So exactly how many people need to disagree with you before you consider you might be wrong? (Especially when veterans like forgottonlore disagree with you).

Yes, there are some people who disagree with me. There frequently are. Others have the same opinion I do, including people who are just as veteran as Forgottenlore - why don't you mention them? It actually seems that the count is pretty balanced on this one. That's... awkward.

And of course I consider that I might be wrong. I do it all the time, if only because the rulings can and frequently do diverge from the printed rules. I take the best shot I can, but I'm fully aware that any interpretation I offer up may be wrong. And when that happens I analyze why I was wrong, and often discuss it publicly (such as the recent IG-88A ruling you were so proud of). Do you do the same?

You know what's so sad about all this? It really doesn't change anything at all. Whether "cost" exists as a game concept or not, it doesn't actually change anything in the game. At all. The closest thing we have to "cost" mattering is the often-cited Yorr/Opportunist pairing, and that's actually handled by the text whether "cost" exists as a concept or not. It certainly doesn't matter for the OP, whose thread has been well and truly hijacked by a side discussion that will have no impact on the answer to his question.

But instead a newcomer to the community is treated to all this. And for what?

One last reply, then I'll be quiet here.

1. I apologize for my last reply, and I've erased it. I honestly missed that the Yorr example was already mentioned. (I looked for it first, seriously.)

2. I re-read the exact wording of the Yorr ruling. Wow. What a horrible example of muddy terminology. I would never call Fel gaining a stress token a "cost" of his pilot ability. It's clearly a trigger.

3. I personally find the concept of "costs" as fundamental as points, rounds, and winning. A single, simple definition, at most, is all FFG needs to add to the rulebook. Far more clarity would come from wording the cards better.

4. The OP isn't about costs. It's about whether it's legal to produce an effect that won't do anything.

One last reply, then I'll be quiet here.

...

3. I personally find the concept of "costs" as fundamental as points, rounds, and winning. A single, simple definition, at most, is all FFG needs to add to the rulebook. Far more clarity would come from wording the cards better.

4. The OP isn't about costs. It's about whether it's legal to produce an effect that won't do anything.

No need to be quiet There's actually the potential for interesting conversations around here, if people will let them happen.

The problem with trying to add a simple definition of cost is figuring out what it would be. There's no common structure the way there is in some games (like SWLCG's "Pay X to Y"). Many things that you might think of as costs (such as PtL's stress) are actually effects that can only come after the ability has been used. It's kinda ugly, which is what Vorpal was saying earlier.

Relating back to the OP, he said: "I would think so as the cost is removing the stress and even though you get no use out of it you can still do it because you can pay the cost".

This is actually a common issue in games which have a cost structure - can I pay the cost even for no effect? In this case, it doesn't matter, because there IS an effect - 0 is a valid number for "any" in X-wing, so changing 0 eyeballs is still executing the effect. We don't have to go to the "Can I pay a cost for no effect?" road, at least not for Farlander, because you're "paying the cost" for an effect. X-wing doesn't actually care if that effect changes the game state or not, only that it is completed..

At the end of the day, do the rules need a definition of "cost"? I don't think so. It's pretty obvious that some abilities require you to spend a token (or similar) and that implicitly is it's cost. If you don't have said token, you can't do said ability. It's just a common concept that everyone is familiar with. So it's not mentioned in the rules as such - big deal. It doesn't need to be. Why add something to the rules that really has no bearing on play? If they decided to start defining every possible concept within the game (required or not), the rulebook would explode into 100 pages or more. Let's just keep it simple.

So exactly how many people need to disagree with you before you consider you might be wrong? (Especially when veterans like forgottonlore disagree with you).

Yes, there are some people who disagree with me. There frequently are. Others have the same opinion I do, including people who are just as veteran as Forgottenlore - why don't you mention them? It actually seems that the count is pretty balanced on this one. That's... awkward.

And of course I consider that I might be wrong. I do it all the time, if only because the rulings can and frequently do diverge from the printed rules. I take the best shot I can, but I'm fully aware that any interpretation I offer up may be wrong. And when that happens I analyze why I was wrong, and often discuss it publicly (such as the recent IG-88A ruling you were so proud of). Do you do the same?

You know what's so sad about all this? It really doesn't change anything at all. Whether "cost" exists as a game concept or not, it doesn't actually change anything in the game. At all. The closest thing we have to "cost" mattering is the often-cited Yorr/Opportunist pairing, and that's actually handled by the text whether "cost" exists as a concept or not. It certainly doesn't matter for the OP, whose thread has been well and truly hijacked by a side discussion that will have no impact on the answer to his question.

But instead a newcomer to the community is treated to all this. And for what?

That's an excellent question. Why are you choosing to make such a big deal out of it? All I did was quote a short block of text from the FAQ. You needn't have responded in the first place, and then we wouldn't be here at all.

