Ophelia and Plink!

[Rufess]

All 5 Arsenal Upgrades give Ophelia the same ability:

Quote

Plink!
When this model suffers damage, it may discard this Upgrade to reduce the damage suffered by 1.

According to the Abilities Section inside the core rule, Plink! has no value so it will not stack. Hence Ophelia cannot discard multiple Upgrades at once to reduce more than 1 damage.

 

And when Ophelia is attaching the second Arsenal Upgrade, again from the rule book, the Plink! from the second Upgrade is ignored. Plus the Plink! is directly pointing to "this" Upgrade. Which means, to my understanding, Ophelia must keep track on the order of all Arsenal Upgrades she had attached, and when she declares to use Plink!, she must discard the first attached Upgrade.

 

Are these 2 statements correct?

[solkan]

I'm going to assume you meant to write "Is this the intended interaction of these upgrades?"   

Because you left out the next step in your sequence of questions:  

- Given the rules text "If a model gains a second instance of an Ability it already possesses (most often from an Upgrade), the second instance of the Ability has no effect unless the Ability has a value (such as Armor +1)."  

After you remove the first Arsenal upgrade, do you actually have a functioning Plink! ability?

--

I can see making an entry in the FAQ/errata pool that FAQ gets a FAQ/errata to "may discard an Arsenal Upgrade" instead of "may discard this Upgrade".  Or the paragraph in Abilities getting an errata/FAQ that to "the model only benefits from one instance (its own choice) of the Ability unless the Ability has a value (such as Armor +1)" instead of saying that the second instance has no effect.

Because who is really going to want to keep track of which order they gained the abilities in, to know what order they're used a few turns later? 

Which entry would you like me to put you down for?  

Personally, I'm going bet for the errata/FAQ to Abilities, because the current wording really isn't ideal for explaining what happens when that first upgrade is discarded, the first instance of the Ability is "ungained", and you're trying to figure out what you have left over.

[Ogid]

A FAQ would be welcome to fix it, but until then playing this as you can discard any Arsenal upgrade would be fine imo; this is probably an overlooked interaction.

[Maniacal_cackle]

18 hours ago, solkan said:

Because who is really going to want to keep track of which order they gained the abilities in, to know what order they're used a few turns later? 

I agree with Solkan's RAI analysis, but if you want to play this part, it should be simple enough. Just keep the upgrades ordered from left to right as you gain them, or any other method that keeps them in a consistent order.

But personally I'd just houserule it that you can do any upgrade discarded (but only one, since I also interpret the rules such that you can't use an ability multiple times unless it says otherwise).