A skeleton attack a hero.... the dice are rolled. A hit!

The over lord plays a crushing blow! Eyeing the heros weapon.... the hero plays a feat.. an evade! the attack is a miss? what happens? overlord event cards take priority according to the pre-ToI rules.... how would you handle this?

snacknuts said:

Tricky.
IIRC, Crushing Blow can only be played after a successful attack. Evades makes tha attake unsuccessful.
So either
a) the OL needs to check with the target after every attack whether it is a successful attack or not (giving an opportunity to play a feat), and if the player concedes it to be a successful attack then once the OL plays Crushing blow it is too late to invalidate the attack with a feat, or
b) the player can play the feat as an 'interrupt' which invalidates the CB so the OL 'rewinds' similar to a guard attack and keeps the CB and threat to play later, or
c) the play of the feat invalidates the CB and it is lost.

I think c) is unreasonable, b) has no standing (there is nothing to indicate that feats have 'interrupt' power that causes backtracking like Guard does), so a) would be my choice. I think.
it sounds clumsy in practice but I think is not as bad as it seems.

Corbon said:

I think a) is the correct way to interepret this. I don't have the card texts in front of me though. If CB's trigger is "successful attack", I wouldn't let Evade be played post trigger- either the attack is successful or it isn't. The OL should give the Hero the chance to play a feat -"Attack is successful!" pause, and if no response from the Hero, play the CB.

In our case, the hero would have taken 1 damage (the skeleton just barely overcame the hero's armor).

The 1 damage wasn't reason enough for the hero to evade the attack, so he didn't.

The OL then played the crushing blow so he could destroy the hero's weapon.

The hero then played evade, being fond of his falcon's claw.

We weren't sure how to proceed, after a brief discussion we decided that the feat should have been played before the CB.. so we un-played the CB on that attack.

The next monster to attack that same hero then destroyed the claw.

I just asked a similar question earlier this week and got few concrete opinions (thread derailed slightly offtopic)

My situation was exactly the same but substitute the evade feat for the "counterattack on successful attack against" feat card. OL wants to destroy weapon. So is the hero's counterattack with or without weapon? I realize there is no hard and fast rule, anxious to hear other's opinions though.

DaveHorn said:

The feat you refer to is riposte, and it says to play after an attack. If the attack is successful and a crushing blow is played on your weapon, I suggest you not play the riposte unless you have another weapon in your offhand that can still damage the monster. It's after the attack, which means it is after the attack resolves. Part of the resolution of that attack is the OL playing a crushing blow, so you would attack weaponless if he used it on your weapon. I also can't see anything allowing for a re-equip after a CB, so even if you have a backup weapon in your pack, you have to wait until your next turn to equip (unless you are tahlia, guarding, and spend 2 of your 3 movement to re-equip...)

That's is pretty much exactly how we ruled it. The question came up because both crushing blow and riposte said "after successful attack".

DaveHorn said:

+1 here. And sorry for missing it earlier.

Regarding the original question (crushing blow vs avoid the attack). I would rule it this way: The second one who played his card wins. The player could have decided to play the feat inmediately (and the overlord wouldn't have played his card), but he decided to keep it for a better situation. As the overlord used the card it became a better situation and the hero used the feat. There are other feats that cancel other cards (one feat can be used to avoid dark charm). So I would say that both cards were used, so the attack was a failed crushing blow.

Galvancito1 said:

IMO, that's exactly why the Feat should not be allowed in this circumstance. As you say, the hero decided to save his Feat card because the damage inflicted was not enough to justify playing it. The problem with this is that his delay resulted in a loss of the triggering condition--The "Evade" card is to be played after a successful attack to turn it into a miss. If the hero opts not to do this, for whatever reason, then he's lost his chance. He can't later see that the attack is going to be worse than he thought and retroactively force a miss. It just doesn't work that way--especially since the rules state that timing conflicts are awarded in favor of OL event cards.

The only time I would allow the Feat to supercede the CB is if the OL did not give the hero ample time to play the card (since this is required by the RAW).

Just to add to the confusion but since CB is already aknowleged to be a "broken" treachery even officialy from FFG them selves i would think it would be fair to give more chances for the players to avoid CB since it would probably come up 2 to 3 times in a full dungeon (3 levels) and since you don't draw Random feats and you must cycle through all of them the only way to counter it is the preventing evil which at best you will see it hmmm let's just say 4 times in the campaign? i would say 5 max. So yes i would allow to use evade and blocked.

Drglord said:

huh?

We find it very rare for CB to come up more than once in a dungeon, and quite often not at all.
In one totally screwed up SoB campaign with a borked party (noobs chose heroes against experienced advice, party was hard as nails but with minimal damage output) we saw it 3 times in a single dungeon (3 levels), due to OL playing it early, getting it shuffled back into the deck on a pack-away-between-session piece of luck*, and getting it again as the first card on his first proper reshuffle. And only because we stayed in the dungeon all the way, painfully slowly, because map position was crucial and Divine Favour meant we weren't getting too badly hammered in CT.