...who is really jumping on who?

Those puppies are jumping on each other, wrestling over a sock they liberated from the laundry. But you can't stay mad at them because, c'mon, Corgi puppies.

Yeah - I've already given them a name and a back story each.

So exactly how many people need to disagree with you before you consider you might be wrong? (Especially when veterans like forgottonlore disagree with you).

Yes, there are some people who disagree with me. There frequently are. Others have the same opinion I do, including people who are just as veteran as Forgottenlore - why don't you mention them? It actually seems that the count is pretty balanced on this one. That's... awkward.

And of course I consider that I might be wrong. I do it all the time, if only because the rulings can and frequently do diverge from the printed rules. I take the best shot I can, but I'm fully aware that any interpretation I offer up may be wrong. And when that happens I analyze why I was wrong, and often discuss it publicly (such as the recent IG-88A ruling you were so proud of). Do you do the same?

You know what's so sad about all this? It really doesn't change anything at all. Whether "cost" exists as a game concept or not, it doesn't actually change anything in the game. At all. The closest thing we have to "cost" mattering is the often-cited Yorr/Opportunist pairing, and that's actually handled by the text whether "cost" exists as a concept or not. It certainly doesn't matter for the OP, whose thread has been well and truly hijacked by a side discussion that will have no impact on the answer to his question.

But instead a newcomer to the community is treated to all this. And for what?

That's an excellent question. Why are you choosing to make such a big deal out of it? All I did was quote a short block of text from the FAQ. You needn't have responded in the first place, and then we wouldn't be here at all.

But you misconstrued the quote so a response was necessary.

Cost is not a defined game element that the rules are structured around but used merely as a way of explaining the interaction of the card effects- a paraphrasing of the interaction to explain it better. An FAQ is a vernacular presentation with the aim of enhanced understanding of the mechanics being used so that the interaction of effects can be better understood; FAQ’s just explain how the interaction works in the easiest possible terms, but those terms don’t automatically become new mechanisms.

The problem is that framework doesn't exist in the rules

I would say rather that it doesn't "explicitly" exist...

If there's an implicit rule, it's too non-uniform to be really helpful.The respective designers of some upgrades clearly had a cost-and-effect framework in mind. But the FAQ ruling for Captain Yorr makes clear that implicit framework doesn't apply to all upgrades: it distinguishes between "a stress token that is part of the cost of triggering an ability", and "a stress token that was the result of an ability". Push the Limit fits conceptually into a cost-and-effect framework (the cost is a stress token, and the effect is an extra action), but the FAQ explicitly says it doesn't work that way.So even if cost-and-effect is indeed an implicit feature of the game, it's an interpretive framework that works only sometimes, without an easy way to tell in which cases it ought to apply.

how does Push the Limit not fit the "cost and effect" framework? You're saying stress is the cost, but you're wrong. In order to receive the stress you need to perform a second action. The second action is the cost, and the stress is the effect. If you don't take a second action you don't get a stress. That fits 100% with Soontir's ability. Stress is the cost, focus is the effect. If you don't get a stress you don't get a focus. I think the problem here is people's definition for what a "cost" is.

With Push the Limit the "effect" is more of a penalty, but it still fits with the whole "cost-effect" guidelines. That is why Yorr can absorb the stress from PtL without hindering the second action. Yorr is affecting the "effect" from PtL not the "cost" of ptl.

The problem is that framework doesn't exist in the rules

I would say rather that it doesn't "explicitly" exist...

If there's an implicit rule, it's too non-uniform to be really helpful.The respective designers of some upgrades clearly had a cost-and-effect framework in mind. But the FAQ ruling for Captain Yorr makes clear that implicit framework doesn't apply to all upgrades: it distinguishes between "a stress token that is part of the cost of triggering an ability", and "a stress token that was the result of an ability". Push the Limit fits conceptually into a cost-and-effect framework (the cost is a stress token, and the effect is an extra action), but the FAQ explicitly says it doesn't work that way.So even if cost-and-effect is indeed an implicit feature of the game, it's an interpretive framework that works only sometimes, without an easy way to tell in which cases it ought to apply.

how does Push the Limit not fit the "cost and effect" framework? You're saying stress is the cost, but you're wrong. In order to receive the stress you need to perform a second action. The second action is the cost, and the stress is the effect. If you don't take a second action you don't get a stress. That fits 100% with Soontir's ability. Stress is the cost, focus is the effect. If you don't get a stress you don't get a focus. I think the problem here is people's definition for what a "cost" is.

With Push the Limit the "effect" is more of a penalty, but it still fits with the whole "cost-effect" guidelines. That is why Yorr can absorb the stress from PtL without hindering the second action. Yorr is affecting the "effect" from PtL not the "cost" of ptl.

