So we were doing a delve the other day and on the final quest (fighting against Merrik and Elisa Farrow) our Hexer envoked enfeebling hex on Merrik (with 3 hp left).

Merrik was instructed to 'spot' the closest hero, who was 6 spaces away. So he took one damage from the Affliction (to start), then one additional movement for each space moved trying to get into range 3.

Now the Delve rules state;

• If an action would cause a monster to be defeated before it could otherwise affect a hero, skip that action.

But since Merrik had to declare his move action before Affliction could be triggered, that was not an option.

We played it such that Merrik moved himself to death.... but should we have stopped the spot movement action at 1 hp?

Probably the course of action most in line with the rules would be to have Merrick stop after suffering the 1hp, similar to if between him and the hero were a field of lava.

Probably the course of action most in line with the rules would be to have Merrick stop after suffering the 1hp, similar to if between him and the hero were a field of lava.

I would agree that would be the best course of action, but not sure its backed up by the rules.

Monsters in RTL are kinda dumb when it comes to conditions or things that 'would happen if'. Bleeding and Burning come to mind;

Bleeding : If a Bleeding monster cannot perform any action in the current activation and has at least 1 action remaining, it performs the special action to discard “Bleeding.”

Burning : If a monster cannot perform any action in the current activation and has at least 1 action remaining, it performs the special action to discard “Burning” from itself or an adjacent monster. If a monster has multiple monsters from which it can discard “Burning,” it discards “Burning” from the monster with the least Health remaining.

Both conditions are allowed to continue to deal damage to the monster (and others) unless the monster literally can not do anything else.

The only rule that mitigates this is the one mentioned above;

• If an action would cause a monster to be defeated before it could otherwise affect a hero, skip that action.

But this would still force a bleeding monster to attack a hero, even if performing that action would kill the monster (and even then, would not stop a monster with bleeding and 2 hp from moving, then attacking).

I kinda like the idea of treating every square he moves as hazard, but that would mean that Merrik would not move at all, since the rules state that monsters always avoid hazard no matter what.