Interim Rules Announcement - ARO Declarations, Skill Requirements, CC ARO baiting etc.

If that were true, there would never be any rulings which contradicted the rulebook. But there have been.

Hell no I don't. But I'm also capable of evaluating decisions or changes made to the rules as being good or bad decisions. And so are other people; the impression I'm hearing is pretty negative rn.

 

No, it’s the opposite. It means that rulings can contradict the book, because CB has the power to redefine the rules at will.

 

But your negative opinions mean jack. Your opinions don't define the rule set for Infinity. The CB rule staff decides that and for you to not believe that is....odd at best.

 

You do understand that this is a separate and unrelated discussion that has no connection to your challenge of authority the Rules Staff has over the rules and in stating what is, and is not, correct in a rules interpretation.

You cannot make a challenge to the authority of the Rules Staff because you do not like the decision.

 

Sure. But previous rulings have been justified as saying "I know it's shitty, but that's what the rules say." Like CDG and Protheion, or Targeting deployables. So which is it?

Your positive opinion means jack.

This isn't the military, I'm a customer. If I think that rules decisions are making Infinity a worse product, I'll say so, and I know others are saying so as well.

 

Yes, but this is a separate and completely unrelated discussion to what you say.

I think you are conflating two different things together.

"The rules do not say this and who are you to rule out what the rules say" is not the same with "I do not like how this rule resolution affects my gameplay because of X"

You do the former when you say you do the later.

 

The point is that when you assume authority over something you invite criticism for your handling of it. The criticism can take the form of "you are drawing incorrect conclusions from the text."

 

Only if the person criticizing it has not the ultimate authority over it.

There is a vast difference between saying to a forum poster they are drawing incorrect conclusions from the text and saying that to the one who wrote the text, rewrote the text, has made the arguments of why the text should be written or not written that way and knows what the implications, intend and interaction of the text should be.

I am sure you can appreciate the difference.

 

Based on my observations, the default stance for N4 has been “play it as RAW, but we may update with an errata later”. This specific thread is an exception to that, with an explanation and justification given.

I assume you’re referencing the Protheion + coup de grace thing in some of your commentary; I don’t see a contradiction there. The rule as written doesn’t appear to allow protheion to function, contradicting the example. Everyone agrees that this is a problem. It’s just not a big enough one to warrant an interim ruling like the CC + Move issue.

 

Hecaton, what positive opinions did I give in this thread? Please quote. I'm just saying because you don't like a rule, does not invalidate IJW and the CB rules team. You seem to think it does. Your opinion does not change the authority of the CB rules team no matter how much you complain.
And yes, you've been doing exactly this.

 

Just throwing this out there: Generating and editing a large document across a team of people and god knows how many file versions and editorial annotations and meetings and emails and Slack chats and texts and phone calls will always result in a mind-bogglingly huge data management and version tracking challenge. For a document that also has to be a rules reference for a new edition of a highly complex game system involving a bajillion rules interdependencies, that goes up an order of magnitude.

When writers, editors, and designers stare at the same project over a long span of time it starts to kind of blur together, and it gets that much harder to spot errors or glitches in change tracking.

I have my own thoughts about ways the text could be more user-friendly and ways it could be presented to make learning the game more intuitive. But exactly zero of the rules glitches to date have jumped out at me as examples of some kind of willful negligence by the production team.

There’s always going to be room for improvement, and there is a possible world in which the N4 rules came out perfect with no need for any FAQ or errata or interim rulings or forum clarifications. Hell if I know how that would be doable, but I’m sure someone with unlimited resources could make it happen.

But. I don’t think that that’s a realistic expectation under the circumstances. I’ve done enough work on publications to consider N4 pretty good for what it is and based on what I expect the production process looked like. Doubly so because it’s not like selling rulebooks is a primary income stream for CB. I’ve seen so many half-assed game products make it to publication and then get errata’d all to hell right away that even with the errors and clarifications seen to date, N4 looks perfectly acceptable to me as a playable starting point.

The game’s still fun and the models are top-notch, and the publisher is responsive and listens more than zero percent of the time, which ain’t nothing. Even when my eyebrows creep to the top of my shiny bald head from epic WTF-itis, I’m still happy to give the CB team grace to be humans who are working to make something for us to enjoy.

There’s nothing contradictory about wanting the rules/game to be better (and saying so) while simultaneously appreciating what we already have and the folks who make it happen.

 

Long story short: Even though I think there's still a lot more to handle regarding the rules, I support rules staff's and CB's decision.

Short story long...
1. I think CB should and can put more effort elaborating the rules.
2. I think myself as a customer, so I will ask for as much as what I've paid.
3. But being a customer doesn't mean I could say anything, ask anything, do anything I want in front of CB or its staffs.
4. So I will gladly try my best not to pester CB asking for "what I exactly want".
5. Sometime in the future I might end up pestering and moaning, and that could be considered 'natural' since it is a conditioned reflex when people are irritated, upset, and not getting what they wanted. This behavior sometimes take form of a rather 'refined style', like pretending to be logical and incisive but still ignoring other peoples' answers, or arguing in a circle.
6. So I still highly doubt that I would consider myself 'right', because producing conditioned reflexs against one's own emotional imbalance is usually considered immature, inconsiderate.

 

It's a little late but I haven't seen anyone responding to this yet. The interaction is: Active trooper A is somewhere in his DZ in total cover doing something. Reactive trooper R is in trigger area of enemy mine and he reacts to A's order with dodge. Usually it would be invalid and end up as Idle but here his Aro triggered said mine and mine validated dodge declaration so he ends up performing dodge against mine "for free" during reactive turn without any enemy to threaten him at the same time.

 

That's been covered in another thread and was ruled to be legal as being hit by the mine template makes the ARO legal.

 

Yes, I know. As you can see I was replying to wuji, he asked about this interaction mentioned by somebody else.

 

Whoops, serves me right for being on the forums before coffee.

 

That doesn't really track. If someone's saying "the text is wrong, but play it like it's written" then saying they're responsible for the text is a mea culpa anyway.

In N3, Coup de Grace didn't inflict wounds either, but we just sort of went with it because we knew that Protheion worked with CdG. Now that CdG is an even more explicit subset of CC Attacks, and Protheion works with CC attacks... dunno why we can't all just go with it now.

IJW indicated that he thought that CdG and Protheion shouldn't be allowed to be combined, as well, so whether or not that *will* be the case is sort of up in the air.

 

I honestly don't take any of your criticisms seriously. That's the point.

 

Because as said above, while examples are part of the rules, they are not the rules, so if there is a conflict between the example and the rules, the rules take precedence.