A while back I had written about resolving direct damage and indirect damage, in the hopes of it curbing the confusion that I constantly see and hear about. Indirect damage is still one of the most misunderstood things (especially with newer players) when it comes to end game scenarios. I’ll be explaining how it works with pictures and I’ll also be going over how Old Daka and the Nightsister Zombie horde work in relation to Indirect as well as their combo and a misconception with the RRG and the death of Old Daka.

Indirect

When the Legacies set hit and we found a new die side, we were pretty ecstatic that the designers were willing to add new elements to the game. Indirect is functionally far worse than Direct (Melee / Ranged), but often times, we were seeing higher values which ended up being great. Anyways, let’s jump right in to correcting the common misconceptions. As a reminder, you assign the full indirect damage between your characters and then you resolve the damage simultaneously. Also note that you can’t assign more Indirect damage than the character has health + shields remaining, unless every other character has been “assigned lethal” as well. “Lethal” is when you’ll take enough damage for your character to be defeated, and the “assign” part is because you have to distribute the indirect damage yourself to your characters, which is choosing what goes where for damage.

Scenario #1: Big Modified

In the above picture you’ll see that the opponent is resolving 5 Indirect Damage, we have 3 remaining health on Old Daka, then 1 remaining health and 1 Shield on Jango. I’ll be putting in the incorrect beliefs as “WRONG” and the correct ones as “ACTUAL”



Edit: I forgot that people may not be aware of how Indirect works in general. Here is the two excerpts from the Rules Reference Guide that you’d need to understand how it operates.

WRONG – I’m going to put 3 damage into Jango because I have 1 Shield and Armor Plating and I’ll put 2 damage into Old Daka. You can only assign Indirect equal to the total remaining health and shields, which I’ll call “available health” from now on .

WRONG – I’m going to put 2 damage into Jango and block it with Armor Plating, then I’m going to take 1 more damage on Jango and 2 on Old Daka. (it looks similar to the one above, but I mentioned it separately because they are some how splitting the damage into 2 separate resolutions)

WRONG – I’m going to put all 5 Indirect into Jango, 3 of it disappears because he only has 2 effective health (1 health + 1 shield), and then I’ll block the 2 damage with Armor Plating. You cannot not “overkill” with indirect damage until EVERY one of your characters has been assigned Lethal Damage.

ACTUAL – Jango is assigned 2 damage because that is his maximum “available health” and Old Daka is assigned 3 damage. Damage goes to resolve and Armor Plating blocks the 2 damage to Jango and Old Daka is defeated.

Keep in mind that this happens this way because the damage was one big packet due to the +2 modified indirect making it that way. In the next example, but we’ll also be including a Nightsister Zombie so first we have to clarify some things.

Nightsister Zombie

Long explanation short: You can’t assign the Zombie indirect damage until all of the non-Zombie characters are assigned LETHAL damage. In most situations that pretty much means that everyone else is dead before it could happen, but there are some ways to block the lethal of your last character (non-zombie obv) with things like Armor Plating and/ or Riot Shield and you shifted the overflow to a Zombie. It could also be bypassed with Target Acquired, but we’ll assume your opponent isn’t a dumb dumb.

WRONG – Some people thought that if you assigned 1 damage to one of your alive characters (and some thought it was each of them), that you could then assign the rest to a Zombie.

Scenario #2: Multiple Indirect and a Zombie!!

Resolution #1 Staying Alive:

After putting the image and writing the scenario, i realized that I made a pretty large mistake here. Old Daka has the Zombies go away when she dies, so for this example. Old Daka is considered to have a Mind Extraction on her, which blanks her abilities.

Your opponent decides to resolve the 2 Indirect die first. You realize that they’ll be sending the 3 Indirect your way after so you have to do this properly if you want to make it out alive here. You assign 1 damage to Old Daka and 1 damage to Jango and nothing to the Zombie because you can’t due to all of your non-Zombie characters NOT being assigned Lethal, then resolve the damage. Old Daka is defeated and Jango’s 1 shield gets removed. Your opponent resolve the 3 Indirect and says “GG” to which you shake your head and say “Not Today!”.

Jango 1 HP Left: Gets assigned 1 damage

Nightsister Zombie: Gets assigned 2 damage

You go to resolve the damage and you trigger the Armor Plating to block the damage on Jango and then put 2 damage on your Zombie. (You can’t assign 2 to Jango even though you could block it because he only has the 1 Health left and 0 Shields). You have successfully survived this encounter with Indirect due to Armor Plating and the Zombie.

Resolution #2 Dead:

Now we’ll talk about what happens if they resolved it the other way. Your opponent decides to resolve the 3 Indirect die first. You assign the 2 Lethal for Jango and the 1 Lethal for Daka, there is no damage left so nothing is assigned to the Zombie. Old Daka is defeated, Jango pops the armor plating to survive for now. The opponent then resolves the 2 damage and because Jango has 1 Health and 1 Shield, but have to be assigned to him and there is nothing left to assign to a Zombie so Jango is defeated now as well. You concede the game because you weren’t going to be able to do anything with your leftover Zombie.

Random WRONG: 5 Indirect is being resolved, so I assign 1 to Old Daka, 2 to Jango, and 2 to the Zombie, then Armor plating keeps Jango alive. This isn’t how resolving damage works. It is one “packet” at a time, which is one base damage die + any modified sides that you want to go with it. Once that damage is done and any triggers from it have been completed, THEN you can go and resolve another die with the same symbol. (This is under the assumption that the opponent chose the Resolve Dice action and that we aren’t talking about some card resolving a single die, but if it was an effect doing it and they could resolve 2 dice, it’d still be one at a time like I mentioned).

Old Daka

There also seems to be some confusion with Old Daka, her Zombies, and things like Acceptable Losses. So for those that aren’t aware, there is essentially a combo deck where you use Old Daka to make zombies, then you use Acceptable Losses to defeat the Zombies and Vow of Vengeance to pump up your character dice damage to astronomical levels. Most of the confusion seems to stem from the following item that was added to the Rules Reference Guide (it’s on Page 29).

This is only referring to any of the in play Zombies that get set aside due to Old Daka being defeated. Any Zombies that were defeated before her defeat, happen to be in the Set Aside Zone but are still considered defeated for things like Vow of Vengeance and tiebreaker scenarios when time runs out before the game has ended.

WRONG – Some people thought that when Old Daka was defeated the already defeated Zombies (which are in the Set Aside Zone) stopped being defeated.

Well everybody, I hope this was useful to you in some way or another. If you feel that a lot of people are getting a ruling or game play incorrect, feel free to chime in and if it checks out, then I can do a How Stuff Works on that subject in order to help the player base better understand. Thanks for reading!

~HonestlySarcastc