Questions from my first few games

I got onboard the SotM train during the Infernal Relics kickstarter and I've been waiting for my cousin/gaming partner to have some free time to dive right in. In the meanwhile, I've read pretty much every post on these boards and gobbled up every little bit of information about the game that I could. I finally got to play for the first time tonight. Long story short, we loved the game and I'll look forward to playing again, but the first two games brought up a few questions that I couldn't find the answers to.  (Forgive me because I don't necessarily know the card names yet and I don't have them in front of me.)

General Comments: 

I found the rules to be relatively easy, though we needed to read several cards a few times each to make sure we were doing it right.  We definitely messed up Maintenance Level a few times but we were able to backtrack and keep it from having an effect on the game.  One thing we had a real hard time with was getting used to drawing at THE END of the turn because most of the games we've played haven't been like that.

Game 1:  Baron Blade vs. Absolute Zero, Bunker, Tempest, and Ra

I know I shouldn't have played Absolute Zero in my first game, but I can't resist a powered armor-type hero.  I played AZ and Bunker and let my cousin pick his two but tried to steer him towards Ra and Tempest since he hasn't been reading about the game as much as I have.  I knew that those two characters are relatively straightforward and I wanted him to have a good first experience.  AZ was basically a non-factor, but I know that's just a possibility when you play him.  I managed to get out Cryo Chamber, Isothermic Transducer, and Nullpoint Calibration Unit but even though I thought I knew how to use them on paper, during the game I couldn't figure out what to do to make it work.  I'll be posting a whole bunch of AZ questions tomorrow when I have the cards in front of me.

We won the game pretty handily and were never really at risk of losing other than we didn't flip him until there were 12-13 cards in his trash.  I'm assuming we played everything more or less right, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd ask.

Questions from Game 1: 

1)  When a card (it was a Megalopolis environment card I think) says that you can't draw cards, does that mean you can't draw cards during your draw phase or you can't draw cards period.  I played it as you can't draw cards at all, but my cousin interpreted it as during the draw phase, so I know at one point he played a Tempest card that allowed him to draw a card and he did.  I don't think it affected the outcome of the game one way or the other, but it would be good to know for future reference.

2)  Baron Blade has a card ("Devious something") that allows players a chance to destroy any ongoing or equipment cards and then deals damage equal to 3 + the number of ongoing/equipment still in play.  Is that damage 3+the TOTAL number of ongoing/equipment to each player or does it do 3+the number of ongoing/equipment cards each player has to that player?  I don't think I'm explaining that well, but we assumed it was the former and boy did that sting.

Game 2:  Omnitron vs. Tachyon, Legacy, and Haka

We decided to play just three heroes in our second game cause we were short on time.  We lost pretty badly.  We had Omnitron down to about 22 at one point, but he healed back up and hit us with Sedative Flechettes and that was just about the end of us.  A few questions here too:

1)  Is Savage Mana as awesome as I think it is against Omnitron?  As long as Haka was the one killing the drones, we seemed to be able to keep them out of Omnitron's trash and really limit his Factory side.  Of course, I formulated this question in my head long before I knew how devastating Sedative Flechettes could be so I suppose Savage Mana isn't overpowered when it can be destroyed in an instant.

2)  Can an incapacitated player skip their turn to destroy Meteor Shower (or Meteor Storm, I forget the exact name)?

Thanks for reading, guys.  I'm gonna catch some Z's and think about a few hard fought battles.  I'm determined to master Absolute Zero, but that will be a battle for another day.

Welcome to the game! I played AZ in my first game, too, but I lucked out and got a decent combo going with him fairly quickly.

Drawing cards is drawing cards, no matter what phase it's done in. If you're not allowed to draw cards, you're not allowed to draw cards.

Yep, it's all of them.

Like you say, it can go away in an instant to Sedative Flechettes, which would undo all Haka's hoarding. So it's not as amazing as you surmised, but it's still pretty good.

I'd say yes, because they're still a player, and they still get a turn, however truncated it may be.

It doesn't cover everything you asked, but note that Spiff's rules and clarifications has lots of useful info: http://www.spiffworld.com/sotm/files/sotm_rules_and_clarifications.pdf

You asked about Meteor Storm, from the Wagner Mars Base environment:

> All targets are immune to damage.

