So, BB has 2 HP and Kinetic Redistributor on. Bunker hits him for four, and BB blocks two and would take two. Is he incapacitated instantly and his cards get removed? Or does his Kinetic Redistributor reflect the damage first?
I believe blocking takes place before actually doing damage. So I believe he gets to unleash the attack before being incapped. I am not 100% sure on this.
I would say that since the abilties in this game have an interruptive interaction with each other, that is that when an action in the game is taking place, if a trigger occurs, it stops the action, carries out the trigger, and then resumes the action, that you would get your attack through before taking damage. Although, I'm not any more sure completely.
It's important to note that in the page where it breaks down the steps that occur for attacking and defending, dealing damage isn't listed as a step. It's just kind of made as a statement after the last step of assigning blocking dice. If it listed damage as a the 6th item in the list about defending I'd be more sure that you have a chance to interrupt it during a block.
From what I can tell, without an official response or errata, you're just going to have to house rule this situation. We had the same issue last week when we played the game for the first time and Baron Blade was incapacitated with kinetic redistributor in play. As the rules are currently written and the wording of the card itself, there are multiple arguments for this card and they would all be valid. In the end, we ended up saying that because of the conflict resolution rule in the book and because not all damage occurs simultaneously, the hit that gets through to Baron Blade incaps him and removes the kinetic redistributor card thus preventing it from taking effect.
You could argue the other way though because of what this card does and the way it's worded and say that because the damage has been allocated already it still needs to resolve. As far as I can tell, there's nothing saying damage can be interrupted in the rule book so if a card would allow for that, it would have to be written on the card and all damage, unless otherwise noted, would resolve at the end of combat. So once the damage has been put out, it would still have to resolve, just whoever's turn it is would get to choose the order in which it resolves.
TLDR: Up to you and your group to decide because the rules as they are written and as they pertain to this situation are too vague.
I know that in playtesting we played it that Baron or Tachyon had to survive the attack before reassigning the dice. I don't know if it was ever official.
Blocking Dice is the very last step, and the process of blocking dice and taking damage is the same step. I would rule this under conflict resolution, so the active player would decide.
Obviously in most cases an attacker would choose to have Baron incapped, and the reassigning of dice never happen.
If it was Baron's turn and it was a Hazard attack he would probably want to redirect before succumbing.
I think that works best.
I agree with Skippy above!
I don’t know… I feel like you have to block dice first, or else how would you know how much damage to take? I would say that it DOES trigger first.
My interpretation of it is that BB would block 2 damage, interrupt the person making the attack so he could make his reflected attack, and then the instigator would finish their attack. That makes sense to me thematically, but it does open the door for more questions. So if it does work this way, what happens if BB's reflected attack would incap the instigator? Does their initial attack finish resolving? Or would they go down before they could finish dealing the damage to BB? I know that nothing is really supposed to happen simultaneously, but this seems like it could be awfully swingy one way or the other.
If the initial attack can incap BB and completely cancel the effect of Kinetic Redistributor, then it severely limits the usefulness of that power at lower health. Hell, it could be completely useless if someone gets a lucky roll and one shots BB.
And if the reflected attack can interrupt the initial attack and incap the instigator, causing the initial attack to not finish resolving, then it removes any incentive for a low health target to attack him, since they are running a risk of just incapacitating themselves with zero upside.
The Tactics game doesn't time like SotM, I remember getting told that a lot in playtesting. It doesn't work the same.
I'm trying to find this situation in the playtesting files, but I haven't found it, even though I swear it was covered.
Dice blocked and damage assigned is one step. you match up defense dice, you remove blocked ones and take damage for the unblocked. You can't think of the timing like the card game, it doesn't work like that.
And in the case of conflict resolution, which Skippy rightly pointed out above, ties go to the active player.
Based on the rules on page 9, I've been treating "assign damage" as an implied step 6, (or possibly step 1. of a third phase) since step 5 of the blocking phase only includes "Block attack dice with defense dice." If there's an official ruling that blocking and assigning/taking damage happen at the same time, that would be handy to know, even if it feels wrong to my M:tG trained brain :-)
Well, really, there's nothing stopping you from playing it that way, even if it's technically wrong (which I would still argue, but that's not the point here). I play Instrument powers as being simultaneous events, even though officially they are sequential.
Okay, I was finishing my guide for Baron Blade scenario 3 when I remembered this ruling:
When Impulsion attacks Tachyon with Synaptic, and she blocks dice, she reassigns them. Before the damage is resolved you roll the defense for the new attack. If that attack was Baron Blade with redistributor he would then reassign blocked dice and the targets would roll defense dice.
Now once you have all of the amount everyone was to be pushed figured out and no more dice to roll, you apply the push.
This was because the timing of the reassigning resolves for all current instances before any of the damage (push, poison, health, whatever) resolves.
So for this question Baron Blade would roll his defense, the blocked dice would be reassigned, and so on until no maore dice needed to be rolled, then all damage would be applied.
The order of damage being applied would be chosen by the active player, but the damage dealt cannot affect the process.
I have started marking damage in these weird instances by putting a dice showing health or push to be resolved on the target, and then when everyone is finished applying all of it. It also works great for tracking how much push is left when a target hits multiple impulsion turrets.