Schrödinger's Castle Battlements

[WWDrakey 5]

 

Grants immunity to non-plot card effects. 

The effect granting the immunity is a non-plot card effect. 

~ Was misprinted and should be called Schrödinger's Castle Battlements?

~~ Toss a coin for every effect?

[sabrefox 0]

The FAQ states: (3.17) Self-Immunity - A card with immunity is not immune to its own abilities.

[WWDrakey 5]

sabrefox said:

The FAQ states: (3.17) Self-Immunity - A card with immunity is not immune to its own abilities.

Yep. And the card with immunity in this case is the location, no? So it is not immune to its own abilities. How does this then imply that it would not be immune to another card (Castle Battlements in this case)?

[sabrefox 0]

Ah, too early - my brain didn't pick up on that

It would appear that FAQ (3.18) doesn't provide any clarity here either: "Timing of Immunity - Immunity is only considered when a triggered effect (or a passive ability) first resolves. A card cannot gain immunity to a triggered effect (or a passive ability) with a lasting duration once that effect has first resolved."

Since the immunity is provided by the attachment's constant ability, it has no point of resolution and thus cannt be cancelled.  Thus the card is now immune to the effect that is providing it immunity.   Nice pickup on that circular reference.

It would seem easy enough to fix by making the immunity resolve as a passive effect instead - "Once in play, attached location is immune…" or something.  That would be allowed under the FAQ section above.

[ktom 598]

sabrefox said:

It would seem easy enough to fix by making the immunity resolve as a passive effect instead - "Once in play, attached location is immune…" or something.  That would be allowed under the FAQ section above.

Nope. So long as you use an "is immune" wording, you are dealing with a constant effect, which creates the circular reasoning of "gains immunity, is immune to what is giving it immunity and so loses the immunity, no longer immune so regains the immunity, etc."

What you have here is an endless loop. 

[Ratatoskr 34]

ktom said:

 

What you have here is an endless loop. 

So, what should be done about it in your opinion? Wait for an erratum? If you were judging at an event, and this card was played, un-errata'd, how would you decide?

I guess one could always point to the FAQ, page 14: "If, at any time, two (or more) lasting effects create an endless loop that cannot successfully resolve itself, resolve the loop as if neither lasting affect were occurring" and rule that the immunity-granting effect of the card is in fact nullified (I'm aware that this is not an endless loop created by two lasting effects, but raher one constant effect cancelling itself out, but I guess the FAQ passage quoted is the closest thing we have to a ruling, right?)

[WWDrakey 5]

Ratatoskr said:

ktom said:

 

 

What you have here is an endless loop. 

 

 

So, what should be done about it in your opinion? Wait for an erratum? If you were judging at an event, and this card was played, un-errata'd, how would you decide?

I guess one could always point to the FAQ, page 14: "If, at any time, two (or more) lasting effects create an endless loop that cannot successfully resolve itself, resolve the loop as if neither lasting affect were occurring" and rule that the immunity-granting effect of the card is in fact nullified (I'm aware that this is not an endless loop created by two lasting effects, but raher one constant effect cancelling itself out, but I guess the FAQ passage quoted is the closest thing we have to a ruling, right?)

Well… I would actually argue that there are two lasting effects here. Albeit one of them is being created by the other one. So, I can see some validity in arguing that solution.

~ Of course, I'd rather go with the Quantum Mechanical solution here and treat this as a superposition of two quantum states that collapses into one state when measured. Hence my coin flip argument. But then, I used to be a physicist…

[Ratatoskr 34]

WWDrakey said:

~ Of course, I'd rather go with the Quantum Mechanical solution here and treat this as a superposition of two quantum states that collapses into one state when measured. Hence my coin flip argument. But then, I used to be a physicist…

~Huh. I know the words, but still I don't understand what you're saying. But then, concerning physics, I'm with Macbeth: "Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it" (V.III)*.

 

 

*Yeah, I know he meant medicine, so sue me.

[sabrefox 0]

Edited to remove post.  There is nothing to see here but my own stupidity.