At the start of their turn, a player may skip the rest of their turn to destroy this card.

Your question was "Can an incapacitated player skip their turn to destroy Meteor [Storm] ...?" 

I don't believe there has been a ruling on this. 'Start of turn', however, is actually one of the five parts of a hero turn, not just a simple description. Since incapacitated heroes do not follow the normal hero turn, I don't think that an incapacitated hero technically has a 'start of turn'. An incapacitated hero would not be able to, therefore, skip their turn to destory Meteor Storm.

A related question comes from the card Paparazzi On The Scence, from the Megalopolis environment:

> Heroes cannot use powers.

At the start of the environment turn, each player may discard 1 card each to destroy this card.

Leaving aside the potential confusion stemming from the use of 'player' rather than 'hero', I think this card is ambiguous as to what is expected and/or allowed if one or more heroes are incapacitated. My intuition is that each active hero must discard a card, such that the card could be reworded as:

> ... the player of each active hero may ...

Now, I thought that an incapacitated hero could skip his turn.  After all, skipping his turn means he can't use incapacitated abilities.  Also, if an incapacitated doesn't have a start of turn, then it's rather pointless for an incapacitated hero to maintain his infection (with the small exception that it keeps infections out of the deck circulation, and allowing Plague Rat to heal if Plague Locus is still in play).  All the infected abilities (except the powers granted to infected heros) occur at the start of that hero's turn, thus, if incapacitated heroes don't have a start of turn, no infected abilities.

Also, if incapacitated heroes don't have a "start of turn" or "end of turn", cards that have an effect at the start of every turn, like Pillars of Hercules, do nothing when it's time for an incapacitated hero to play...

I think it's safer to assume that an incapacitated hero has a "normal" turn, with a start phase and an end phase, or many possible card effects would become hard to arbitrate.

Yeah, I think the rules need to be clarified in future editions to clearly state something like an incapacitated hero no longer has a play or draw phase and uses one of the choices during its power phase, or something that would otherwise concretely clarify what is intended. 

I think this is exactly correct. Incapacitated heroes who are infected do not have infected powers/abilities.

Pillars of Hercules causes the player of a hero to play a card, but incapacitated heroes do not have decks. I don't see an issue.

Belay that. I was thinking of Atlantean Font of Power.

Even so, I see no issue – no villain card is played on an infected hero's turn. But perhaps that is just my interpretation rather than being clear.

It's a problem of consistency : everything has a turn in SotM, the villain, the environment, the heroes, and every turn has a start, and an end. Most cards use these to time their effects - if incapacitated heroes suddenly worked in a different way, it could cause strange behaviors for the cards, now or with future expansions.

I don't know if I'm right or not, but seeing how Christopher always insist on consistency, I consider safer to simply consider that an incapacitated hero's turn works exactly like a normal one, the only difference being that he doesn't have the three normal actions (or, rather, he doesn't have a deck anymore), only the choice to use one incapacitated ability.

Looking more precisely at the glossary, I even see nothing preventing an incapacitated hero to use a power if something gives him one (Plague Rat) or even to be given a card (like Rod of Anubis, or Infection), but this is open to discussion :)

Plague Rat and Infection talks about 'active heroes'. I assumed those are the heroes that are not incapacitated. It states so in the glossary (enhanced edition). So Infection can't even go to incapacitated heroes? Or am I playing this wrong?

You are right, but when a hero becomes incapacitated with an Infection card on them nothing says to discard it, and the designer has said that it stays.  The obvious implication is that they still count as an infected hero when a card references the number of infected heroes.  The less obvious part is whether Afflicted Frenzy can cause an incapacitated hero to deal damage at the start of their turn.

I asked Christopher about these issues and he said it was ok if I quoted his responses.

I asked:

Does an incapacitated hero's turn still have start, play, power, draw, and end phases?

Can an incapacitated hero use a power from an Infection card or the Rod of Anubis?

Christopher responded:

Incapacitated Heroes still have turns, but not play, power, or draw phases of their turns, as they only have a 'use an incapacitated ability' phase.

Therefore, you can skip your turn to resolve 'skip your turn' effects, but you cannot use or skip your play, power, or draw phases, as you do not have them.

I asked further:

Do incapacitated heroes still have a start and end of turn phase, such that at the start of their turn a villain card could be played, an effect that started before they were incapacitated could end, and/or (as you stated above) they could choose to skip the rest of their turn?

