If I choose to exhaust Faramir to satisfy the King Spider's When Revealed effect, do I still get the +1 Willpower bonuses?

I apologise if this rather basic question has been answered many times before, but I can't find it for the life of me

Sorry, no. You can only get the +1 Willpower bonus if you voluntarily triggered Faramir's action.

Let me expand on that a little bit. Faramir has the card text, " Action : Exhaust Faramir to choose a player. Each character controlled by that player gets +1 until the end of the phase." Page 25 of the core rulebook says, "Many cards are written in a “pay or exhaust X to do Y” manner. When confronted with such a construct, everything before the word “to” is considered the cost, and everything after the word “to” is considered an effect." Faramir's ability fits this pattern, so exhausting Faramir is the cost you have to pay in order to get his ability.

King Spider 's card text reads, " When Revealed : Each player must choose and exhaust 1 character he controls." If you're exhausting a character in response to the King Spider card, you can't use that exhaustion to pay a cost. That would be like saying "This card made me remove 1 resource from one of my heroes, so I'll use that 1 resource to pay for a card." That doesn't make sense.

Now, if you had Arwen Undómiel in play, you could use her ability after King Spider exhausts her. That's because her ability is worded differently: instead of exhausting as a cost, she has a response to being exhausted. Her text reads, " Response : After Arwen Undómiel exhausts, choose a character. That character gains sentinel and gets +1 until the end of the round." It doesn't matter what caused her to exhaust: maybe she was committing to the quest, maybe she was defending against an attack, or maybe she was exhausted as a result of King Spider's text. Regardless, after she exhausts, you can use her ability to give someone (even her, since it doesn't say "another" character) sentinel and +1 .

Many thanks for that very clear explanation of the situation. I was fairly sure that you couldn't use the Exhaust action to serve two purposes at the same time, but hadn't spotted that subtle difference between Action and Response as on Arwen's card.

Exhausting isn't an action; it's an effect. You can take an action to exhaust someone or something to do something specfic, but never independently.

Exhausting isn't an action; it's an effect. You can take an action to exhaust someone or something to do something specfic, but never independently.

This nicely illustrates the problems that plague me with most card games, and why forums such as this are so helpful. Strictly speaking exhausting, being a verb in this case, is an action. Being exhausted is an effect.

You're coming at this from an English-language angle, which is commendable since so many English speakers have no conception of it.

You're coming at this from an English-language angle, which is commendable since so many English speakers have no conception of it.

Putting it in rather poor English - you're absolutely not wrong