[Bomb 66]

Why is this being over-thought?  Obviously the immunity text on the card would be worthless if it could never be applied.  Clearly the intent of the attachment is not to be immune to itself and to be immune to all other non-plot card effects.  Is there a FAQ entry for constantly applied/gained immunities not being immune to it's source?

The best text would be "Attached location is immune to all non-plot card effects except for Castle Battlements." where it is self-referential.

I understand there is always that one person in a tournament setting that might be a **** about it and that is why there is this discussion.  Unsuspecting players will play this card not considering that there is a hole in its own ability because it's not defined in the rules as an immunity not being immune to the source of the immunity.  It's probably assumed to be not immune to it's the origin of the immunity, but it's unfortunately not defined in the FAQ as such…

Isn't there an old attachment out there that has "Attached character gains: "No attachments.""?

[sabrefox 0]

No one questions the intent of the card, but as noted, the current rules surounding immunity don't fit this card as written, especially the sectionsabout Self-Immunity and Scope of Immunity. I'd agree with your simple fix though.  Nice and simple.

 

Bomb said:

 

Isn't there an old attachment out there that has "Attached character gains: "No attachments.""?

 

 

The new Bastard attachment comes close to this, "After you play Bastard from your hand, discard all other attachments on attached character. Attached character gains the Bastard trait, loses a P icon, and cannot have attachments played on it." The first statement is a passive effect to clear the card of existing attachments, then the second is a constant effect that doesn't affect the Bastard card becuase it is already played and attached.
 

[ktom 598]

If I were judging, I'd argue that the absence of the word "other" (so that the card read "…immune to other non-plot…" is a clear mistake and exercise my power as a TO to say the immunity to everything other than the Battlements stands. (While waiting for official errata.)

Usually, my answer is "if I didn't know about it before the event, you play it as written rather than as assumed, then I'll send it to FFG and issue a house rule if necessary until the errata comes." But in this case, there is no real "as written" resolution, making it a clear mistake.

In the end, though, the text as written cancels itself out and should be errata'd.

[Slothgodfather 270]

If it was worded as a "gained" keyword, then under the FAQ of not being immune to itself, it would work as "intended' correct?

[radiskull 39]

Slothgodfather said:

If it was worded as a "gained" keyword, then under the FAQ of not being immune to itself, it would work as "intended' correct?

Except that it would become immune to the source of the gained text, thus removing the gained text, and so on ad infinitum.

[ktom 598]

Further, the "gained" keyword is still not considered a card ability, and the "cannot be immune to itself" rule is that cards cannot be immune to their own abilities.

To do what you are suggesting, Sloth, the attachment would need to be a triggered or passive effect. Essentially, it would need to read something like, "Response: After Castle Battlements is attached to a location, choose that location. It gains immunity to non-plot card effects."

At that point, the immunity is coming from a lasting effect that does not depend on the continued activity of the attachment's text, instead of a constant effect that does need to attachment text to be active.

[sabrefox 0]

OK, now I'm really confused…isn't this what I suggested above (albiet, the wording was slightly different) and told that immunity is a constant effect?  After thinking about it, I agree, since if immunity was a passive effect, it wouldn't resolve until the effect it should protect against has already resolved.  

Immunity being a constant effect is the trouble, not the specifics of where the immunity text originated from, right?

[KristoffStark 1]

ktom said:

If I were judging, I'd argue that the absence of the word "other" (so that the card read "…immune to other non-plot…" is a clear mistake and exercise my power as a TO to say the immunity to everything other than the Battlements stands. (While waiting for official errata.)

Usually, my answer is "if I didn't know about it before the event, you play it as written rather than as assumed, then I'll send it to FFG and issue a house rule if necessary until the errata comes." But in this case, there is no real "as written" resolution, making it a clear mistake.

In the end, though, the text as written cancels itself out and should be errata'd.

I whole-heartedly agree.

