Collateral Damage clarification

By MrVoltog, in Star Wars: Destiny

I think that, if they wanted the card to be booth, they would have written something like this:

"...either melee damage and/or ranged damage..."

also, while writting about this card, this "condition" card (There a THEN) must fullfill the first condition in order to gain the THEN benefits. It is well explained in rules...

However, what is not explained in rules is: Do I have to fullfill the then? If opponent have 0 ressources, can I still play this card?

Thanks for your input!

On 10/06/2017 at 11:07 AM, wakefieldbw said:

Right.

That is pretty normal for that guy, the old fall back to the appeal to authority fallacy because making an extra thousand snide masterbatory posts makes you an expert.

1 hour ago, Stranglebat said:

That is pretty normal for that guy, the old fall back to the appeal to authority fallacy because making an extra thousand snide masterbatory posts makes you an expert.

I can appreciate the irony of your self-affirming circle jerk. You do realize that neither your post or the one you quoted contribute anything meaningful to the conversation, don't you? Careful you don't trip in your rush to take me down a peg.

Considerate it an appeal to experience , my sweet summer child; surely I'd be willing to give FFG the benefit of the doubt if I was also too naive to know any better.

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Honestly, this is pretty simple. The use of "either... or" indicates a choice of which die faces you can choose ( "you can do either this or that"), but you're not limited in how many times you can select a die of either type because the card permits you to resolve as many as you like ("one or more"). That's why I've been insistent about a selection mechanism, because without one every die with a relevant face becomes an equally viable choice. There are several different ways that they could have worded it to make the choice exclusive rather than open-ended, but they didn't. That's about as deliberate of an interpretation as we can get without reducing the argument to precedence, which is just a bad idea on so many levels. You can accuse me of resorting to fallacies if you like, but I've been an FFG patron for nigh on 4 years now, and I've seen a lot of discontinuity when it comes to card templating. The text on one card is ultimately meaningless when it comes to interpreting others. Believe me or don't, there's nothing to be gained for me either way.

Edited by WonderWAAAGH
3 hours ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

I can appreciate the irony of your self-affirming circle jerk. You do realize that neither your post or the one you quoted contribute anything meaningful to the conversation, don't you? Careful you don't trip in your rush to take me down a peg.

Considerate it an appeal to experience , my sweet summer child; surely I'd be willing to give FFG the benefit of the doubt if I was also too naive to know any better.

You take yourself down a peg just by thinking you can win any arguement by merely being condescending.

Anyway this is going to be another one of those wait for a ruling from lukas issues. Because everyone is going to read it how they would like to see it and not allow contrary opinion to change their mind in the absence of official rulings.

Ignoring other cards this one to me presents a simple either or senario. Resolve one or more of Either Ranged damage or Melee damage. Then lose a resource. Read it logically or don't doesn't mean a thing to me if you can't critically evaulate card text without bringing bias in.

I didn't realize this was a competition. Silly me.

Why does this even need a ruling? The wording is crystal clear. To wit:

Quote

Resolve one or more of your dice showing either melee damage ([Melee Damage]) or ranged damage ([Ranged Damage]). Then force an opponent to lose 1 resource.

So you do a normal damage dice resolve (Melee or ranged). THEN you force opponent to lose a resource. Basically it is adding a resource loss kicker to a normal damage dice resolution.

[Resolve one or more of your dice showing][either melee damage or ranged damage].

Do the second part in brackets as many times as you want (one or more). Honestly, even at 0 it's far from overpowered to be able to resolve mixed damage in red, and the resource loss is trivial. Who's playing this and thinking to themselves, "wow, this card is incredible!"?

Edited by WonderWAAAGH

Q: With the card Collateral Damage (SOR 120) can I resolve a Melee dice and a Ranged dice as part of the same action? Thank you in advance, Michael

Michael,

Thank you for the question. No, you must choose to either resolve melee or ranged with the card, but not both.
May the Force be with you,
--
Lukas Litzsinger
Game Designer
Fantasy Flight Games
On 6/9/2017 at 6:56 PM, wakefieldbw said:

Let's try to deduce intent. Collateral Damage is a 0 cost card. It let's you resolve damage, which is free, AND remove an opponents resource, which typically costs either an action, or a resource or both.

Seems like adding the ability to resolve mixed damage, ALA All-in for example, which costs 1 resource, would be excessive based on 0 cost.

I think this right here is the strongest argument.

Yes, the wording can be interpreted both ways. But one must look at the intent of the card and what it does wholly. If the wording is meant to allow you to resolve both damage types, wouldn't that make the card a little to powerful for 0 cost?

Edited by Shado
spelling mistake

And now I seen the question has already been answered.

Guess I should finish reading all the comments before posting.

