Tarik Mansuri has an antimateriel weapon, and also has poison. Poison forces the *target* of an attack to make an additional BTS roll, but does not work against *troopers* with the STR attribute (emphasis mine). Scenery items are not, as far as I can tell, troopers. Therefore, if Tarik hits an antenna in the Grid, does he force it to make two ARM rolls and one BTS roll? Thanks!
No. I have two answers to this: 1) Scenery is Structure, not Wound based. We know that Poison is written to only impact Wound based targets. If you feel that the "troopers" bit of this is so significant, than that leads to: 2) Poison can only be used as a CC Attack. Close Combat is defined as being base to base with an enemy, not a wall. Let's not further break the game. ;) When a rule is written entirely from the position of it's impact on Troopers, and you ask a question about the impact of something that is NOT a trooper, then we have to do some reasonable extrapolation.
Hmm. I'm fairly sure your point #2 doesn't apply because the rules of the Grid, and the scenery structure rules, specifically allow them to be targeted.
And we must at least imply that the scenery structure rules override the requirement to be in base contact with an enemy, or the entire Looting and Sabotaging scenario doesn't work.
There's nothing in the Forward Observer skill that mentions troopers, just targets. You're thinking of the Targeted state not having any effect on a scenery structure because they're not troopers.
We've got some verb confusion here. When I say 'targeted', I mean 'targeted by an attack'. Perhaps I should have said just 'attacked', except the language in the first paragraph of the Destroy Antennas section of the Grid uses 'targeted'. This topic is not in any way related to the designate antenna rules.
For the sake of clarity it may be easier to consider this in the context of Looting and Sabotaging, which uses the same language ('[AC2s] can be targeted'). For Looting and Sabotaging to work, Tarik and other models with antimateriel CCWs must be able to target the AC2 with an attack. Poison works against 'the target' of the attack. Poison only turns off against 'a trooper' with the STR attribute. An AC2 is not a trooper. For clarity: I'd like the answer to be that poison does not work against structures. But this question is being asked on behalf of a friend, and I'd like to be able to explain the why to them in addition to the answer proper. If the full answer is 'poison does not work on structures; the structure rules are something of an incomplete appendix in the scope of the infinity rules, and as such are somewhat incomplete. Consider the reference to poison not working against troopers to also mean it does not work against all non-trooper targets of a poison attack with the STR attribute', that's totally cool.
As the person referenced in Shep's first post, I suppose I'll chip in here. I don't think any reasonable person would genuinely argue that Poison should affect Props like Antenna. However, I'm just drawing attention to an interaction that according to the Rules As Written is legitimate. So, in light of the recent discussion regarding Intent and other aspects of the game that are adopted by the player base by extrapolation/house rule/what-have-you, I was wondering if there were people in the RAW crowd interested in contesting or defending the argument that Antenna can be poisoned? As such, macfergusson, while I agree with your point personally, for the purposes of this discussion I'd like to suggest that we remove any notion of extrapolation/assumption or interpretation of CB's intent in writing these rules. Can anyone provide an entirely rules-based argument that rejects the following thesis: 1. Poison acts in a certain way, except for a set of explicitly stated exceptions. ie. Troopers with a STR stat. 2. Troopers are defined as game elements that belong to a player's army list, can make/receive attacks and spend orders. 3. Antenna don't spend orders or make attacks, so cannot be classified as Troopers. 4. Therefore, Antenna fail to meet the criteria for exemption from Poison.
Explicitly mentioning an unusual case of being in CC with an object because of a specific mission is a pretty unreasonable expectation. It should be evident that the intent is for poison not to affect objects, and the single problem is the use of the word 'trooper' - used because it is the thing you will most often be using your CC Attack on. It's quite strange to actually look for a problem you don't want, especially one as rare as a situation where poisoning objects is likely to come up. It's also such an irrelevant problem to virtually any game of Infinity that the time taken to update rules for it would be a waste of development time... surely!
In short: no, nobody can provide an entirely rules based argument. I don't think anyone can reasonably be upset that a system originally written in another language should require interpretation based on assumed/known intent of the designers. (I expect it sticks in the craw a little for some based on some previous discussions about a very RAW interpretation of the LOF rules but bigods let's not revisit that here.)
That's exactly my point, mate. We can't make arguments for strictly RAW for this game. Otherwise, we end up having to concede that buildings are allergic to cyanide. I think we can file this under: "Proof that game designers are only human." and cross-reference that with "Yes, reasonable interpretation of the rules is perfectly OK. Don't be autistic about the rules, you sad creatures." Robshep has the right of it, this topic is related (in intent) to the recent LOF rules discussion. Thanks for the contribution, everyone. :)
Not at all. The next time we get a bunch of idiots demanding that we play a terrible rule exactly as written, we can point to examples like this as to why reasonable interpretation is a better way of playing the game. You might even say we rejected the Null Hypothesis: 'The rules are perfectly fine and should not be interpreted, only played exactly as written.'
Also, I genuinely wanted to know the answer to the posion thing. Didn't actually intend for the ROI/RAW conversation to spill over here. Cheers all.
I have no idea why you're trying to bring up a completely unrelated topic in a rules discussion, however there aren't any "idiots" involved in either case.