[Slothgodfather 270]

sabrefox said:

OK, now I'm really confused…isn't this what I suggested above (albiet, the wording was slightly different) and told that immunity is a constant effect?  After thinking about it, I agree, since if immunity was a passive effect, it wouldn't resolve until the effect it should protect against has already resolved. 

Immunity being a constant effect is the trouble, not the specifics of where the immunity text originated from, right?
 

The part that it doesn't specify that it's not immune to the attachment is the trouble.  As another possible fix to the text it could say "oppenent's non-plot cards" and then all is right with the world again.  But then again, that is a stretch into what the card is "intended" to do.
 
 

As a side note, this thread's subject title is extremely fitting.  Did anyone else imagine Shedlon explaining the concept to Penny?
 

 

[sabrefox 0]

Having pursued a Physics degree myself in the past, I LOVE the reference, and actually understand, to some degree, the idea of "superposition" that was mentioned earlier.  I might not put the card in my deck if it was that unreliable, but I agree it is currently the Schrodinger's Cat of AGoT.

[KristoffStark 1]

The difference being that when you open the box, you discover if Schrodinger's Cat is actually alive or dead (or one could see it as the act of opening the box defining the cat one way or the other).

We need an errata to open this box, and define the Battlements.

[WWDrakey 5]

Bomb said:

 

Why is this being over-thought?  Obviously the immunity text on the card would be worthless if it could never be applied.  Clearly the intent of the attachment is not to be immune to itself and to be immune to all other non-plot card effects.  Is there a FAQ entry for constantly applied/gained immunities not being immune to it's source?

The best text would be "Attached location is immune to all non-plot card effects except for Castle Battlements." where it is self-referential.

I understand there is always that one person in a tournament setting that might be a **** about it and that is why there is this discussion.  Unsuspecting players will play this card not considering that there is a hole in its own ability because it's not defined in the rules as an immunity not being immune to the source of the immunity.  It's probably assumed to be not immune to it's the origin of the immunity, but it's unfortunately not defined in the FAQ as such…

Isn't there an old attachment out there that has "Attached character gains: "No attachments.""?

 

 

NOTE: The following is a sort of preamble to something that I've been thinking about lately, feel free to skip until later if this is all clear or boring to you. ; )

Well, I guess the whole theoretical background here goes somewhat on these lines:

• All of the different cases of how cards interact cannot be explicitly written on the cards themselves, not enough room.
• All of the different interactions between cards cannot be written explicitly out by the design team. Even with binary interactions there would be over half a million interactions (6*120 cards for CPs, 60*6 cards for deluxe expansions, around 200 for Core Set… that makes around 1280 cards… square that and you have around 1.6M. Remove double-counting and you're at something like 800k). Not enough manpower, time etc.
• Despite this, players have to be able to interpret all of the interactions during gameplay and preferably in a similar way in different isolated places. Otherwise somebody will come with a deck that contains Free Man, only to discover that the TO says that it's a widling, not a wildling…

Now, for all of this to work out properly, we need two things:

1. A formal language that is used in the cards.
2. A compatitable rules set for parsing this formal language.

If there is no clean set of rules, then we cannot extrapolate and come up with the same end result in every game played by every player anywhere. Essentially, we'd end up playing the game differently everywhere, and it would be useless to talk about a real metagame anymore, since we wouldn't all be talking about the same game anymore. 

This is actually pretty similar to how programming works. The text written on the cards would be the code, the rules would be the coding language and the player/TO doing the interpretation would be the parser/compiler. Now, in an ideal situation, the rules set would be so thoroughly defined that there would be very little room for mistakes, all of the special structures of the language would be included as rules and the overall size of the rules set would be manageable. Of course, ideal rarely happens. However…

Why I decided to pick up on this:

I'm a bit worried on how laxly FFG is treating the overall formal language behind the game. To begin with, the game is pretty hard to parse for most people, evidenced by the 'Oh, we've been playing this wrong' -comments that you very often see from people. So, FFG isn't doing too well with either the clarity (the rules are in a difficult to interpret form) or conciseness (there's just too many rules for players to keep up with), to begin with. One portion of this might be the fact that the rules are spread out into two documents? Or just the way the sheer length of the accumulated rules text? But it starts getting downright worrying, when an argument can be made that even the card designer's aren't fully aware anymore of how the rules function.

