I was listening to TCOC about the sorrowful man and how it was useless it is as written. The suggestion was that you had to pick costs that you can pay. What do you all think about that?

Also mentioned PotS Theon and Shield Islands Dromon

For comparison's sake look at the wording on Pyromancer's Apprentice

Haha, I think you know why my vote is.

Game of Cyvasse also would play differently... probably stronger than it already is...

Sounds logical. It would probably help to make the game more intuitive. The current ruling for Sorrowful Man & the other cards is quite bad imo.

oshi said:

Actually cyvasse would be weaker because there would be less using of knelt characters

I think it's very unintuitive to have rulings that allow you to do things that are not actually possible within game mechanics. It significantly ramps up the amount of time players have to spend on rulings and memorization and makes people who are looking for logical rules angry.

Stasis said:

Well, you do have to pick costs that you can pay. For example, Confession's "kneel 3 influence or a HOLY character to..." requires you to choose something you can do, or else you don't pay the cost and therefore do not initiate the effect.

In Sorrowful Man, though, you are choosing an effect . We have long said that you can choose effects that do not resolve successfully. A successful resolution - sometime in the future - does not have any impact on whether or not you can initiate the effect in the first place. That's why "choose and kneel a character" lets you choose a character that is already kneeling. That's also why "choose a participating character, that character gets +2 STR; if you win the challenge, draw a card" does not require you to look into the future and know whether or not you are going to win the challenge before being able to give the character the +2.

So, while I agree that many loopholes or strange situations might be closed if there was a blanket "you cannot choose to initiate an effect that cannot be resolved successfully" rule, there are many things we take for granted that would change if that were the case. Standing a standing character would be illegal - maybe not a problem, but would change how the game is played because it is so ingrained. There's an argument that "put into play" effects would no longer work to dupe unique cards because you can see - before initiation - that the card will not successfully come into play. It would make the whole "you do not initiate the part after the 'then' if the part before the 'then' is unsuccessful" rule meaningless because you would not ever be able to initiate the effect in the first place if the part before the 'the' would be unsuccessful.

I'm not saying it would be a bad ruling - just that there would be consequences. Generally, I think it is a bad idea to make a sweeping, all-inclusive ruling to "fix" a handful of cards. In this particular case, though, I think it would be better to errata Sorrowful Man to take out the word "choose" (which is all you need to do to make the thing the merciless, unavoidable killer people "intuitively" want it to be) rather than to make a blanket ruling that puts unwritten restrictions on card text.