With the recent discussion over competing effects, I started thinking about Adrenaline Rush, and realized it has some very strange interactions with Damaged Engine and the current rules.

Assume you have a ship with Damaged Engine - all turns are red. That ship has an Adrenaline Rush, and you declare a red maneuver. Will Adrenaline Rush work?

It seems to depend on the specific red maneuver you declared.

If you declare a K-turn, you have a red maneuver, and only one effect: Adrenaline Rush. AR takes effect, turns it white just like it always would, and it's good to go.

But what if you declare a turn? The Damaged Engine turns it red. Now we have two competing effects: Damaged Engine, and Adrenaline Rush. Damaged Engine tries to make it red, AR tries to make it white, and per the FAQ the effect that makes it more difficult wins.

So if you declare a maneuver that isn't affected by Damaged Engine (i.e. a turn), Adrenaline Rush works fine. If you declare one that is affected, AR loses and doesn't work.

I tried to consider how this would all apply to a B-wing, comparing the 1-turn (red) and 2-turn (white) and my brain melted.

So if you declare a maneuver that isn't affected by Damaged Engine (i.e. a turn), Adrenaline Rush works fine. If you declare one that is affected, AR loses and doesn't work.

Sounds good to me.

I tried to consider how this would all apply to a B-wing, comparing the 1-turn (red) and 2-turn (white) and my brain melted.

No doubt regarding the 2-turn (white): Adrenalin rush looses.

1-turn (red):

1) You can argue that damaged engine changes the maneuver from red to red. So adrenalin rush looses.

2) You can argue that damaged engine does nothing so adrenalin rush works.

Your right, that is going to cause some confusing interactions, but I bet the ruling ends up being that AR will make it white for the one turn, based on DE doesn't turn the maneuver red when you perform the maneuver, it changes your dial when it is dealt. But as I am sure you are already typing, that is going to directly conflict with the other rule about maneuver color changing.

Your right, that is going to cause some confusing interactions, but I bet the ruling ends up being that AR will make it white for the one turn, based on DE doesn't turn the maneuver red when you perform the maneuver, it changes your dial when it is dealt. But as I am sure you are already typing, that is going to directly conflict with the other rule about maneuver color changing.

I don't think the timing actually matters. Damaged Engine is an ongoing ability - it doesn't make it red then stop, it is an ongoing effect that keeps on making it red. Adrenaline Rush is actually the same - it makes it white for the rest of the phase, because it has to stay in effect through the rest of the steps.

Edit: I don't actually have my cards to check, but I think that's the wording I remember on Damaged Engine - it's something very close to "Treat all turn maneuvers as red"

So if you declare a maneuver that isn't affected by Damaged Engine (i.e. a turn), Adrenaline Rush works fine. If you declare one that is affected, AR loses and doesn't work.

Sounds good to me.

I tried to consider how this would all apply to a B-wing, comparing the 1-turn (red) and 2-turn (white) and my brain melted.

No doubt regarding the 2-turn (white): Adrenalin rush looses.

1-turn (red):

1) You can argue that damaged engine changes the maneuver from red to red. So adrenalin rush looses.

2) You can argue that damaged engine does nothing so adrenalin rush works.

I think the same 2 possibilities apply to the 2-turn, just with most of the choices flipped. If Adrenaline Rush is trying to make a white maneuver white, how do you treat that?

It's just a weird one all around.

So if you declare a maneuver that isn't affected by Damaged Engine (i.e. a turn), Adrenaline Rush works fine. If you declare one that is affected, AR loses and doesn't work.

Sounds good to me.

I tried to consider how this would all apply to a B-wing, comparing the 1-turn (red) and 2-turn (white) and my brain melted.

No doubt regarding the 2-turn (white): Adrenalin rush looses.

1-turn (red):

1) You can argue that damaged engine changes the maneuver from red to red. So adrenalin rush looses.

2) You can argue that damaged engine does nothing so adrenalin rush works.

I think the same 2 possibilities apply to the 2-turn, just with most of the choices flipped. If Adrenaline Rush is trying to make a white maneuver white, how do you treat that?

AR cannot try to change a white maneuver. It can only try to change a red maneuver.

DE:

Treat all turn ({left} or {right}) maneuvers as red maneuvers.

Edit:

Regarding the 2 turn:

If both AR and DE try to change the same maneuver. DE wins.

