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Dmitri's Bamboo Armor card says (among other things), "prevent getting poisoned and/or injured." Does that prevent only the player with the Bamboo Armor from getting poisoned or injured, or does that prevent all involved players? Thanks.

All involved players, I think. Not 100% sure though, good question.

If you look at the rules, I would answer the same thing as Brisingre: all involved players are protected.

But for sure, thematically. I do not understand how an armor can protect multiple persons...

hi, maybe it helps if you concentrate of the wording seen on the card which causes the state.
sometimes it is said:"the active player gets injured", or "all involved characters get injured". I have to assume, that your problem with the armor occurs only when you take an action where 2 or more characters are involved.
so, I would go after the wording first, as mentioned, and if it is stated "all involved characters get injured", I would only avoid the state for the owner of the armour - dimitri.
to me it doesn´t make any sense, that alle characters are protected.

Curious --

What about if it said "the active player gets injured" and the person with the armor isn't the active player? Is the armor just useless in that circumstance, or can it always protect one person?

hmm... in my opinion it´s useless for the active player in your example. further, the bamboo armour is a character specific ability, one out of five. it´s generally not allowed, that you use specific abilities from other characters. f.e. the is especially for only.

i dont have the 100% accurate answer or what the developers have thought, but I think several arguments strengthen the interpretation, that the bamboo armour only protects dimitri.

A blue card from a specific character can only be used by this character. But the result of this blue hand card, when crafted, can be given to every player involved in the creation. So any other character can have and use the bamboo armor.

The only restriction on character-specific cards is that only that character can have them in their hand. This implies some other restrictions -- only you can use cards in your hand, so you're always the active player on your white-box actions. Consequences of actions that don't specify who the target target the active player, so if, say, a state-dropper doesn't say "one involved character" or something it only works on you. But brown-box effects work for any action you're involved in, even if you're not active, and critically, as arnaud points out, items can be built to any involved character, and traded between characters. There is no restriction on having another player's character cards in your inventory, only your hand.

Anyway, there's an advanced skill, Shield, that does pretty much the same thing. It's not just bamboo armor that does this. So we can forget about answers that depend on the fact that bamboo armor is a Dmitri card, I think.

In general, if something doesn't say who it affects, the default is to affect the active player. A case could be made by that logic that armor and shield affect the active player, regardless of who uses them.

There is not a similar default for cards affecting the person who controls or plays the card as far as I know. It sort of feels like there is, because only you can initiate actions on cards in your hand or inventory, which makes you the active player, which means that default targeting of the active player targets you on your own cards, but I don't think it goes any farther than that in the rules as written.

Cards can explicitly target the player whose hand or inventory they're in by using the words "you" and "your." This seems to be the normal way of making cards target their owner outside of actions, for passive abilities like the ones that kill companions if you get the wrong state. Between this and being the active player, we are very very used to effects from our hands and inventory self-targetting. But it isn't just an automatic thing that happens.

But this is all assuming Prevent has to target a character, and I don't think there's a single instance where Prevent has an explicit target like that. There's only one other Prevent that I know of, the Lucky advanced skill, also just says prevent without a target. I've assumed it self-targets in the past (when glancing at it before throwing it back in the advanced skill deck) because blue cards usually self-target, but under a technical reading, if it targets at all, it must target the active player. But I don't think Prevent does target a player. I think Prevent is it's own thing.









The actual question is what the fuck is Prevent.

I don't think there's any mention of Prevent effects in the rulebook at all. We don't know how it works. There's a variety of ways you could think about it.

-Preventing states happens as soon as you choose to activate the ability on the item. If one or more states are being prevented, the action can't give anyone those states, no matter what. They just don't happen.

-Prevent effects wait until a state of the right name happens, and then they prevent it. They prevent exactly one state card, on anybody, whoever takes one first.

-Prevent is like any other thing that targets a character. It could say "prevent all involved characters from getting injured" or "prevent any one involved character from getting injured." In the absence of a specific target, it will target the active player.

-Bamboo armor is a suit of armor. It protects the guy wearing it, not everybody else who happens to have fallen off the same cliff as him. So unless something says otherwise, prevent always means "prevent yourself". Unlike most other things, if you wanted to prevent the active player taking a state, you have to say "prevent the active player", which never actually happens. Prevent is only on blue cards, blue cards usually self-target, so Prevent self-targetting kind of makes sense even if it isn't in the rules anywhere. Maybe they just forgot it.

-You can easily imagine compound variations of these. Maybe it shields you, maybe it shields the active player, maybe it shields everybody. Maybe it only blocks the first state card, maybe it works for the whole action.







Maybe there actually are rules for Prevent i missed, too. If anybody has a rulebook reference for it let me know please.