Situation that came up last night while playing The Battle of the Pelennor Fields:

Quest stage 3 has the text, " Forced: When an enemy is destroyed, place progress on this stage equal to that enemy's total Threat (progress must be placed on the active location first)."

Wraith on Wings has 0 threat, but gets threat each round as you put resource tokens on him.

When you destroy him, do you get to put progress tokens on the quest card? Is his threat 0 (because he has been placed in discard) or do you count the amount of threat he has accumulated?

I note that the quest card text does say "total threat," which implies modifiers should be counted, but I can't imagine a scenario in which this guy is NOT in the discard pile at the time you place progress tokens on the quest.

Well, the Forced effect does say "when destroyed" rather than "after destroyed". Also, lotr doesn't have an explicit disrupt/interrupt mechanism, so Response/Forced are allowed to act as interrupts, resolving at times that might otherwise seem strange.

I also agree with you that the use of "total threat" implies that using a calculated value is plausible. Certainly if they had written "printed threat", or "after an enemy is destroyed", then you would use zero.

Given these I would resolved the Forced during the destruction process, before I had discarded the tokens that given him threat, and thus add the threat. I am also pretty comfortable saying intent is on this side of the argument.

Yeah, it seems to be a time where the mechanics don't match with a pretty clearly communicated intent. Unless I'm misunderstanding the word "destroyed." Whether you use the words "when an enemy is destroyed" or "after an enemy is destroyed," either way the trigger seems to me not to be able to fire until the card is in the discard pile, since there are no intervening steps in the "destruction process."

"When an enemy with victory point is destroyed put it in victory pile instead of the discard pile" mean that the enemy is directly put on victory pile. Of course the "instead" have a lot to do with the clear interpretation of this one but it is, in fact, the same way to deal with those effect ;).

The way I see it, we have 2 simultaneous triggers:

1. When an enemy is destroyed, place it in the discard pile/victory display.

2. When an enemy is destroyed, place progress on this stage equal to that enemy's total Threat.

As these have the same trigger, I'd say perform them in the order of your choosing.

The second one is an actual trigger though, a Forced effect on the quest card. The other is a basic game mechanic and couldn't be classified as a triggered effect for the purposes of timing. Either the intent was to place 0 progress when you kill a Wraith, or there isn't a clean way to interpret the rules to match the intent (i.e., the effect shouldn't actually work).

It's not a triggered ability on a card, but nevertheless they share a trigger. You don't move an enemy to the discard before it's destroyed, so the only remaining options are moving it to the discard when it's destroyed or after it's destroyed. In the former case, it shares a trigger with the quest card and you can resolve the quest card first. In the latter case, you would have to perform the quest card first by placing however many tokens. Either way, you can get the progress, which is also what I believe to be the designer intent (based on lack of the word "printed").

That's how I make sense of it anyway.