Idea: *possible solution* for Step cards and movement modifiers

There have been numerous threads about how Encumber and other movement modifiers don't react properly to Step cards. The most recent is RoflCat's from earlier today, to which I contributed. But I'm not here to add another wail of lament, I'm here to prophesy a new path of rightness and good sense.

I got to thinking about the difficulty of correctly processing reactions to the movement and attack halves of step cards. Many, many cards have multiple effects and do two or more things at once: but no other cards are so clearly divided into first moving, and then possibly canceling the attack. You can't have anything react to the second half until it is confirmed to happen, which has led us into the current muddle. If you wanted to try to explain how the step keyword works, you might say it's almost like playing two cards in one go.

1. Think about what happens when you play Lunging Hack.
2. Now think about what happens if you play Quick Step (a cantrip) followed by Weak Strike.

It's almost exactly the same, isn't it? (Lunging Hack is piercing while Weak Strike is crushing.) Yet Quick Step will interact correctly with all the things that are supposed to interact with movement, because it is resolved as a pure movement card. For now anything with step keyword is resolved as "mostly" an attack card.

Instead of trying to "untangle" the reaction sequence by putting the burden on the reaction process to distinguish the two halves of a step card, as I wrote earlier, how about treating use of the card as if it were distinct events one after the other. I've seen how Card Hunter creates "copies" of a card while processing effects: I can think of a card with a single target as one that has a single copy. Now take that further and define a procedure so that the copy is not identical to the "original" card. So when you play Lunging Hack, for example, the game treats it as if you had played a pure blue card ("Lunge") and reacts accordingly. The last thing this half-copy does before expiring is to call another half-copy ("Hack") which now acts as an attack, including canceling if no targets are in range and interacting with all the reactions appropriate to playing a red card. The only difference from playing two regular cards in sequence is that the whole Lunging Hack discards if any part of it fails.

I would call such things "ghost cards" because they would be invisible to the players. The battle log might read

Ivan takes a step . . .​

. . . and hacks away.​

plus all the reactions. The card link in the log text should give an image of the whole Lunging Hack card if queried rather than the Lunge and Hack halves. Yet it would be performing in a manner consistent with players' intuition without twisting innocent reaction code into knots.

And I've been trying to think of ideas for other combos that could benefit from similar treatment, but not getting very far. There just isn't anything else in the game with such distinctly sequential components. But once a system is in place, I'll bet our clever game designers can dream up new ways to exploit it.

 

The copy code! Brilliant! I have no idea if it's that simple internally, but even if the technical details must be hidden from the player, the final result will much better match intuition.

Now we just need a solution to the OTHER field of move problems (group movement not interacting with individual Halt and Encumber) and intuition will triumph.

 

Yeah, full-on ghosts might create bugs with some stuff. But it feels like the right direction: the reaction process is a sieve of characters' hands+attachments looking for certain markers. What we want is some way to set the sieving process for just movement and then restart it for attacks afterward instead of trying to process all parts of the card at once. Fiddling with the copy function just seemed natural from the analogy to using cantrips: if the same plan works when you play two cards, then look for a way to make this one card act like two.