!

*This excludes any affiliated with Greater Than Games, LLC.

Gah. Don't encourage him with exposure.

Much appreciated!