Rulings for 25 March 2001

Sensei Question 1.

I was buying some new cards and got the Lady of the Forest Sensei, and found something interesting. I might be wrong, but it seems to read that if ANY player's creatures or forests are destroyed then the player with the sensei loses 1 honor. This would make it difficult for a person playing with that sensei to attack a Ratling player, or deck with Elemental Dragons. Am I misreading this card, or maybe did they mean to put the word "your" on it and didn't? Any rules guys want to reply to that? Anyone else who might know?

You're not misreading it. Play it as written. The Lady of the Forest cares about the whole forest, right down to every last spotted owl.

Blessings Question 1.

I was wondering a couple of things. First of all, if a kiho is attached to the basic Shiba Ningen, via Blessings, does it count as a Void action if cast? What about if it is a random elemental kiho? Or an elemental fire kiho for instance? Would that count as Fire, Void, both, or neither?

You take just the text, including keywords, of the one single action that was used and copy it to the Personality card. Using it will always be a Void action because it's an ability on Ningen and Ningen is a Void card. It will also be a Fire ability if it starts with something like "Kiho Fire Open:", but NOT if the word Fire is only in the kiho card's title.

My second question was whether the elemental cards like Hitsu-do and Kaze-do, which are elemental, count as being cast from the element they are obviously supposed to represent, even though they don't specifically state which element they are a part of?

They don't count. The actual element word has to be on the card, in English.

Questions

I've got a couple of questions unresolved by the Accumulated Rulings:

1.- Rise from the Ashes: It doesn't affect Hand, Provinces and Decks. Does it affect the Discard Pile?

No.

2.- Yokuni Sensei. It's stated in the Accumulated rulings that it doesn't affect events which stay in play as "Sacrifices for our future". Does this mean this kind of events do not stay one turn in the provinces, so you replace them as soon as they resolve?

That's what it means. For those rare few Events that say the very card "stays in play", the Event formally leaves the Province and gets put out on the table somewhere as part of its own written effect.

3.- I have a 3 Chi personality with a +4/+4 "Blade of Secrets". My guy dies in battle. May I play "The Final Breath" targeting a 4 Chi personality or not?

Yes. Count the Chi when they were still opposing.

As one of my English teachers once said...

Assuming L5R will still be around in the future, what happens if Jeff leaves the game? Do the rules then reset according to what the new lead designer thinks?

That depends on him and/or her, now, wouldn't it? I hope the new designer will have the good sense to come to me as a reference, though, like I've been going to Dave.

As one of my English teachers once said...

2 - Designer's intent has been considered. Jeff's the designer, his intent is for it to work this way.

That's not what "designer's intent" means.

If you're asking about Dave's intent...well, Dave's an *awesome* guy. But I think that he'd tell you himself, this isn't his call anymore.

He would also probably tell you that he is currently in favor of the "going home and bowing are two separate effects" ruling, 'cuz he is. And ya wanna know something really weird? He's more in favor of it than I am, for reasons which he has been quite clear about in our internal discussions and which make perfect sense to me.

Winter Warfare and rulings

Hah. I understand absolutely that Jeff et al. make ruling based on what the cards say; I would never impugn their motives. But everybody 'knew' how WW vs. Block worked until some rules wanker somewhere realized there was some 'sloppiness' in the wordings and decided to get an advantage a month or so before GenCon. You can't tell me Jeff et al. were eager to make this ruling; they were forced into it by someone with nothing better to do than twist the cards to do something opposite to what they ought to do.

This "wanker", if such a single person truly ever existed, did nothing more than point out that this is exactly what the Soul of the Empire rulebook says on p. 37. It even uses being sent home bowed and dishonored as an example.

Now, as for how that rule got in there, I suspect it was the simple case of the editor INTUITIVELY applying the "all effects are separate" rule in an example situation which occurs relatively frequently (at least, the going home bowed part does). I'm trying to get in touch with her to verify this, but she's out of the office right now.

One of the intents of the new rule is that new players shouldn't need to get a feel for the entire game before they can start correctly intuiting how cards are supposed to work with each other -- something, let me remind you, that's been requested on more than one occasion by members of this very forum. I still believe that the "going home bowed is one effect" ruling feels intuitive because, to some degree, it's merely familiar and not actually intuitive at all. I didn't know and STILL don't know how large that factor actually is, but this one datum made me feel it was higher than I'd been estimating.