Rulings for 23 March 2001
A rules digest from the L5R CCG rules team, copied from the mailing list archive for Oracle of the Void. The askers' names are left out. Rulings are as they stood on this date; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.
Rulings for12-14March 2001
Btw, what happens if a player has Yuki no Onna in play? Who decides whether people go home?
Whoever controls the card that tries to send them there.
Just a few rules QN's for the guru's
2. Does the use of Kuni Yori ex3 and similar cards ignore honor requirements?
Yes for Kuni Yori Exp3. In general, to be honest, every single card seems to have been ruled based on intent, and I'm considering how best to rectify this.
Does anyone who actually plays the game have any suggestions?
Logic vs. common sense.
Exactly. I object to the thought that the problem is embedded in the English language. The fact of the matter is that the problem is embedded in sloppy use of the language in card text. The designers have used 'cannot be sent home', 'cannot be moved', 'cannot move', 'no unit may move', etc. all to express the same idea. 'Send home bowed', 'send home, bowed', 'bow and send home', etc. There ARE no specific forms in the 2500+ card set, and that's the problem. Short of a booklet of errata that would standardize the constructions used to achieve all the game effects, we're left with a patchwork of rules texts, some of which are clear and some of which are not. Consistency is impossible in such an environment, which is why the fall back position should be an easy, intuitive understanding of what cards do and how they interact. It is only when intuition breaks down that rulings should have to be applied.
Here's a counterargument to that:
The inherent flaw of what you're proposing -- that every card be read according to its own particular grammar and punctuation -- falls victim to the very pitfall you yourself mention, namely, that there IS no one consistant template applied to all cards since the beginning of time. If anything, this will increase the number of cards that don't do what they were intended to do...or even what they intuitively do, since a good deal of that intuition comes not from individual cards but from past experience with similar ones.