1) Do characters start with their familiar on the board or must the Necromancer spend 1 fatigue on his turn to summon his zombie at the start of the dungeon?

2) If the Necromancer kills himself under the effects of Dark Charm does he regain 1 health point for killing a monster (Since Dark Charm says the hero attacks "as if he were a monster")?

3) If the Overlord uses Dark Charm and the Spiritspeaker is within 3 squares of the target and wants to use Stone Skin to boost its defense, can he? Considering that Dark Charm says the hero attacks "as if he were a monster."

MasterBeastman said:

1. I believe the only heroes that start with familiars on the board will be: Vyrah the falconer and Challara (from Dungeon Quest) since both of those familiars interact with the monsters/board… allegedly. The necromancer must summon the reanimate to the board via the skill so in most cases the first turn for a Necro will be to move & summon up the reanimate.
2. This is a tough call but I suppose since you're a monster and you kill yourself the scythe would in turn give you 1 hp back and keep you from being knocked out.
3. I sadly don't have dark charm in front of me to review what the wording is and I believe you're asking if the Spiritspeaker can use the stone skin to help protect the affected player. Considering the wording says the player attacking themselves is now a monster, I guess you wouldn't be able to use stone skin. If dark charm was used to attack another player then sure, stone skin could be used on the other target. Tough call really.

MasterBeastman said:

He can't gain the 1 HP unless he kills himself, and he can't kill himself if he still has HP left. I would say "No" to this question, personally, just to close the endless loop. Since the rules in 2e explicitly state that heroes can only attack "monsters" and monsters can only attack heroes, I prefer to interpret the phrase "as if he were a monster" simply to mean "he can attack a hero." This is somewhat different from the 1e ruling concerning "friendly" and "enemy" figures, since in this paradigm, the hero is still a "hero," it's just that DC is letting " attack as if he were a monster." He's not actually a "monster" though.

This is just my personal interpretation, mind you. FFG might just as easily go the other way if this question were posed to them via the Rules Questions link at the bottom of the page.

MasterBeastman said:

I'd say "Yes" to this one, at least partly to remain consistent with my previous ruling. The DC'd hero is still a "hero" (and thus a valid target for Stoneskin,) he's only attacking as if he were monster.

Another consequence of this ruling would be that the OL could NOT use DC to make the hero attack a particular monster figure (should he ever find a good reason to want to do so) since DC makes the hero "attack as if he were a monster" and monsters cannot attack other monsters.

2. I would likely say "no", but if pressed, I would accept "he heals after he kills himself". What that means is, the hero is defeated, the Overlord draws a card, and then the hero gains a health, which revives him - keep in mind that if a defeated hero gains health from any source, he's revived and it doesn't take another action to get him up, but he misses out on the "free" HP from the red dice. Anything else that triggers on a hero being defeated also happens (for instance, if the hero was carrying an objective, he "drops" it right before getting up again).

I am a noob here, for the most part. I never played 1E, and while I did run the demo for 2E at my store, I only got to glance through the rules first.

I'm afraid I don't have the card in question in front of me, and I'm unsure of where to find card images, but here goes.

The Disciple Class deck has a card (I think it's a basic ability) that says something like "Exhaust this card and choose one ajacent hero or yourself, roll one red power die; that hero recovers that many hearts"

The active issue here is that the card does not have the arrow identifying it as an action. My first thought was that this means it is activated for free, not requiring an action (which is how I ended up ruling it). However, I then looked over the Hero's Turn description again, and I could not find an oppertunity to activate an ability that is not an action (apart from Beginning of Turn abilities).

How is this supposed to work?

Anything that doesn't have the action arrow does not use an action. In this case, you exhaust the card instead, so that it can only be used once per turn, plus it costs a fatigue if I remember correctly. You may still carry out two actions.

jjcole said:

So, timing wise, this could be done at any time during the Hero's turn, correct?

MasterBeastman said:

I think that Steve-O's interpretation that the hero attacks as a monster, but does not count as a monster for other purposes, is probably the best one. In particular, if he counted as a monster for purposes of targeting, could he even attack himself in the first place? You normally can only target a space containing an enemy.

However, just for completeness, I'd like to offer another angle on this question. Suppose he does count as a monster, and therefore fulfills the triggering condition on his ability that lets him recover wounds…

Consider the order in which these effects resolve. Suppose, for a moment, that reactions are resolved after the thing that triggers them - that is, the order is: first defeat the target, then the necromancer can use his ability to recover 1 wound.

In this case, the necromancer cannot be healed for defeating himself because he would be knocked out at the time he would need to invoke his ability, and "a hero cannot use skills or abilities while knocked out, unless an effect specifically allows it." (Knocked Out rules, p.15) It doesn't matter whether he fulfills the condition of "defeating a monster", because the ability is no longer available. Even if he defeated a monster at the same time (e.g. with a Blast attack), he still couldn't heal.