If AR cannot even try to change the maneuver, DE wins.

Either way the maneuver is red.

Yet another point of view:

AR and DE (try to) change different maneuvers. DE changes a white maneuver, AR changes a red maneuver. Those are different maneuvers. So the FAQ ruling does not apply at all!

AR cannot try to change a white maneuver. It can only try to change a red maneuver.

DE:

Treat all turn ({left} or {right}) maneuvers as red maneuvers.

Right - but once Damaged Engine does its thing, its not white. It becomes very strange because it can trigger off the new color, but the rule for comparing seems to be based on the original difficulty.

So I'd see it maybe flowing like this:

- AR isn't active

- Damaged Engine turns it red

- AR is now active

- Consider both effects: AR is changing the maneuver to white, Damaged Engine is changing it to red. The original color is white, so AR is effectively not changing the color.

...or something. This is mostly a mental exercise, I don't think our timing or conflict-resolution rules are near detailed enough to actually parse this out, but it's a fun challenge

Damaged Engine is an ongoing ability - it doesn't make it red then stop, it is an ongoing effect that keeps on making it red.

I think you are reading more into it than is there, and I think that is where you keep getting hung up on so many of there rulings. I suspect they are not viewing cards like this as continuously triggering, but as setting a game state that remains until something else changes it. When you are dealt a face up damage card, you resolve its effects, in this case your turns become red. DE stops doing anything then, your turns are just now red, it's done. If another effect comes along and changes the game state again, it changes. That seems to be how they view swarm tactics and damaged cockpit as well. The ruling on effects changing a maneuver to red and green I suspect was meant to refer to 2 effects occurring simultaneously and that THAT is the rule that is poorly worded.

This interpretation also means that they really should have some rule about critical effects being undone if the card is discarded or turned faced down, but in spite of logical hole, the impression I have gotten is that this is how the designers are viewing these interactions.

This is mostly a mental exercise, I don't think our timing or conflict-resolution rules are near detailed enough to actually parse this out, but it's a fun challenge

I agree to that. And I think the final result should be a red maneuver. But that's just me.

I think you are reading more into it than is there, and I think that is where you keep getting hung up on so many of there rulings. I suspect they are not viewing cards like this as continuously triggering, but as setting a game state that remains until something else changes it.

The problem with this view is that it's pretty flatly and directly contradicted by the maneuver difficulty response. Timing and ordering of effects is not mentioned. The response says - very directly - that the change that makes it harder wins.

At least up until the recent Swarm Tactics ruling, there wasn't anything in either rules or rulings to support this idea of later-wins. And even now, we have a classic FFG response that gives us a pinpoint ruling rather than a broad rules understanding.

On a broader issue, I'm not sure your read holds well anyway. If R2 and Damaged Engine contradicted each other directly, then maybe you could say that the newer one was changing something that was created at the beginning. But it really doesn't. Damaged Engine does nothing to affect R2. It changes the difficulty of a particular subset of maneuvers. If you were going to track that the way I think you're suggesting, you'd have to look at all your maneuvers at the beginning of the game, and say "Okay, 2 turn is green because of R2." Later, when you draw a Damaged Engine, you'd have to mentally update each of the maneuvers. If you got rid of the Damaged Engine, you'd have to update them again - but does R2 come back? When you have a range-limited pilot, are you flipping a switch when Biggs comes into range, changing the targeting rules?

Your point about critical effects needing a rule to turn them off is well-taken, but you need to extend that to every ability with a limited duration, too. The way you're suggesting it works, Wedge would say something like "When Wedge declares a target, that target receives -1 Agility. After the attack is complete, restore the target's agility to the value it had when Wedge declared the attack".

I don't think the developers think of it like that, because I don't think ANYONE thinks of it like that. It seems to me to be a very strange way to approach the whole thing. An approach that says "I'm doing X, what abilities are active which affect that?" seems a far more manageable way to evaluate the game state.

Could I be completely wrong? Of course. But I didn't create my understanding from thin air - the way card abilities are written, and the way FAQ entries often phrase abilities (such as the question concerning abilities of destroyed ships staying in play) point very strongly to this being the underlying model.

Could I be completely wrong? Of course. But I didn't create my understanding from thin air - the way card abilities are written, and the way FAQ entries often phrase abilities (such as the question concerning abilities of destroyed ships staying in play) point very strongly to this being the underlying model.

