Unexpected Betrayal with no 'army'

L5R CCG Rules board, 12 June 2008

A topic from AEG's L5R CCG Rules forum, copied for Oracle of the Void from a copy of the forum saved in October 2015, so pages it didn't save are missing. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.

A player, 12 June 2008

This post is regarding an earlier ruling: http://www.alderac.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=59722 In that ruling it was indicated that "Unexpected Betrayal would qualify as an effect that alters the force of an "army," and thus there is no army on your side for Unexpected Betrayal to cause that Unit to contribute to. The new effect would fail."

This seems to be contradictory to a more recent ruling seen here: http://www.alderac.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=68693

In this ruling it is indicated that a non existent army is treated as an army with zero force. Thus it seems that if Player 1 plays unexpected betrayal sucessfully on player 2, and then player 1 loses all units in his army, he would still be considered to have an army with zero force and zero units, thus the unit hit with unexpected betrayal would apply his force to player 1's army.

Here is the highlighted rule from the more recent rules discussion: Glossary, Army: This is similar to the rules for absent stats; if anything in the game needs to know the Force, number of units, or other numerical aspect of an "army" with no units, it is always zero.

I don't mean to resurrect a dead discussion, but I am now confused. Does the new ruling governing armies with zero units change what the ruling should be for unexpected betrayal?

Thank you for your help -Dross

Brook Cunningham (rules official), 12 June 2008

Here is the highlighted rule from the more recent rules discussion: Glossary, Army: This is similar to the rules for absent stats; if anything in the game needs to know the Force, number of units, or other numerical aspect of an "army" with no units, it is always zero.

I don't mean to resurrect a dead discussion, but I am now confused. Does the new ruling governing armies with zero units change what the ruling should be for unexpected betrayal?

The thing is, there are more rules in the Glossary entry for Army than just the highlighted one from the recent discussion that you mention. There is also:

http://rules.l5r.com/Glossary_A#Army: "A side with no units is not an army. Specifically, its force total is zero, regardless of effects that modify “army” Force."

Unexpected Betrayal is an effect that modifies an army's Force. No army = no modification, as per the above.

On: Unexpected Betrayal