Environmental rules

[Blorf]

[CmdrRook]

[Blorf]

Great. A follow-on question, then. When attacking the frame with one white in a hazard area, does it activate?

P91 says: When one mobile frame attacks a mobile frame that hasn’t taken its turn yet, switch to combat order. But p101 says: If it doesn't have a defense number, switch to combat order. Those are two distinct conditions. The difference between these never matters without hazardous terrain, (and equally never matters with CmdrRook's house rule,) but in this situation there is a frame that has not yet taken its turn but DOES have a known defense number. The question boils down to the intent of the rule being to primarily find the defense number (and activation is just a necessary result) or primarily to activate the defending frame (allowing the defender to react)?

I'm leaning toward activating the frame. (but I'd house rule it that if the frame has no SSRs then the attacker does not need to wait for the defender to roll. The defender cannot declare a target and rolling will not affect the incoming attack at all. Because it's undefended, it's likely to be destroyed and its rolling can be skipped if it is. If it survives the attack, it activates next and can roll and move.)

On a completely separate line of thought, perhaps it makes sense to penalize a one-white frame in a hazard with losing their free green instead of the white. That drops this whole question, and might be a tiny bit more fair to the poor sod.

[aurlaent]

I might be misunderstanding your point, but I don't think you can activate and not get a defense number.
The turn order is:
1. Name target (and range)
2. Roll dice
3. Defend (and allocating 0 to defese counts as a defense number which lasts for the rest of the round.)

So I would guess that the intent of the rule is to find the defense number, because if the frame is completely destroyed by the attack it doesn't get to react anyway.

[Blorf]

You're correct that you can't activate without assigning a defense number. But in this very specific case, you can know the defense number of a frame before it activates because there's no capability to assign one. This can't ever happen without environmental hazards, but we're about to play a game that has them. So the question is, if you already know the defense number, do you activate the frame?

[aurlaent]

Now I understand.
My take on it would be to activate the frame as even if you know it's defense must become zero, it doesn't actually have a number assigned yet.

[Red_Robot]

[Blorf]

Good points as well. I suggest this house-rule to anyone coming to this thread for guidance:

A frame with only a single white die left and beginning its turn in an environmental hazard must choose before rolling to either set aside the white die or the green d8.

[Mantisking]

[Blorf]

[CmdrRook]

[Blorf]

I stopped forgetting the free when I internalized that a frame should never be rolling only whites. (Heh, except in this case...)
Playing a game with no ranged weapons in my loadout probably helped, too.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

A frame can definitely have a defense number of zero.

But you're right: more precise wording is probably something like, "The special system give you one of the two white dice when in hazardous terrain. If you're not in hazardous terrain, you still roll all available white dice."

That is, when you're in hazardous terrain, you're always at a dice deficit.