And yet you seem continually confused by their assorted rulings, whereas I, and from what I gather a lot of other people, find the rules very intuitive. I didn't create my understanding from thin air either - the way the card abilities are written, and the way the FAQ entries phrase abilities, I would have been absolutely shocked if the ruling for overlapping swarm tactics had been anything else.

I did point out in my post that the ruling on maneuver difficulty may be the badly worded one, not everything else.

Anyway, my point is that if we get a ruling on the DE/AR interaction, and that ruling is that AR takes precedence for a the turn, that maybe its not that FFG rules are as scatter shot as you say, but maybe that the underlying model isn't what you think it is.

I could very easily see this going like this

You guys spend the next couple days hashing out what YOU ALL think the right answer "should be"

FFG hands down a ruling that goes the other way

The rest of us have to spend the next couple weeks reading about how random and unintuitive FFG rulings are, in spite of the fact that some of us were predicting it would go the way it did

I've certainly had my fair share of misses, but to hold up the intuition side of things as some sort of perfect predictor is hardly accurate either. There have been any number of examples - R2-D2 timing, Night Beast, Dutch to a stressed ship, Daredevil/R2, ionized ships with Advanced Sensors, to name just a few - where those who go by intuition got it wrong. Your gloating over the awesome accuracy of intuition is rather deeply misplaced.

Yes, there are a number of corner cases that come out with rulings that surprise me. Yes, that might possibly be because there's some super-secret rules manual buried deep in FFG headquarters that they refuse to share with the rest of us, and I've interpreted it wrong. Or it might be that the times intuition gets it right isn't because intuition got the rules right, it's because it's a case where they said "Wow that's a screwy interaction, we don't want that, just tell people it works the other way." In effect, the intuition side isn't actually making any correct analysis - they're just going to the obvious answer, and hit on the times FFG breaks the rules for them. The times when FFG sticks to the rules, we often get the very non-intuitive rulings listed above.

If you want to argue that FFG never does this, you're welcome to. I'd suggest starting with an explanation of the Proximity Mine/Boost/Barrel Roll ruling, and going from there. That's the gold standard for this sort of thing at the moment, although I can give you several others.

One other data point to consider... Prior to Imperial Aces (which I exclude because we don't have an FAQ update for it), X-wing had 93 distinct abilities, and 8 pages of FAQ. This is a ratio of 1 page of FAQ for every 11 abilities. Let's consider some of FFG's other products:

Netrunner: 408 cards / 14 pages = 29.1

LOTR LCG: 1068 cards / 16 pages = 66.75

SW LCG: 636 cards / 10 pages = 63.6

I'm not touching AGoT, just too much variability in what gets counted or not.

The worst other game there still has roughly 1/3 the amount of FAQ/errata as X-wing, per unique ability (note: This assumes most, if not all, of the LCG cards have some unique structure to them, which I believe is a generally true statement). The others are twice as good as that, meaning that LOTR and the SW LCG both manage to only have about 15% as much errata as X-wing.

Your gloating over the awesome accuracy of intuition is rather deeply misplaced.

Bite me. I'm not gloating at all, I'm trying to minimize your constant whining. In virtually every thread you post in you find some way to slip in a moan about how inconsistent you think FFG's rules are. My only point is that maybe you should wait and see, since by your own admission you can't figure out how they are going to rule, instead of making a decision based on what YOU think they should say and then getting pissed (again) when they say something else.

Bite me. I'm not gloating at all, I'm trying to minimize your constant whining. In virtually every thread you post in you find some way to slip in a moan about how inconsistent you think FFG's rules are. My only point is that maybe you should wait and see, since by your own admission you can't figure out how they are going to rule, instead of making a decision based on what YOU think they should say and then getting pissed (again) when they say something else.

I comment on the inconsistency because <gasp!> they're inconsistent! More often than not, when I comment on it it's because we're taking another flying leap into that inconsistency. It's half gripe that we have to and half disclaimer that none of us really know where it'll land... but in the meantime, here's our best guess for how to play it until then.

If you disagree with that inconsistency, you're welcome to prove the ongoing stability and consistency of FFG's rules any time you care to. I believe I've given you a solid place to start, and even a nice checklist to work through. If you're perfectly happy rolling dice to decide the rules to affect every other game, that's awesome too. Nobody's forcing you to read anything here.