The FAQ ruling on Yorr says, basically, that if Yorr pays the cost, the friendly ship doesn't get the effect. But then it says explicitly that Push the Limit doesn't work that way: it's just an ability that happens to result in two things, one of them good and one of them "bad".

And as I said, Push the Limit fits into a conceptual framework of cost-and-effect just fine. You take a stress token (cost), and you get an extra action (effect). But the rules say it shouldn't be interpreted that way, so I declined to do so.

What you seem to be saying is that the cost of PTL is the action, and the effect is stress, which... okay? So now you've managed to shoehorn PTL into a framework that the FAQ says not to use, at the cost of keeping that framework sensible. For other upgrade cards, how do we determine which is the cost and which is the effect?

In fact, your version of the cost-and-effect framework breaks down when applied to either of the other examples used in Yorr's FAQ entry: Fel gets a stress token and gets a focus token. Which is the cost (which Yorr can't absorb), and which is the effect? If I mirror your PTL interpretation and define the stress token as the effect rather than the cost, then I can say that Fel pays the cost (suffers from a focus token) and Yorr gets the effect (hurray, stress!)

I'd rather steer clear of arbitrary definitions like that, and step back to something like Klutz' framework of trigger-effect. It fits much better with the game as a whole.

That's... Creative, I guess. If Fel gaining a stress counts as a cost, then I assume Jake gaining a focus counts as a cost? What about Jake performing a focus action? Is Dutch acquiring a target lock a cost?

You're chasing down a very strange path with this, and attempting to classify triggering conditions as costs. There really isn't any basis for that. It also breaks a lot of the common definition of the term. That's not impossible (see:Simultaneous Fire) but it should be left to explicit or at least strongly implied rules.

So if we're stuck with a base definition, what makes a cost a cost? Borrowing from some of he SWLCG concepts above, a single payment can't cover multiple costs. It must be paid by the player activating the ability. The payment is optional.

None of these apply to the things you're trying to call costs. Iwe know a single event can trigger multiple abilities, so one paid cost could be used for multiple things. Fel's ability triggers when he gets a stress, regardless of where the stress comes from, whether it's your effect or my effect or a game effect. The stress is often not optional (if ever, but that's another discussion is rather not get into).

Even ignoring the technical definitions, you're also going down a road that you usually hate, with an incredibly counterintuitive definition. Would most players thing that gaining a focus token is a cost? That the second action from PtL is a cost? I doubt it. Again, that doesn't mean it can't be that way, but think we need some much stronger evidence for it than what we've got.

Sorry, possibly a poor choice of words in the original, which should have more explicitly said "X-wing's rules do not have any concept of cost".

Then again, I suspect that those who seem so eager to jump on me over this one know that I pretty much always discuss things here in terms of the rules. I'd really expect that after my response, it should have been obvious to CaptBooYah that I was specifically discussing the rules.

Let's be honest about this. It's not some minor, innocent misunderstanding. It's a couple of people who really dislike me jumping on what they think is a gotcha opportunity, and they're doing a lot to confuse the actual question at hand in order to do so.

The OP suggested Keyan's ability would be determined by some distinction related to having paid a cost. There are no rules for covering that, which is what I pointed out. Nobody even tried to actually address the issue or clarify what a cost might actually be, or address the OP's suggestion. Instead, we got this, which I'm pretty sure helped absolutely nobody learn anything about the actual rules.

Nobody was jumping on you, you were just flat out wrong. And then you turned around and maligned me with a personal attack, so who is really jumping on who?

And now to lighten the mood with a custom meme:

...No, he's not flat out wrong. There's no established cost or 'buying' mechanic in the game; it's just a comparative framework. I kind of imagine this has to do with the way X Wing is sort-of bolted onto Wings of War and the designers' wish to maintain relative rules simplicity (simplicity which then disappears as soon as you add things like a cost vs reward structure, or an ability stack).

And just fyi, from an outside observer's perspective, yes - it very much looks like two people jumping on someone who is known for being a good source for rules clarifications for the sake of trying to get one over on them, over something that has nothing to do with the OP & is insubstantial as a rules discussion anyway. Like, how long have you been waiting for the chance to post that gif and show the world how that nerd ain't got your goat this time? Quite a while?

...No, he's not flat out wrong. There's no established cost or 'buying' mechanic in the game; it's just a comparative framework. I kind of imagine this has to do with the way X Wing is sort-of bolted onto Wings of War and the designers' wish to maintain relative rules simplicity (simplicity which then disappears as soon as you add things like a cost vs reward structure, or an ability stack).

