My human Blitzer tackled a Dark Elf Assassin, successfully, to gain the Passing Skill from his Response. Does the Assassin's Downed Passing Skill go off before the Blitzer's gained Passing Skill?

And yes, we know these Skills are optional.

Page 3 of the Sudden Death rules :

"Each time a player with downed skills is downed, the downed manager resolves these skills immediately, interrupting the active manager's turn."

The downed passing skill happens first.

So, just to clarify. A downed skill goes off before a response ability?

So, just to clarify. A downed skill goes off before a response ability?

Well, now that I think about it some more, that's a fair question without an obvious answer. Page 10 of the core says, "Managers must completely resolve a skill before using another skill." But the question is whether a response to a skill resolution counts as part of completely resolving that skill, and I don't see a rule on that. Normally in the example you gave with no other considerations, it seems like a wash because the ball ends up in the same place either way, but I could see a situation in which one of the players had a team/staff upgrade with a response that cued on being the ball carrier. ( I can't recall any cards that do that off the top of my head). You might have to house rule it.

In my own meager opinion, I would rule that responses and the skills that trigger them form a complete set; the response being a sub-routine of the skill if you will, and therefore part of the skill. So you would resolve a skill, any responses it triggers, then the next skill, which in the above example would be the other player's downed skill. That seems to me to flow best logically with the pg. 10 rule.

I certainly play that the downed skill is used first. It interrupts the tackling player's turn. Then the tackling player resolves the rest of his skills. Makes sense to me.