Removing Cohorts in Organized Play Question

[BlindBadger]

p. 22 of the rule book states: "If you would banish a cohort, remove it from the game instead; it may not be used in future scenarios, even if it’s listed on your character card."

I did not find any special organized play rules for cohorts. I am confused over what removing a card from the game does in organized play.

Example: Four people are playing an organized play scenario and during that game they make a play that would banish a scenario specific cohort.

1) The same four players later choose to replay that scenario using the same box of cards. Is the cohort available for the replay of the scenario, or is s/he removed from the game?

2) Three of the four people in the example replay the scenario using the same box of cards and a new fourth player (who did not play in any games in which the scenario specific cohort would have been banished) joins them during the replay... is the cohort available for play or removed from the game? If the cohort is available, is it only available for the new player?

3) Three of the four people in the example replay the scenario and a fourth new player (who did not play in any games in which the scenario specific cohort would have been banished) join them during the replay. The game box that is used is one brought by the new player (it is different box than the one the three people originally used). Is the cohort available for play or removed from the game? If the cohort is available, is it only available for the new player?

I am not sure if I should have posted this in the rules section or the organized play section, since this is a rules question that only pertains to organized play.

[Keith Richmond]

Without speaking for the exact specific wording of the rules for OP (Vic and Tanis are far more learned there than I), I can say that the scenarios were designed with the assumption that the cohorts were available regardless of whether they were banished or not previously.

It would be particularly troubling, and require tracking by character, and some way to establish quorum as to whether it should be in or out, I'd think.

There's at least one scenario that would be downright ruined if you followed that rule, and really the Herald would need to be errata-ed to "return to box" instead of "banish" (I would have pushed to remove the banish previously except I assumed it did not matter in OP).

[zeroth_hour]

If you're using OP Guild rules, while Vic says the box technically can have "memory" (you can use the normal purge rules for Basic and Elite cards if you want), whether or not the Cohort is removed from the game is not one of them in my opinion.

It makes very little sense that some other group can take the cohort away from the scenario (I'm looking at 1-2A here) before you and you can't use her. So, whatever Keith said about it being too complicated :)

[Tanis O'Connor]

Yup, Vic and I just had a chat about this last week. It's basically impossible to fairly adjudicate what happens in a situation where some characters' head-canon has a cohort banished and some doesn't, so we just don't use that rule in OP. Since cohorts might be seen again in the future, we'll be adding a rule to explain that in the next version of the Guide.