And just fyi, from an outside observer's perspective, yes - it very much looks like two people jumping on someone who is known for being a good source for rules clarifications for the sake of trying to get one over on them, over something that has nothing to do with the OP & is insubstantial as a rules discussion anyway. Like, how long have you been waiting for the chance to post that gif and show the world how that nerd ain't got your goat this time? Quite a while?

Buhallin's just a guy with an opinion, much like the rest of us. Whatever relative value you place on those opinions is your prerogative and yours alone. If he was really as credible as you're making him out to be would he need you to come to his defense? I'll leave that up to you to decide. Likewise, you can judge for yourself if such a provocative and personal defense is any more flattering than what you're accusing me of. For the record, I didn't need to skim 16 some-odd pages of FAQ, because I knew exactly where to find the entry I was looking for. It's been there since Yorr's release, and it's a common pit stop for just these sort of references. Or did anyone honestly think that this is the first time the issue of cost has come up in X-Wing?

The fact is, I don't need to jump at an opportunity to prove anyone wrong, not Buhallin or anyone else. When I have a problem with somebody's opinion, I let them know it. This particular situation didn't warrant any more explanation than the quote itself, because the language really is that clear. Is "cost" a defined term in X-Wing? Of course not; X-Wing doesn't get the benefit of a Rules Reference Guide like FFG's newer games. Does the Yorr entry make it perfectly clear that "cost" is a distinguishable element within the game? It absolutely does. So when a person says "cost doesn't exist," and the rules say otherwise, that person is 100% flat out wrong.

So, how long have I been champing at the bit to post that JPEG? About as long as it took me to conceive and make it, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty seconds. If you have any other personal indictments to make, I request you do so via personal message. This board really isn't the place to air out dirty laundry.

And now I'm posting this separately, so that it doesn't get drowned out by all the needless antagonism. Take it as you will.

Message from:
Michael

Rules Question:
I have a question that is, as of right now, purely academic. Say that I wanted to change the rules up a bit and mix factions, and I flew Drea Renthal alongside Captain Yorr. Would Drea's ability constitute a cost, as per Yorr's FAQ entry? The reason I ask is because there's some debate at present about what constitutes a "cost," or whether that's even a distinguishable game element in the first place. There seems to be some methodology to it (Opportunist and Soontir Fel don't have the "then receive a stress token" phrasing), but nothing is explicitly spelled out for us to be able to interpret when something is or is not a cost. I understand if this is a complicated question given the current state of the rules, so something broad and general would suffice as an answer. Just enough for us to get by until this possibly becomes a FAQ entry unto itself, at any rate. Thanks in advance for your time and attention, I look forward to reading your response.

Yes, Drea Renthal would be considered a “cost.” Basically, a cost is an ability that says “receive a stress to do a thing”; because Yorr intercepts the stress, the ability can’t trigger. It’s an unfortunate effect of his wording.

Cheers,
Alex Davy
Creative Content Developer
Fantasy Flight Games

Well, there it is then. Cost does exist. It's quite probably one of the dumbest game definitions ever, since it apparently applies to the entire ability, and only if what you have to do to trigger it is gain a stress, but it does exist.

I willingly admit my error, although I won't even pretend to understand the reasoning behind that definition, and amend my initial response to "X-wing has no concept of cost for an ability such as Keyan's". Which, ironically, means that spending a token is not paying a cost, but gaining that same token is.

I'm very glad we got through all this so that we could... You know, I can't use "clarifiy" there even in jest. Ah well.

There is no question that costs do exist. Even when not defined.

Everything that say: "do something to gain something" is basicly a cost system.

BUT! if they start to add the word "cost" as a trigger for special cards or rules (like they did in the FAQ for Yorr) they should as well do a definition: what is a cost in X-Wing.

I can even understand the relation from Yorr and Soontir. Even though the wording of "cost" is a bit strange.

Soontir is (from my view!!) a trigger. "When you receive a stress token, you may assign 1 focus token to your ship.". If he does not get a stress token, because Yorr is taking it, the effect can not trigger, and he can not get the focus token. In the end is does not change anything. Soontir does not get the focus when Yorr is taking it. Not matter if you call it cost or trigger.

Push the Limit is as well clear. First you do an additional action, than you receive a Stress token. The trigger for the Stress token is, in this case, the additional action. And it is not cost or requirement for the additinal action.

Opportunist: Well. This is a little bad wording in my opinion. Or at least not absolute clear.

It would have been more clear when the card (Opportunist) would say something like: "you may receive 1 Stress token. IF you receive one Stress token this way, roll 1 additional Attack die.". But this would make the text a bit to long on some of the cards.

Drea Renthal has the same wording as Opportunist. So they have "rule" it the same way, or it would be confusing.

But basicly you can say that Yorr is a replacement. If you use Yorr the orignal card never received the stress. And because of this they never "trigger" (or however you would call the mechanics) their effect.