The purpose of this sub-forum is to help aid in the discussion of questions and proposed solutions to questions posed by the community that could use official clarification from Fantasy Flight Games.

Please keep general questions out of this forum section. Please help us keep this sub-forum clean and limited to discussions that have already been researched and cleaned up.

A small group of players have been collecting unresolved discussions (from the boards here on Fantasy Flight Games and from discussions held at BoardGameGeek.com), cleaning up the discussions, and narrowing down to possible rulings. This has been done this to help streamline the decision process and hopefully ease the amount of time needed by Fantasy Flight Staff.

We have over 35 questions gathered and a small discussion of the GLOAQ and will post them a few at a time every few days for the community to add any final discussion to the posts. (But not all at once to avoid overwhelming the forum.)

Corbon and Thundercles have put a lot of work into this and the collection of these topics. Lets help them get these discussions ready for FFG to clarify these discussions for us!

In general, the plan here is to refine a submission that we can make and discuss with FFG.

Typically, the submission will follow the format ;

Background: Some background information and explanations why this is an issue worth looking at and what the problems are. This is not strictly necessary but allows FFG staff to get a proper understanding of the question without doing lots of research themselves - thus giving us a better chance of not getting a 'bad' answer, and saving them a lot of work.

Question: The actual question which will eventually go in the FAQ (hopefully) goes here. In general I think it is better to keep the question as simple as possible and make the answers more complex if necessary. We have seen with several previously rulings that a complex question with simple answers has a tendency to create more uncertainty - people don't trust that the question was properly understood and therefore mistrust the answer.

Answer:
A selection of answers to be provided to FFG. For the most part, they should then be able to simply pick one answer and the rest, although some answers will still need a little refinement from them (one or more items from this list, etc)

Notes/Comments: sometimes there will be extra notes or comments for either us (to promote discussion points) or FFG (to further clarify or something)

Q and A will be bolded so that they can be easily separated out by anyone not interested in the fluff.

If you think the wording could be changed for greater clarity, think that there is too much bias towards one answer in the question, think additional (or less) comments should go in the Background section, think of additional or better 'answers', or even just feel that the entire question is a waste of time, then please comment in that thread.

Ideally, at the end of each thread a refined 'send this to FFG' will be available that we can put in a document that we can discuss with FFg staff as they prepare the next FAQ.

This is a wonderful idea, I know I will appreciate all the work you guys do to answer some of the questions that have plagued the game since the beginning.

I hope this works the way it is supposed to.

Sweet! Thank you guys!

Jonny WS said:

+1

This would be great if we could get a revised cleaned up FAQ, thanks a ton to everyone who's put so much work into this already.

i'd have a special request regarding the faq... don't split it up into the base game and the different addons, only to have subsections that deal with the single addons together with other addons. this tears the faq appart and there's no sense of direction any more. just do a faq, that treats the rules, as if it were only one big game.

this is to make every rule apply to EVERY addon in ANY combination. i know that can be hard, but it will help also help you in the future to incoporate new addons into the existing ruleset and it will hopefully remedy situations like dark relic + rtl, where there's absolutely no direction, only guessing and house ruling.

an index would be great too.

eNTi said:

That's an interesting idea, but keep in mind that the FAQ was probably split up like this so that people who don't own all the expansions only need to concern themselves with the parts that correspond to stuff they own. The game is, at least in theory, designed to be modular.

Perhaps questions that bridge multiple expansions could be marked (like with the expansion symobls) so people can tell which expansions are involved in each question? Keep errata and questions that concern only expansion X in their own department, but maybe merge all of the "mixed" questions into one bag (or two bags - vanilla and AC.)

I'm not sure how much leverage this subforum really has to change the FAQ structure at such a base level, but it's an interesting idea.

if i understand that correctly, that would mean, that the card revisions are only applied, if you own a certain addon? like the change to leadership?

eNTi said:

I'm not sure that understand what you mean. If you don't have the expansion that gave you the Leadership card (AoD?) then what does it matter if the rules for it have been changed? You can't use it either way.

If you mean things like that new Beastman and Skeleton cards that were included in WoD, those changes would certainly apply even if you only owned an old copy of the base game without the changes. That was a generic errata, though. WoD only included updated cards for the convenience of the players.

If you're perhaps referring to the "half action" paradigm introduced in AoD to make extended actions work easier, and you're playing without AoD, then I would say that's a personal call for each group. Without the expansion you'll never be called upon to make an extended action, and thus dividing your declared Action into "half actions" is moot. If you prefer to maintain that paradigm so your group is already familiar with it when you buy AoD, I don't see any harm in that, though.