Now, the following (and previous for that matter) are purely my personal thoughts, so feel free to disagree. Even vehemently. No, really. Feel free. I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on these:

• I think that instead of using existing well defined structures within the formal language to produce new and interesting effects, AGOT design tends towards constantly creating new structures into their own games language. Now, the funny thing is that Castle Battlements is actually a good COUNTER-example, since it is using an existing rules structure (Immunity) in new and interesting ways. An example in this direction would be the new River Plots. Maybe the character agendas also, although they're resurrected from CCG.
• For the amount of new types of effects that AGOT gains constantly, very few of them are defined into new terms into the language. An example? Instead of defining 'Claim Replacement (attacking alone):', we write out all of the rules for this on each card that does this. Similarly for character Agendas. Now, this is of course good in it's own way, since players don't need to look elsewhere for the rules. However…
• Clear templates aren't being used in card text, not at least always. Instead, the card text is written 'free form', which leads to every single card having to be checked for it's exact wording and how that relates to the rules. Hard to come up with a good example of this, I'm personally drawn towards pointing at Kindly Man and dual-house Theon Greyjoy. They both function similarly, but one has you 'name' a cardtype, while the other doesn't. If Kindly Man used the Theon template, it would say: …he or she names either 'kill' or 'pay', then chooses and kills the chosen character or gives you 1 gold from his or her gold pool, if able. Another good example is Dragon Skull vs. Venomous Blade.
• I really think, for this kind of game, either strict usage of templates OR defining terms for everything is very beneficial in keeping the rules 'clean'. For comparison, L5R uses the template -system, while MTG tends towards terms. AGOT sort of swims between the two, without really deciding on either solution. Both solutions have the same effect however. You can think the rules through for the template or mechanic, and can 'inherit' most of the behaviour. One comparison of these two methods is that 'terms' are easier to change later on, while templates tend to be more user friendly, since you don't have to check what the mechanic was… Templates lead to long card text (which can be daunting for new players), terms can lead to loads of 'what does Character Agenda (death): … do?' during first games.   
• Rules problems aren't always solved 'cleanly' in AGOT. Case in point: Kings of Summer, framework draw and draw cap… and how this was resolved, i.e. changing the rules suddenly to work differently. Or To Be A Stag, To Be a Dragon and suddenly deciding that for these cards you suddenly needed a card in your discard/dead pile… instead of changing the wording to match the rules.
• The number of QA slip-ups is getting a bit too obvious, and is causing people to 'lose faith' in the cards being correct. This makes it harder for people to accept how a certain card works, and causes them to start arguing 'designer intent' etc. Examples: Wilding. Snakeskin Veil and there not being a single 'Sandsnake' in the cardpool. Onborn. Loads of other examples from other FFG LCGs, especially the AGOT-styled cards in CoC, that used 'kneel' instead of 'exhaust' as terms etc.

Looks like I ended up with another Wall-of-text. Oh well. Thoughts?

[ktom 598]

sabrefox said:

OK, now I'm really confused…isn't this what I suggested above (albiet, the wording was slightly different) and told that immunity is a constant effect?  After thinking about it, I agree, since if immunity was a passive effect, it wouldn't resolve until the effect it should protect against has already resolved.

What you were told above is that the wording you proposed did not change the granting of immunity from a constant ability (requiring the attachment text to be forever active) to a lasting effect (not requiring the attachment text to be active beyond the triggering of the passive or triggered effect that creates it). You had the right concept, but your execution did not accomplish it. The "Nope" was to your execution, not to your theory.

sabrefox said:

Immunity being a constant effect is the trouble, not the specifics of where the immunity text originated from, right?