On 2017-6-9 at 10:55 PM, WonderWAAAGH said:

I don't owe them any benefit of the doubt, do I? Their history on the matter certainly hasn't earned them much, but perhaps you're just a little too wet behind the ears to know better. Maybe you should wait another thousand posts or two before offering advice to your more experienced peers. Ciao, cupcake.

Experience does not necessarily equate wisdom. A smart man knows a tomato is a fruit. A wise man knows a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

I believe the card allows you to choose one type of damage and I will play it and expect it to be played as such until there is some sort of official ruling.

2 minutes ago, Hol Coronet said:

Experience does not necessarily equate wisdom. A smart man knows a tomato is a fruit. A wise man knows a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

I believe the card allows you to choose one type of damage and I will play it and expect it to be played as such until there is some sort of official ruling.

A smart man posts on threads with his opinion. A wise man reads the thread before posting? (Hint: Read the last few posts)

54 minutes ago, Hol Coronet said:

Experience does not necessarily equate wisdom. A smart man knows a tomato is a fruit. A wise man knows a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

I believe the card allows you to choose one type of damage and I will play it and expect it to be played as such until there is some sort of official ruling.

I like how people with zero experience keep telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to FFG. Is it some kind of subconscious protestation of your own neophytic inadequacies that compels you to lash out? Facts are facts, kiddo; all it takes is a set of eyes to see them.

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At any rate, I'm glad the matter is settled. I feel that the card had a chance of actually seeing play if they'd ruled the other way, but now its usefulness is wholly suspect. Oh well.

Edited by WonderWAAAGH
17 minutes ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

I like how people with zero experience keep telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to FFG. Is it some kind of subconscious protestation of your own neophytic inadequacies that compels you to lash out? Facts are facts, kiddo; all it takes is a set of eyes to see them.

---

At any rate, I'm glad the matter is settled. I feel that the card had a chance of actually seeing play if they'd ruled the other way, but now its usefulness is wholly suspect. Oh well.

I have zero experience on this forum. You know nothing of my experience with this game or FFG in general. Regardless, how long you've been buying their stuff still doesn't make anyone any more or less of an expert.

So am I to be belittled until I have a few hundred posts under my belt? Seems awfully welcoming...

It's not expertise, it's pure observation. FFG doesn't invest enough in design, development, or playtesting for any of their games. The rules typically have glaring holes in them, lack sufficient definitions, and there's no uniformity when it comes to card templating. They get by on the power of their licenses, and one could argue that the games are still playable/enjoyable regardless, but there's no getting around the simple facts outlined above. You're right, I don't know how much experience you have, but if you had any at all you'd have already seen these things for yourself - and saved yourself the effort of trying to put me in my place. So... welcome! Want to talk about cards now?

Edited by WonderWAAAGH
54 minutes ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

At any rate, I'm glad the matter is settled. I feel that the card had a chance of actually seeing play if they'd ruled the other way, but now its usefulness is wholly suspect. Oh well.

In a deck which has a predominance of one or the other the ability to resolve more than one dice with the same symbol isn't all that bad. I resolve my ranged as normal and get you to lose a resource, not all bad as far as I can see.

15 minutes ago, Amanal said:

In a deck which has a predominance of one or the other the ability to resolve more than one dice with the same symbol isn't all that bad. I resolve my ranged as normal and get you to lose a resource, not all bad as far as I can see.

Resolving multiple dice of varying types would have been decent filler in a deck with mixed damage faces, like FN-2199 and Holdout Blaster. It still would be limited to red, and the resource loss is almost wholly trivial; you play the card when you want to resolve the damage, but you don't worry about waiting for the perfect opportunity to deny that resource. By the time you've activated enough characters to make Collateral Damage worthwhile your opponent has probably spent all their resources on upgrades or events anyways. At 0 the card would be playable, but far from strong. And like I said before, if I wanted to pay 1 to resolve all my dice I could have already done that with All In, and you see how much play time that card is getting at store champs.

Yeah, I see what you are saying. However, I think the best part of this card is the Resource Loss, so run it in a "Snap" deck and the effect of the card could be somewhat better than in a FN-2199 deck.

Some cards don't go into every deck of a certain colour, some cards pair up with a specific character or even set of characters.

Remember that there are other costs beyond resources. Collateral Damage does two things, the first of which is letting you resolve damage, which you can already do as a basic action. The other is remove an opponent's resource. Even if it was colorless, would you still waste 1-2 of your 30 card slots just to remove that one resource? I know I wouldn't.

Sometimes I wonder if my dice have 6 sides or are all misprinted to have blanks on all six sides, so sometimes I look at cards like these and feel that, yes I would put them into a deck against better judgement to make up for those rolls/re-rolls that just never come close to expected outcomes.