by abredon
Sentientcow_craig wrote:
Aaron,
I wanted to chime in as a creator too. I kind of see your point of view, but as you enter the room that takes you to black, you will have to base that room on some alarm color represented on card to determine the number of enemies, and I feel that would be red. It says the alarm is not reset to green until after the M.I.B is defeated. What if you walk into an unexplored room while M.I.B is on board? If you have mismanaged the alarm to this stage, then repercussions should be deadly. Thanks for feedback!
I wanted to chime in as a creator too. I kind of see your point of view, but as you enter the room that takes you to black, you will have to base that room on some alarm color represented on card to determine the number of enemies, and I feel that would be red. It says the alarm is not reset to green until after the M.I.B is defeated. What if you walk into an unexplored room while M.I.B is on board? If you have mismanaged the alarm to this stage, then repercussions should be deadly. Thanks for feedback!
In terms of logic, the rules don't actually correctly answer two questions here:
1. What do you spawn when there is no 'alert level' (tracked by the MIB figure that is now on the board). Since you spawn based on what color the missing alert tracker is in, the rules strongly imply no spawn. Either a special rule is needed or a different alert tracker and the final space being red.
2. Do you spawn while in combat? The rules actually say 'no' on this, as the room encounter sequence is only listed in the 'out of combat' section. (The sequence of an encounter is initiated by 'decide among the players who will enter the room first' (page 16 of the rules), which can only be done outside of combat. Here the rules should initiate the encounter sequence on 'when a player enters an unexplored room' (which can be done while in combat).
You need blind playtesting to figure this out (playtesting where the designer is watching but not allowed to comment). When the designer sees something being interpreted correctly according to the rules, but not the coreect interpretation he wanted, he knows the rules are unclear or incorrect on at least that point.
There is a third potential hole in the rules: what if the Black alert space is reached on floor 6 (e.g. due to including the Shrine of Umugatu in a campaign)? There is no spawn point on floor 6, so you can't spawn the Man in Black. Since you can't spawn him, you can't kill him, and thus can't reset the alarm level. You also can't increase the alarm level.