Suggestion: Forfeit... almost there, but not quite

[Deekow]

I love having forfeit, so thank you a thousand times. You have it right by going through the blessings and refreshing hand. However, the reason forfeit "works" is that you're essentially doing nothing every turn until the clock runs out (excepting the final scenario of each full adventure path). It shouldn't interrupt a check, which it currently does.

 

Example, I was just playing Seoni, encountered a trap there's no way I could have beaten and had no cards in hand to prevent "death". By the rules, I should have been done in. However, I was able to forfeit before rolling dice, and since I had a full hand before taking damage, I lived through it.

 

This will mostly only really matter with Permadeath, but if you acknowledge that you should draw up to full hand size when forfeiting, then you understand that forfeiting shouldn't circumnavigate death in the first place.

[codepoetz]

Forfeit in beta3 never kills anyone. I changed this so that forfeit will kill characters who cannot draw up to hand size. One of the reasons we all want forfeit is to escape from bugged checks, so we'll always allow you to escape the current check.

[Deekow]

Ok, I can appreciate having a way out of bugged checks. I've even asked for error handling on a couple things, so I do see that as a good thing.

 

However, being able to forfeit out of a check completely negates the spirit of Permadeath, relegating it to an honor system. Outside of Permadeath, this doesn't matter as the game ends either way with no character loss. People that force it on themselves with an honor system already will take measures to play in a permadeath fashion if the game doesn't allow it (there are whole communities in games without a permadeath mechanism that will delete their characters, or start all the way over, etc). The way the forfeit works now, permadeath may as well not exist; there's no actual game mechanics that force that style of play, since it can be entirely circumnavigated with forfeit, keeping your otherwise risked characters entirely out of harm's way. If there's going to be a permadeath mechanism in the game, it needs to be effective, or it's feature bloat.

 

I'm not sure if there is a way to meet in the middle here, but for permadeath to function and error handling of escaping checks to coexist as concepts, there needs to be some way to escape the check function/method and still have the potential risk of taking the expected damage for failing a check. I don't see the source code as you do, so I don't know where this could ever even happen; but, I sincerely hope there's an option C somewhere that solves both problems in the future.

[Nathan Davis]

The intent for Forfeit all along has been that it should mimic a constant passing of turns until the clock runs out. To do so, we need to account for strange scenarios like Here Comes The Flood and scenarios that don't allow the Blessing deck to run out. It also needs to account for location powers that can potentially kill you, like Mountain Peak. It also needs to be restricted to not being available during a check or during damage. And character powers that automatically draw at the beginning of a turn (like Sajan's Role Power). All of this put together makes Forfeit a complex feature that would need extensive testing.

 

For Beta and early versions release, we'll keep a simplified version of Forfeit in effect. There was high enough demand among Beta Testers that we felt it better to get this version out there, rather than wait for the full and complex version to be ready.

[Deekow]

... so we'll always allow you to escape the current check.

 

Fair enough. The quoted bit was the only concern. I can certainly see it being a beast to deal with as a last minute feature.