Halflings of D'haz vs. simultaneous wounds ruling

By jhaelen, in CoC Rules Discussion

Recently someone (The Professor?) quoted an older ruling that struck me as odd (I bolded the relevant part):

1) Educated Officer responds to the the card being wounded, so each wound it receives is an instance that it can respond. Since all wounds from a single effect or game state are received simultaneously even if a card is targeted with more wounds than it can survive all those wounds are considered taken , allowing Educated Officer to respond to each.

2) You always draw or discard a card 1 at a time. So each card drawn from the top of the deck causes the card under it to be the top card and therefor is revealed. Effectively you r opponent is revealing all four cards they draw.

Damon Stone
Associate LCG Designer
Fantasy Flight Games

Doesn't this mean that the Halfling's ability is completely useless since the defender can simply decide to assign all wounds to the same committed character even if the character wouldn't be able to survive them all?

Halflings of D'haz
[Neutral] Search for the Silver Key F75 / Illustrator: Raya Golden
[Character] - Monster.
Cost : 4 / Skill : 2 / Icons: CCCCC
Game Text: Halflings of D'haz can only commit to stories on your turn. The loser of any C struggle in which Halflings of D'haz participated must receive an additional wound for each icon by which the struggle was lost.

From the FAQ:

The loser of the # struggle where
Halflings of D’haz participated must
assign additional wounds for each
icon the struggle was lost by among
characters he committed to the story.

I don't think so. It sounds like D'Haz by way of the FAQ forces the player to distribute the wounds. What Damon is explaining is how it would work otherwise.

Penfold said:

I don't think so. It sounds like D'Haz by way of the FAQ forces the player to distribute the wounds. What Damon is explaining is how it would work otherwise.

I'm not sure the current text is sufficient to clarify the question.

I just noticed the section about the similar card effect of Bloodbath:

The player who wins the combat struggle
chooses which characters get wounded.
That player may choose to distribute
the wounds however he wants among
characters committed to that story,
as long as it is legal. This does mean
that a player can, for instance, put two
wounds on the same character with no
toughness
(because the wounds are dealt
simultaneously), if he wants to. However,
he cannot choose to wound a character
with Invulnerability.

I bolded the relevant sentence. Unless I am mistaken, the Halflings' effect works just the same, except the defender gets to choose how to distribute the wounds.

The new FAQ (2.0, came out today) addresses this:

Halflings of D'Haz:

The additional wound tokens are assigned one at a time by the losing player.

TheProfessor said:

The new FAQ (2.0, came out today)

Is it REALLY 2.0 or is it 1.5? I think we need an MRP!!! demonio.gif

Good question. We need an official ruling on whether it is 1.5 (written in the document) or 2.0 (name of file)!

TheProfessor said:

The new FAQ (2.0, came out today) addresses this:

Halflings of D'Haz:

The additional wound tokens are assigned one at a time by the losing player.

I still have to investigate all of the additions / changes in detail, but judging from skimming it over, most or all of my (many) questions of the past months have been addressed. I've also noticed at least one change that will make a modification of my deck for the European Championship necessary.

It is 2.0. I always download the graphics version and only do the printer friendly one if I am going to a tournament. It says 2.0 on both the file and the front cover.