I think in 6+ completed campaigns (RtL and SoB, though only 3 so far went all the way to final battle) we've seen it twice in a single dungeon maybe one other time?

CB was only 'broken' when there were two in the deck.

*At the end of the first session, the first level of the dungeon complete, the OL had played something like 13 cards, including CB. So the OL's hand goes in his box and all the rest of the cards go back together. Next session they are reshuffled (in case of peeking or slippages while packing etc) and 13 cards are dealt and discarded. CB wasn't one of them. So OL got to play it in twice in his first run through the deck, and then again as the very first card in his second run through the deck.
You win some, you lose some. This time the OL won big. Other times he's lost big, with CB or Evil Genius ending up randomly shuffled out.

Given that you can draw 4 new feats on every dungeon level (well, every activating glyph), and if you want Preventing Evil to come up more you can target magic feats for an hero with a magic ability (and you should have at least two magic-capable heroes in your party, given melee-based heroes are a dangerous inherent risk due to Soaring outdoors and a party should avoid having two of them if possible). And you can be holding anywhere around 6-8 magic feats in hand when the 20 strong (?) magic feat deck gets reshuffled, you should probably be able to get Preventing Evil around once every 2-3 complete dungeons. Which IME means it has the capability of cancelling 30-50%, or more, of all likely CBs.
Not to mention CBs which are 'killed' by Wind Pact before they can be played.

Having said all that, I don't think 'balance' is the best way to answer a rules mechanism question.
Though given two roughly equal rules possibilities balance might be considered to have a casting vote.

I thought this issue was resolved by the following FAQ entry:

Q: Are there any general rules for resolving what happens
if the overlord wants to play a card and a hero wants to
play a feat card both in response to the same triggering
event? Which card is resolved first?

A: The active side has priority.

Hmm yeah well descent should start adapting the magic the gathering rules about instants to start resolving that kind of stuff. With both sides now having cards to play it's really getting crammed.

Galvancito1 said:

The problem with this mentality, of course, is that you end up with a stalemate. Neither player will want to play his card first, so either there will be a period of uncomfortable silence after every attack until it is deemed that no one is playing a card, or one side will cave and play their card, followed shortly by the other yelling "A HA!" and dropping his own card.

Also, I don't see how the Overlord could logically play CB *after* the hero uses his feat to make the attack miss and claim that this nullifies the feat (thus making the attack hit again) and allowing him to destroy the hero's weapon to boot. Thus, supporting this idea is basically like saying the hero's card always wins.

Parathion said:

I completely agree that this FAQ entry applies, although it may still be unclear to some what "being resolved first" means, exactly.

Since the OL is making an attack against the hero, this must be the OL's turn, which means CB gets resolved first. (Unless perhaps this is attack is the result of an Ambush card being played.) But surely "resolving" CB means that the OL gets to destroy a hero item, and this is predicated by the attack being successful, which at least implies damage was dealt normally. If the hero tries to play the feat card on the same triggering condition (to be resolved "second") how does that work? If the attack is now declared unsuccessful, we have a paradox since CB has already been resolved on the assumption the attack was successful. Does the hero lose his item per CB, but not take damage from the roll? Does the feat just fizzle? The only thing that seems clear here is that the feat has no chance to pre-empt the CB.

Likewise, if the OL is somehow making an attack during the hero's turn, the feat would take priority and make the attack unsuccessful, thus CB - getting resolved "second" would presumably fizzle since the attack is no longer successful.

Perhaps the question was just poorly worded, and what the answer really means is that "the active player decides what order to resolve the cards in." Of course the active player will always choose his card, so we still have the same "fizzle or try to resolve" question to answer for the second card. I think it's also safe to assume any other heroes will choose the feat card, should the OL attack a hero who is not currently the active player with an interrupt attack (interrupting Hero A's turn to attack Hero B.)

Personally, I prefer Corbon's answer (a) from way up near the top of the thread. Knowing practical game play as I do, I know that players don't always give one another enough time to respond to things properly (hence the whole "rewind" philosophy that FFG themselves have endorsed,) as such I would support Corbon's (b) as a reasonable means of resolving situations where one player acted prematurely. If you want to take this FAQ answer to say "the active player's card will always win" on top of those two options, that's cool with me. It's worth pointing out, though, that 90% of the time the CB will still be "winning" since most of the OL's attacks are done during his own turn. That interpretation could well be more relevant with other card combinations, though, so I'm not saying it should be disregarded out of hand.

In short, for the TL;DR crowd: I think that the active player gets to decide which card "trumps" the other, and the card which is denied can be taken back into the hand of the player who used it, along taking back any costs paid for that card. In this specific situation, the OL will almost always be the active player, which probably means CB will go through and the feat will not.