Quote:
Originally Posted by hcobb
ITL 118: "A figure that takes 5 or more hits in one turn has its DX adjusted -2 for its next action (spell, attack, etc.)."
So that can be either this turn (for a low-DX figure), or next turn (for a high-DX figure). Or years from now if you slip a Freeze item on the victim.
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Interesting -- is this the latest ITL, or before SJG rewrote it (I don't have the newest version).
Because original Melee (c.f. Reactions to injury) said "A figure which takes 5 or more hits in one turn has its DX adjusted -2 for the NEXT turn (only)," we always played it that a low-DX figure often got -2 DX after the higher DX attack caused 5 or more hits, as well as -2 for the next turn. It wouldn't make sense to say the penalty didn't apply THIS turn (i.e., the turn where the figure was attacked before his action came), since an injury had an affect immediately.
Anyway, it's how I coded the unit test in my melee simulator.
If this is a new rule, then it surely makes combat less deadly.
Rules (like software) need concrete scenarios (use-cases) to add clarification. The tests in software portray expected behavior concretely (and expose ambiguities in the requirements or the implementation of the requirements). A test can be "wrong" because the requirements weren't clear, or because the test was coded wrong.
I'd almost argue that rules need to be demonstrated by a set of scenarios to illustrate their scope, kind of like the examples of Flavius and Wulf (which are very incomplete examples). Several things prevent that from happening:
- it costs too much to write all the scenarios,
- fixing the inconsistencies that crop up (debugging) would prevent games from ever being published (much like most video games today have tons of bugs in their first release), and
- there's probably a market value to ambiguity in rules -- there's buzz created in forums on the internet like this thread -- although SJ would probably never confirm or deny that ;-)
Bon courage to Andrew!