But what if you declare a turn? The Damaged Engine turns it red. Now we have two competing effects: Damaged Engine, and Adrenaline Rush. Damaged Engine tries to make it red, AR tries to make it white, and per the FAQ the effect that makes it more difficult wins.

Not exactly. For starters, the maneuver on the dial at the time of reveal is still white (assuming Bwing's 2-Turn) so, there is a chance that AR doesn't kick in from the very beggining, since its trigger is 'when you reveal a red maneuver'. Damaged engine instructs us to 'treat' it as red, but I'm not sure if this truly qualifies as 'revealing a red maneuver', which is the requeriment to AR.

Futhermore I'm not sure either if the FAQ rule applies here, because it is not exactly the same situation.

In the FAQ, one effect tries to convert a white maneuver to red (increase difficulty), while other tries to convert that same white maneuver to green (decrease difficulty). But in both cases, the original maneuver was 'estable', and both effects could apply simultaneously.

However, in the OP's case, if you reveal a white turn, AR can't trigger by default. For AR to trigger, it needs first 'the help' of damaged engine in order to take effect. In other words, both effects don't apply at the same time over the maneuver. If DE doesn't turn the maneuver red first, AR cannot do nothing.

Thus, they are not 2 effects operating truly simultaneously from the start over the same maneuver. One needs the full valid aplication of the other to exist.

To add to the brainmelting, the situation is totally different if your reveal the Bwing's 1-turn. In this case, you actually revealed a red maneuver, so AR could trigger from the beggining, without needing DE to take effect. This case would be closer to the FAQ situation.

Edit: Typos

When I asked James about the "Adrenaline Rush while already stressed" case at GenCon, he said it worked fine because the maneuver was never really red at all. Ongoing "Treat as..." effects seems to have a sort of blanket effect that exist out of timing, even if they require some trigger in order to activate. So when you use AR while stressed you never really reveal a red maneuver to trigger the "Opponent picks your dial" clause, and when you have a Damaged Engine you never really pick a white maneuver.

I truly hate the ruling, but that's straight from the lead's mouth.

In that case, I think we don't have other choice than following the FAQ rule.

AR is an effect that decreases maneuver's difficulty, but DE is without any doubt an effect that increases it. So, the latter has priority.

Your B-Wing could perfectly use AR for K-turns and red Banks, because for those maneuvers there is no effect that increases its difficulty, but in the case of turns, there is such effect... Thus, DE would take priority and your turns will be red, regardless of AR usage.

I'd suggest the answer is obvious, at least to me:

From the FAQ:

Q: If two or more game effects conflict in
changing the difficulty of a maneuver, which
effect takes priority?
A: An effect that increases the difficulty of a maneuver
takes priority over an effect that decreases the
difficulty. For example, if a ship equipped with R2
Astromech is dealt the Damaged Engine card, all
of the ship’s turn maneuvers are treated as red
maneuvers, including the 1- and 2-speed turn
maneuvers.

Just replace "a ship equipped with R2 Astromech" with "a player using the Adrenaline Rush" and you've got your answer. The game state shouldn't care where the colour change effect comes from.

I'd suggest the answer is obvious, at least to me:

From the FAQ:

Q: If two or more game effects conflict in

changing the difficulty of a maneuver, which

effect takes priority?

A: An effect that increases the difficulty of a maneuver

takes priority over an effect that decreases the

difficulty. For example, if a ship equipped with R2

Astromech is dealt the Damaged Engine card, all

of the ship’s turn maneuvers are treated as red

maneuvers, including the 1- and 2-speed turn

maneuvers.

Just replace "a ship equipped with R2 Astromech" with "a player using the Adrenaline Rush" and you've got your answer. The game state shouldn't care where the colour change effect comes from.

This would be the most logically approach to take.

The recent ffg ruling on swarm tatics being maniditory would suggest a permanent change is just that permanent you cant turn it off at will. Even if you get a critical hit that reduces your pilot skill to zero you would swarm another ship to zero.

The moment you add veteran's instinct to your ship you have changed the game state. You cant stop being a higher PS just because this turn you want to move first.

So the question is when your reveling a dial are you revelling the original colour and then treating it as different colour or was the colour changed by the up grade card or damage card before you assigned the dial?

Bulihan has given us a precedent to this question.

The only other dial changing arguments is fetinator and im not sure if even that helps.