Baron Blade scenario two. Heroes are Legacy and Tachyon.
Baron Blade has dropped two Impulsion Turrets and a Blade Battalion.
Tachyon's turn. She maneuvers into position to use Accelerated Assault (sprint and attack) on the Blade Battalion. She also has Synaptic Interruption as an active power.
Tachyon sprints into the space adjacent to the Blade Battalion, triggering both their hazard and the hazard of the Impulsion Turret right behind them. Four effects now need to resolve.
My reading of the conflict resolution rules suggests that Tachyon's player gets to choose the order in which to resolve them. Logically, she would resolve the Blade Battalion's hazard first, trusting Synaptic Interruption to let her redirect it to the Impulsion Turret; then complete the Accelerated Assault against the Blade Battalion; then the Impulsion Turret's hazard (assuming it's still in play).
If that's not how conflict resolution works, and the hazards resolve before Tachyon gets to resolve her Accelerated Assault, then it seems to me that playing melee heroes is a losing proposition in Scenario 2. But then, if the heroes choose characters with ranged attacks, Baron Blade can't put turrets out fast enough to have more than a couple left by the end of turn 5.
The hazard spaces would have to go first, since they are an interrupt. Melee characters do have a slight disadvantage, but don't forget that Tachyon has Hypersonic Assault which she can use to move through hazard spaces no problem. I believe Legacy is the only other hero that is pure melee, but since you don't play a single hero, he can boost the attacks of other heroes for a sure destruction of a Turret every round.
Hazard Attack activate when a target enters or end thier turn in one of those hexes.
If a target enters a Hazard Space, you then immediately do the attack, you do not continue on your way and do all Hazard Attacks after all movement is complete.
First, thanks for answering. I realize that the >Games people are at Gen Con, so I really appreciate someone taking the time to discuss this with me.
So: I agree with your assessment in principle, but it raises a lot of niggling rules questions, particularly in regard to conflict resolution.
Leaving aside for a moment the definition of Tachyon's Accelerated Assault attack (which is triggered by her using a sprint action), there's still the question of when to resolve the other three elements. Who decides which hazard resolves first, since they both trigger off of Tachyon entering the same hazard space? And if they are in fact "interrupts" (as in Magic: the Gathering), does Tachyon's Synaptic Interruption interrupt either of them? Could Tachyon's player decide to resolve the Blade Battalion's hazard attack, then her Synaptic Interruption, then the Impulsion Turret's hazard attack (assuming she doesn't take the turret out with the redirected attack)? Or does Baron Blade's player decide which hazard attack to resolve first, and then Tachyon's player has to apply the Synaptic Interruption to the final hazard attack?
Regardl ess of the answers to those questions, it seems to me that the scenario doesn't quite work as written. If your assessment is correct, melee heroes have basically no chance to succeed (barring extraordinary luck), whereas if the heroes are exclusively ranged, then Baron Blade won't be able to do much to keep his turrets in play–especially if he can only drop one turret per turn. Even the Blade Battalions can't do much to help, since it costs Baron Blade an action to activate them. As it is, he's forced to choose between moving or placing a battalion. Is there a strategy for Baron Blade that we're just missing?
The current player decides the order. So most likely Tachyon is the deciding player in this case.
I'm using interrupt as a temporally stop of something for a bit so something else can go. Have no idea if that is Magic's definition of it.
You could totally have Blade Battalion's Hazard Attack go first, then have Tachyon redirect it, and then do the Impulsion Turret's attack if it is still in play.
It's not, interrupts don't exist in Magic anymore. Magic does work very similar to the way the Sentinels Card game and Sentinels Tactics handle abilities, with a slight difference. They both use a stack system to resolve, the most recent thing to activate happens first, rather than having to wait behind the first thing that activated. Except Sentinels does not have a pause when something is activated before you start doing its effect, and in Magic, unless the ability itself makes a card do something, abilities do not happen until an ability is completely done resolving.
Example: End of Days in Sentinels, Wrath of God in Magic. End of Days blows up everything on the field except a few things, Wrath of God blows up everything on the field except non-creatures. In Magic, Wrath of God blows up everything at once, you do not select an order for it. If things happen when the cards get blown up, they wait until Wrath of God is done, then all get put on the stack in a specified order by that system. In End of Days, you blow them up one target at a time, and then if something triggers from getting blown up it happens in the middle of End of Days resolving and when it's done, End of Days continues to resolve.
I spent a good amount of time playing Sentinels early on with the Magic rules. I didn't find out we were wrong until I started searching for certain interactions when I didn't know how they worked and ended up here.
Magic players or ex-Magic players seem to really have trouble with Sentinels, and we've had a lot of rules discussions because someone's insisted that a card should work a particular way because that's how it would work with Magic.
I guess it can be hard to let the rules of that game go when you play a different game.
It is hard when you learn a particular way of resolving timing and conflict to unlearn it and learn a new way. Magic is so prominent that to many people that timing is natural, and they don't even realize it until something else asks them to do it wrong.
It's not really hard, it's just not obvious that it's different immediately. Perhaps I missed reading examples in the card game that showed a card resolving in the middle of other cards, but without an example it just made sense to resolve abilities fully before resolving things that trigger from what that ability did. Once one is told how it really works, adjusting isn't that hard. I play a lot of different games though. So that could just be me. Nobody should -ever- argue that something should work a certain way because it would work that way in another game. Games should be viewed as having been made in a vacuum from one another. (Though personally I believe game developers should at least research leading games in their genre before repeating mistakes that those games made early on. Specifically something Yugioh should have done with Magic, since it made so many of the same mistakes.)
The thing that makes people apply the rules of Magic to the game when they pick it up is that the structure of the abilities is practically the same. They don't use the same name for them, but mechanically, they're the same things. As follows:
Activated Abilities - Abilities with a cost, in Magic they're formatted as Cost:Effect. They only activate when a player chooses to make them activate based on specific timing restrictions.
Triggered Abilities/Replacement Effects - Structures as When, or Whenver, they trigger after a specific event occurs and happen whether the controlling player wants them to or not, unless the effect says "may". Replacement effects are slightly different in Magic, but only in that they modify how certain events resolve, are denoted with an "If", and can't be responded to. They're not different in Sentinels because players don't get to "respond" to things in Sentinels, so they're no different from triggered abilities in that sense.
Static Abilities - They don't activate or trigger. They just are. Constantly. These are things like, "Creatures you control get +1/+1." or "Increase Hero Damage by 1" (I forgot how this is worded in the Sentinels card game. It's been a while it seems. Basically things like the effect on a couple of Legacy's cards.)
This isn't a bad thing. But when the abilities have an almost perfect 1-to-1 structure to Magic abilities, it's really easy to expect them to work the same in all ways. If you happened to miss the part of the rules that tells you otherwise, that's likely how you're going to treat them. It also doesn't affect the balancing in 99% of scenarios so it isn't obvious right away that you're wrong.