Re: Temples of Gisei Toshi - what does "you may" mean? (L5R rules board)

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, 5 March 2012

Following up on this thread:

The intent of Temples of Gisei Toshi is very clear. However, I'm not sure how I can get from the card's text to the current ruling. By illustration, compare to Imperial Gift.

Temples of Gisei Toshi Limited: Bow this card: Name "Follower", "Item", or "Spell". Look at the top four cards of your Fate deck. You may show one of those cards that is of the type you named, then put it in your hand.

Imperial Gift Gain 2 Honor and search your Fate deck for an Item, show it, and put it into your hand.

When anything produces multiple effects, those effects are always severable unless explicitly declared otherwise. This thread about Imperial Gift made that clear. Quoting from the ruling there, "If the honour gain were dependent on putting an item into your hand, the text would be something like: Search your Fate deck for an Item, show it, and put it into your hand; if this put an item into your hand, gain 2 Honour."

I do not see how the wording of Temples of Gisei Toshi is mechanically distinct from the wording of Imperial Gift. The rules on making choices don't suggest that the "you may" construction continues across multiple effects without explicit text describing that relationship. The examples provided there all include specific conditional text to link subsequent effects to the choice ("If you choose this...", "If he bowed..."). There is no special rules significance assigned to then that would make this inherent in Temples of Gisei Toshi.

In order to preserve the proper functionality of the holding, should it not receive technical errata to read: You may show one of those cards that is of the type you named; if you showed a card, put it in your hand.?

Alex Jones (rules official), 5 March 2012

The rules on making choices don't suggest that the "you may" construction continues across multiple effects without explicit text describing that relationship.

I beg to differ: A choice involving multiple effects following a "may" must be taken in an all-or-none fashion, unless they are phrased as alternatives to each other using "or."

Imperial Gift creates 4 effects: Gain 2 honour, search your deck for a card, show the card, put the card in your hand. None of these effects is optional. However, the search effect may fail, either because there are no items in your deck or because you choose not to find one, in which case the last two will also necessarily fail; if you successfully find an item, you *must* show it and you *must* put it in your hand.

Gisei Toshi creates three effects: Look at the top four cards, show one of them and put it in your hand ("Name a card type" is a choice, not an effect). The first effect is not optional, but the last two are as a pair, as described above. If you choose to apply the last two effects, you *must* show the card and you *must* put it in your hand.

On: Temples of Gisei Toshi