Though, this order of resolution may be problematic for effects like "cancel a wound being dealt to you" (if 2e has effects like that) - do you need to resolve the wound first, before you can cancel it? That gets awkward…

On the other hand, suppose that effects resolve in a stack: once we determine that a creature is being defeated, the necromancer can invoke his ability, and then his ability is resolved before the target is defeated. So, first the necromancer recovers one wound. Then, we move down to the next effect in the stack - the necromancer's defeat. Do we resolve effects already in the stack even if the condition that caused them is no longer fulfilled? Intuitively, it seems to me that they must be - otherwise we reacted to something that never actually occurred. (And generally, in games, you only check a condition when you begin something - e.g. if you have a spell that temporarily turns a creature into a statue, it doesn't break early simply because the target is now a statue and is therefore no longer a valid target for the spell).

If the necromancer is still defeated after being healed, I think a strong argument can be made that this erases the healing. "When a hero is defeated, he immediately suffers fatigue up to his Stamina, and damage up to his Health (if defeated by some other effect)" . Technically, the rules seem to say that he suffers damage up to his health only if the effect that defeated him was not damage, but I suspect that parenthetical was intended to explain to the player why that rule exists rather than to restrict its application.

However, even if it doesn't reverse the healing, the healing doesn't revive him, either, because he wasn't knocked out at the moment that the healing occurred. So he would effectively get an extra point of healing whenever he manages to get back up, but he would still be knocked out until something else brings him back.

KristoffStark said:

Some skills, such as Defend , seem obviously intended to be usable when it is not your turn. If a skill doesn't require an action and doesn't specify any restrictions on timing, I think I'd have to assume it can be used at any time on anyone's turn.

However, I believe the skill you are thinking of is Prayer of Healing , which (based on the image in the preview articles) is specifically restricted to being used during your own turn.

Which, actually, raises another interesting question. In first edition, you could only use "during your turn" effects during the action part of your turn (not during refresh/re-equip). As far as I've noticed, second edition doesn't have a rule like that, so it appears you could hypothetically use Prayer of Healing at the beginning of your turn, refresh it at the end of step 1, and then use it again on the same turn. I wonder if that's intentional…

Antistone said:

That is indeed that card I was referring to.

And I'm willing to bet that they did NOT intend it to be used before the refresh stage on your own turn.

KristoffStark said:

Since the refreshing of the cards is part of the "start of your turn" phase, I would guess that you can't actually do anything *before* the "start of your turn" phase, and that refreshing cards and any "start of your turn" effects would occur all at once before any other effects or skills could be used.

The end of another hero's turn would not be considered part of "your turn".

When I'm an Overlord, I like to think myself as an obstacle, not a impassable wall.

Because if the players lose the game, I don't get to play anymore either. =(

That's no longer the case in 2nd edition. Win or lose, the game goes on.

radiskull said:

Ohhh yaaa… Well doesn't give the heroes much incentive, since they proceed regardless haha

suplex said:

At the end of a Quest, every player (overlord included) gets 1XP. Winning the Quest generally results in an added bonus, like gold, or items.

So there certainly is incentive.

jjcole said:

The rulebook seems to specify that refreshing cards happens after things that specifically say "at the start of your turn", even though they're in the same phase.

Simultaneous action gets really tricky. If you've got one card that says "if you have more than 2 wounds, remove all but 2 of them" and another card that says "remove 1 wound", telling players that they happen "all at once" doesn't really clarify anything. If a card says "exhaust at the start of your turn", players are going to ask whether that happens before or after you refresh cards, and "at the same time" is not a valid answer.

In 1e, the player could choose the order of start-of-turn effects.

So still no consensus on my original question huh?

All we really need to know is:

1) Can a hero buff the defense of a character who is attacking himself via Dark Charm?

2) Can the Overlord play monster-buffing cards on a hero that is attacking or moving through the use of Dark Charm?

I wish they wouldn't have used the phrase, "As if he were a monster" because that's the height of ambiguity.

Also, some people were concerned that Dark Charm can't force a character to attack himself. The card specifically says it can.

Most of us don't have the game. It's hard to answer questions about specific cards without actually seeing the entire text of those cards.

MasterBeastman said:

I would ask FFG for a definitive answer to both of those, but personally, I would say yes to both, for these reasons:

1. He's still a character/hero, so why not?

2. He's attacking AS IF he were a monster. So anything that modifies an attack of a monster (i.e. a plus to damage or the like) seems a natural fit. Of course, the character ISN'T a monster, so cards that say 'sacrifice a monster' couldn't target him.

Just my thoughts anyway.

Antistone said:

Suppose you could do that, you still only get to refresh it once a turn, so it would mean you hadn't used it in the previous turn.

This question came up during the preview weekend at our local store, and we ruled that the "as if it were a monster" part of Dark Charm applies only to the declaration of the attack (necessary to make it legal to attack another hero), and for all other intents and purposes both figures (attacker and defender) are still heroes and not monsters.

Columbob said:

Yes. This wouldn't let you use it more often overall, just let you "save" an unused one for the start of your next turn. Still, that might be pretty useful.