Personally I would be inclined to read and apply all the rules changes and accept that not all of them will affect the game we play, but my mode of thinking is not the only one people who play Descent might have. Some people might not care about errata and clarifications based on expansions they don't own, and having the FAQ divvied up by expansion would help those people find the answers they care about.

Just a bump until we get a sticky...

Just a reminder.
We seem to be getting a high proportion of "I think the answer is this" replies, which are not the purpose of this subforum.

The purpose here is not for us to vote or say what we think the answer should be on any thread. That will be for FFG to decide.

It is also not the purpose here to discuss why or why not one answer is right - that can be done in the main forum, but if a question reaches this stage then it is safe to assume that there is more than one possible set of reasoning that can, or will (even if it should not), be advanced in support of an answer. As such, adding another reason doesn't change anything.

The purpose here is
1. to make sure that the questions, especially the Background section, are balanced and accurate, and don't bias or misinform the FFG staffmember. We want to inform on the issues, and explain the problems, so that the staff member can make a decision that does not contradict existing rules and answers the actual problem we have, not something else entirely
2. to make sure that the options (answers) we present to the FFG staff for choice are clear and definitive (ie don't create even more questions due to casual or unclear answers
3. to make sure that the options we provide cover all (or all reasonable) solutions . We do not want the FFG answer to our carefully worded and clear answers for a brief, vague answer just because the solution was something we didn't think of!
4. to make sure any question we ask is actually worth asking . If we ask 40 important questions we might get good answers. If we add 200 unimportant questions (things that are already clearly covered by the rules for example) to our 40 to make 240, then our 40 good ones probably won't get the attention and care that they deserve.

So please keep posting, but post appropriately - even just to say that you are happy with the Q&A as posted in the first post of a thread!

Steve-O said:

Erk!

This is leading to some hardcore game definitions being needed. I was avoiding that thus far on the grounds that it was impinging on FFGs territory to far, and unlikely to be acceptable to them.

But what you are basically suggesting, if I understand right, is that we get a totally new rule section that properly defines all sequencing .

I have something like ideas-wise, that which I have articulated in parts in several threads, and I think is the way the game does actually operate (both in intent and in necessary fact), but hesitate to write that up as a thread as it is only my expression of some complex internals.
There is certainly enough complaint from people who don't think the same way when a reasoning is given for something that includes ideas that are not expressly mentioned in the rules, yet are a logical and necessary extension of procedures that are done without thought or written rules. Those who follow some of the more arcane (interesting!?) long arguments may recognise phrases like "you just made that up" and 'there is no such thing in the rules" refering to concepts like change of control and simultaneity.

Perhaps this would be best served by a shortish essay to be added to the FAQ? (Assuming of course that FFG agree!)

I could write such a thing, but fear that it is too much one persons ideas.

I guess if we were to go ahead with that, i think we would need to draw up a list of general things that need to be covered.
That list may start with:

• Events or actions with the same trigger
• Who decides sequencing when both sides have events active
• How to decide if something is 'immediate' or not
• Properly defining 'start of turn'

...and probably more.

I really don't think an exhaustive list is the way to go for this sort of thing - the list is too big, the concepts too wide and it is too hard to fix a list if an error is made or if new possibilities are introduced.

Hmmm, might move this to the 'purpose' sticky thread...

In fact, this could be one of two extra things to discuss with FFG staff once we are ready, more than just the FAQ.
1. This 'essay' idea.
2. 'Balance ideas/proposals for SoB - while opinions seem to vary over whether other expansions are balanced or not, SoB seems to be both universally accepted as 'broken' and mathematically provable (almost) as 'broken'. While I, personally, am working on some different 'new' (sort of) strategies for the heroes to see if they make a difference, I think it is still clear that there are extreme fundamental problems with SoB. So the question then is, should we also collate and discuss ideas about getting FFG to 'fix' SoB, or is that too much to bite off, or inappropriate for us to attempt?

Steve-O said:

We play "immediately" as meaning "before anyone does anything else". Simple, easy to check and almost ruleless.

I have a question for the FAQ. Well, actually it's not a question only I have as I have it written in some subforums. And it is not really the question what I have to add, but a possible way to present the answer to it so that it cannot be overseen when written nor misunderstood when read. It's about obstacles and the obstacle list. I just haven't found any subforum with the question "what exactly is an obstacle?" or similar. Where can I post it?

Galvancito1 said:

That's Question #4.