The meat of it: What happens to fuel leak if it's flipped facedown before its triggered effect can resolve?

From what I can tell, if Lieutenant Tavson has fuel leak and suffers a crit, both Fuel Leak and Tavson trigger, and the player can order those effects in either direction because Fuel Leak is a card ability, not a game effect. If so, this creates an interesting and bizarre situation. Tavson can use his action to repair Fuel Leak. Fuel Leak is now both facedown, and in the ability queue.

Does Fuel Leak's ability queue instance resolve, thus repairing the card again (and discarding it) and assigning another damage card, or is it prevented from resolving because it's facedown and doesn't "exist" now? It might seem trivial since you end up with the same number of damage cards, but other effects could trigger on receiving new damage (Tavson again, Hull Breach, etc).

The one thing I can think of that might shed light on this is, repairing Wounded Pilot prevents it from resolving, because it's facedown by the time it would do anything. But it's more like it's facedown by the time it would be triggered , so nothing enters the ability queue in the first place. So I'm not sure if that helps us.

edit: as I think about it, this applies to Direct Hit too.

What umm... what do we do with this? I'm not sure whether we have the information to produce a clear and reliable resolution, or if it's going to be mainly speculation and inference. But if there's a clear answer, I would love to hear it!

Ummm... if critical damage text isn't a game effect, I'll eat my hat.

(Disclaimer: I'm not actually wearing a hat currently.)

Hrm. I think Tavson can flip down/repair a Fuel Leak before it can trigger, provided he's got a charge to spend. Going back to the Jake example in the RR: It's possible to have abilities in the queue which can't trigger, and they ultimately get ignored.

I don't see what Direct Hit has to do with this situation, though.

Ah right, no on Direct Hit since Tavson can't equip the astromechs and crew with Repair effects.

As for critical damage being a game effect, I assumed "game effect" is stuff that's not on cards assigned to ships, but text in the rulebook. Pilot abilities, card abilities, damage cards, and conditions are all card abilities, and "game effects" are the effects that are core to the game, independent of which cards are on the table (like receiving a stress token after performing a red maneuver).

Well... the ability queue entry in the RRG differentiates between "player effects" and "game effects". In my mind, player effects are those things a player can choose to bring to the table. Since everyone uses the same set of damage cards and does not get to choose which ones get used, I can't see damage card text being a player effect. Therefore it must be a game effect.

10 minutes ago, Wazat said:

Ah right, no on Direct Hit since Tavson can't equip the astromechs and crew with Repair effects.

As for critical damage being a game effect, I assumed "game effect" is stuff that's not on cards assigned to ships, but text in the rulebook. Pilot abilities, card abilities, damage cards, and conditions are all card abilities, and "game effects" are the effects that are core to the game, independent of which cards are on the table (like receiving a stress token after performing a red maneuver).

I think there wouldn't be time. When critical damage is suffered, the cards are dealt face-up and their effects are resolved. A Direct Hit would have been resolved, dealt an additional damage, and been flipped down before you get to the first "After Suffering Damage" trigger.

With Fuel Leak, the trigger event is the same--suffering 1 damage. You'll still suffer the full results from whatever crit came in, then you'll have a window: trigger Tavson or trigger Fuel Leak. Tavson could spend a charge and an action to flip face down Fuel Leak, and I believe that this will prevent Fuel Leak from resolving.

I'm not completely confident, but I don't really have a reason to doubt it, other than it seems cheezy.

5 minutes ago, lordvorkon said:

Well... the ability queue entry in the RRG differentiates between "player effects" and "game effects". In my mind, player effects are those things a player can choose to bring to the table. Since everyone uses the same set of damage cards and does not get to choose which ones get used, I can't see damage card text being a player effect. Therefore it must be a game effect.

Hrm... Maybe.

Game Effect is a pretty nebulously defined term. The one example in the ability queue rule lists a red barrel roll giving stress before someone can trigger an effect which triggers based on a barrel roll. The term "game effect" doesn't show up anywhere in the Damage or Damage Card rules, although it does show up in Condition Cards.

Meanwhile, no where in the Rules Reference is an action on a damage card refered to as any different than an action on an upgrade. The text in the action rule simply refers to cards, without making any sort of distinction.

The argument that 'damage cards should be treated as game effects and resolved before abilities under a player's control' might be enough. I'm still thinking on it, and would certainly get behind it if there were a few more folks. That's probably as much an effect of it being a slow weekend than anything else.

this is from the good old rulebook. "some of the faceup damage cards have lingering game effects."



game effects and player effects are pretty inconsistent terms. for example, performing a coordinate action is a player effect, but being coordinated and thus getting to perform an action is a game effect. taking the action from being coordinated is again, a player effect.

a lot of effects are pretty clearly game effects and a lot of effects are pretty clearly player effects. others, not so much.