Christopher responded:

Every turn always has a start of turn and an end of turn (unless somehow it/they have been skipped - in that case, the turn still had those phases, they were just skipped). So, yes, an Incapacitated hero's turn looks like this.

• Start of Turn
• Use an Incapacitated Ability
• End of Turn

Thanks, Arenson9. My first night playing and already I've inspired an official ruling :)

That means that if Fanatic has Divine Focus in play she can discard on the incapacitated hero turn, too, right?

With Pillars of Hercules in play the villain would get a card, but the incapacitated hero would only get one ability, right?

Abilities are not powers, so things granting extra powers do not give extra abilities. Incapacitated heroes still have start of turn, and thus Divine Focus would still be allowed.

When incapacitated, a hero's character card is flipped and all other of that hero's cards leave the game.

Ah, I see. You aren't talking about Fanatic being incapacitated. Never mind what I wrote.

If it makes you feel better arenson, I did the same double take on that post. :D

Bumping this old thread because I have a question which, seemingly, has never been conclusively answered.

As far as I can tell from this forum's search function, this is the only time this question was ever asked, and I didn't see a definite answer, just Arenson's "intuition".  It looks to me as if he's not right about this one, though; the card does NOT say "active heroes", and incapacitated heroes no longer have cards in hand, so per the wording of the card it seems evident that the presence of a single Incapacitated hero means the Paparazzi will never go away (barring Flash Floods and Grappling Hooks and so forth), meaning no more powers for the heroes for the rest of the game.  I'm now wondering whether this was intentional; it's sort of thematic ("A Hero Falls - Did His Comrades Let Him Die? Stay tuned for details on this developing tragedy!"), but will result in a LOT more game losses in Megalopolis if true.

This isn't quite true. Incapped hero don't have a hand at all, not a hand of 0. I think this hints at what the real answer is that it is all active heroes. Incapped heroes don't have hands or powers, both are abilities directly relevant to the card in question. The card doesn't apply to an incapped hero (it doesn't have powers or a hand), and only the active heroes have to discard.

EDIT: This is how it works on the Mea Computer.

But it very much applies to the remaining heroes, and if "all players" have to discard and some can't, the incap heroes basically cause a game loss just by existing.  (Hostage Situation works the same way, now that I read it again; somehow I thought they were different.)

and only the active heroes have to discard.  EDIT: This is how it works on the Mea Computer.

The what?  Other than whatever a "mea computer" is, do you have any other source to support that only active heroes have to discard?

The Mega Computer is the card rules and interaction engine for the upcoming video game of the card game.

The intent of the Mega Computer is to accurately play any situation according to rules, and the makers have worked a lot with GtG to make sure it lives up to their goal.

If Mega-Computer plays it that way it probably should be played that way.

The game does a good job of avoiding those kind of lockdowns, I doubt that Paparazzi is intended to work that way.

It sounds like the Mega-Computer is a thing all players could benefit from access to...any chance that it can be made accessible for us non-Sidekickers?

I don't actually know how to access it, I think it is part of playtesting the video game, but I could be wrong.

Mega Computer is part of the video game playtesting that strips away the graphical interface and lets you play games through a command line interface (e.g. play card 5; discard cards 2 and 7; hit target 3, then target 4, then in any order after that). It doesn't have a list of rules that you can just read through - the goal is to adjust the internal electronic rules to make them identical to how the game is actually played.

So, if someone says that it is played a certain way in the Mega Computer, that -may- mean that it is correct, since the Mega Computer is attempting to mimic the actual rules. Alternately, it may be wrong in the Mega Computer and we just haven't caught it yet. In this case, I suspect it is the latter (i.e. I don't think you are completely hosed if one hero is incapped)

True, I didn't say this is true, but rather what the Mega Computer does right now. When they setup the game, they sat down with GtG and said, "Ok, tell me exactly how this thing works." There are a few things not perfect, but that is why it is in testing. Right now, the Mega Computer will destroy the card if all active players discard a card. While I can see how this might not work for the wording (I can also see how it doesn't), I just can't picture this being true. Also, there are a bunch of cards that would fall into this category.

MigrantP did say he will post the some of the rules, especially regarding how to handle multiple effects and modifiers.