This came up in a game against the Vengeance Five this weekend; they were definitely losing so it didn't matter, but it occurred to me that as an insult added to injury, Hostage Situation reads as though it's completely impossible to get rid of (save with Bio-Engineering Beam if you happen to have that in play) if even one hero is incapacitated, since it specifically requires that "each player" discard a card, and the players of incapacitated heroes are still players but no longer have a hand, thusly discarding is impossible and the condition cannot be met, nor can they ever play cards to get rid of it while it's out. Has it been clarified that there is some exemption here, so that "each player discards" actually means "each player who is capable of discarding chooses to do so and has at least one card in hand"?
As an aside, does the goofy wording "each player discards 1 card each" signify something in relation to this question? Or has the wording been updated to fix this issue without my knowing (since I have a somewhat old printing of the Enhanced Edition, before the Ruling 15 revisions)?
I've always played these cards as though only active heroes have to discard, since incapped ones don't have a deck. It's fine when only one card needs to be discarded but if you're in the Tomb of Anubis you can't ever get rid of the Trial of Fire if there's only one hero left because that needs H+2 cards with a maximum of three per player being discarded. We've had that come up a couple of times, often in combination with the Swinging Blades when the surviving hero has soak (and that probably being the reason why they've survived ;)) so can't take the point of damage (we only ever have three heroes in the game so it is just a single point) to get rid of it. As a result, the environment ends up doing a lot of the work in damaging the villain since the surviving hero so far has been a card-saving Scholar or a Rhino-tanking Naturalist, neither of whom are in the best position to deal heaps of damage. But eventually, in their respective games, I think the Scholar was eventually able to Turn Loose while the Naturalist let the villain's hp get low enough and then went Croc and nommed 'em to death :D.