The combination of immunity as a constant effect - being matched up against a constant effect granting that immunity - is the problem. The immunity granted makes the card immune to the card granting the immunity. You need to change the effect granting of the immunity to something that, once immune, the card will not be immune to. Changing the granting effect to a passive or triggered ability will turn the granting effect into a lasting effect - which you cannot be retroactively immune to.

[ktom 598]

WWDrakey said:

Looks like I ended up with another Wall-of-text. Oh well. Thoughts?

Without going into too many specifics, I would agree that FFG does not always follow its own established template, and that they have been known to issue blanket rulings (or card-specific "clarifications") when it would make much more sense to use card-specific errata to match the established template - instead of add to the precedent people need to know and learn.

I would also agree that, after a very promising run of consistency, things have gone a bit south since about the Maester cycle. Interestingly enough, I think that corresponds to a noticeable, and lamentable, jump in the level of power-creep, which is starting to turn off some of the players in my area.

I find the fact that "exhaust" has been replaced by "kneel" on CoC cards hilarious. Since I am not a CoC player. I did not know that was happening. Ah, the speculation abounds….

[Penfold3 0]

 The kneel bit in CoC is years old one cycle had some problems and to my knowledge was never repeated.

New rules that have to be learned versus card errata that needs to be learned is 6 of one half a dozen of another. If the rule is easy to understand (as in concise) and applies to multiple cards then I think it is the better choice. It is easier to remember one rule change than three card changes. That of course does not mean that it is always the best choice.

[ktom 598]

Penfold said:

New rules that have to be learned versus card errata that needs to be learned is 6 of one half a dozen of another. If the rule is easy to understand (as in concise) and applies to multiple cards then I think it is the better choice. It is easier to remember one rule change than three card changes. That of course does not mean that it is always the best choice.

Totally agree - if the rules really are new - and necessary. But if the wording on the card is confusing and no rule seems to apply, I think it is better to errata the wording on the card to fit the existing rules (if possible) than it is to create a new interpretation or construction rule for why the wording on the card, as written, "really" worked all along.

 

Case in point would be the "To Be a Dragon" and "To Be a Stag" errata. The errata they received says that if the corresponding character is not in the discard/dead pile, you cannot trigger the event. Fine. I get that. But it creates an exception to the rule that if it is legal to trigger an effect, you may do so, even if there is no practical result when it resolved. We now have to remember the exception to the rule whereas if the two cards in question had simply added the word "choose" to the identification of the card in the discard/dead pile, making that card a target and thus invoking the "if a target is missing, you cannot trigger the effect" rule. Rather than create an exception that we have to remember, and remember not to apply outside of those two card, we'd just have to remember text errata. Since both solutions would have appeared the same way in the FAQ (card-specific text errata instead of card-specific rules exception), I simply think adding the word "choose" to make the cards consistent with the game's normal template rules would have made more sense than creating a "carve-out" to those template rules.

Similarly, we have cards like CS-Davos and The White Book where the "do X or Y" template already requires you to do the one that will be successful, and we have cards like PotS-Theon where the "choose X or Y, do something based on that choice" allows you to make a choice that will mitigate the ill-effects of that choice. The Sorrowful Man question people have could go one of 3 ways: 1) Leave it alone so it stays like Theon, 2) Give it card-specific text errata to take out the word "choose" and make it like The White Book, or 3) Write a new FAQ entry that effectively creates a new rule about why The White Book and Theon have "really" been the same all along. Either #1 or #2 would be cleaner in my book (although, if the rule is written in such a way that it doesn't create new problems, there ultimately is nothing wrong with #3). FFG has used all 3 possibilities in the past, so we'll see what actually happens.

Castle Battlements is the same way, really. FFG could say nothing and let TOs/judges/house rules deal with it (since very few people would argue with the result). They could give it card-specific text errata that takes puts in the "required template" specifically excepting Castle Battlements from the "all card immunity" somehow. Or, they could write a new requirement into the immunity rules that say when an attachment gives the attached card immunity, it cannot create immunity to its own immunity-granting effect. All three would ultimately work, but I think the card-specific text errata is cleanest because it does not create a new rule that we don't really need.