Disclaimer : this one is not from me but coming from Boardgamegeek.
Should we round up or down in PACG ? It's nowhere in the rules - but until now it seems that I never had to over the years.... I mean until:
Discard to explore. This exploration, on your checks to acquire or defeat, add half the number of cards in your discards.
So what should I do if I have 5 cards in my discard ?
This one's for you Mike :-)
Disclaimer : this one is not from me but coming from Boardgamegeek.
Should we round up or down in PACG ? It's nowhere in the rules - but until now it seems that I never had to over the years.... I mean until:
Discard to explore. This exploration, on your checks to acquire or defeat, add half the number of cards in your discards.So what should I do if I have 5 cards in my discard ?
This one's for you Mike :-)
Until we get an official response, I have a half joking response. I'm not even sure it classifies as a joke - the more I write it, the more I convince myself it makes sense.
What if you don't round at all? If you have 5 cards in your discard pile, then you add 2.5 to your checks. Sure, that +0.5 doesn't usually mean much. You want to pass a difficulty 17 check and you roll a 14, then adding +2.5 brings you to 16.5. That's a fail. If you had 7 cards in discard and added +3.5, that's a pass.
Excluding corner-cases that care about whether you overkill or underkill certain banes, or match a check's difficulty exactly; taking the definition of 'half' at face value (not assuming anything about rounding) is almost identical to rounding down, so that's how I'd play it. Rounding down, that is, if I don't just choose to count it - as written - as potentially adding 0.5 to your checks.
For the most part, the game doesn't stop working once you add a decimal point. Most other mechanics can probably logically take it into account. What if you take "2.5" points of combat damage as a result? I'd round that up, personally, because you need to discard a number of cards to make up for the amount of damage you take - discarding 2 cards is clearly not enough, so 3 cards it is.
(But yes, this definitely needs a FAQ. But it's technically functional - if poor form - as-written. Nowhere in the rulebook expressly forbids "0.5" from existing.)
Actually you are right, I stand corrected, there is no rounding needed, at least for evaluation checks.
I could in theory even play two boons on a single check that each add +2.5 for a total of +5.
Top fun.
For things like damage... Well that starts to be interesting. Indeed I can fail a check to defeat a monster after exploring with the Prince of Pain and as a result I need to discard 2.5 cards!
I knew at some point Mike would invent a rule that forces me to tear up my cards. Game creator nasty you are old padawan.
More seriously, I would agree that while waiting for an official answer you could say I need to discard 3.
But the nasty young padawan rule reader in me would say:
If, for any reason, you are ever required to remove one or more cards from your deck and you don’t have enough cards, your character dies.
So if I only have to remove 0.5 card, I do not die :-)
I just LOVE this one.
OK that deserve a spot in the weekly can'o'worms contest.
Huh. In my country, the "default" rounding for 0.5+ is UP, so it's pretty clear cut if no "round down" is specified. Guess it might work differently in the US. *shrug*
In the US, default rounding in normal mathematics is to round up.
In board and card games, however, there is no default. Rounding up/down is often dictated by whatever is most fair in terms of gameplay. So standard mathematical reasoning doesn't necessarily apply.
To clarify, the standard arithmetical practice I know of is that 0.5 rounds up, if you need to round it for some reason. That may be a universal - at least in the West - principle.
But like I said, if you don't round at all (and allow yourself to have a decimal place in your results) it's equivalent to rounding down almost 100% of the time in PACG. That seems close enough to an actual argument to round down. +2.5 may as well be +2, +6.5 may as well be 6, etc.
Plus, mathematical standards of convenience, or logical precepts, don't necessarily apply in board gaming, which has a very defined set of expectations, interpretations, and desired outcomes. I still default to counting from 0 as a Computer Science student, which is very rare for games... and I still get confused when I play any old video game that feature lives and I don't know whether "1" means that I have 1 life left, or whether it means I have 2 lives left because it will drop to '0' before giving me a game over.
Bleah. Arbitrary standards, and/or lack thereof.
We're taught in schools to round 0.5 up for simplicity. In typical calculation areas, though, you'll define beforehand what rounding method to use, typically something more complex that better distributes the bias that would accumulate from doing so. In most of the software I've written, for example, we used round towards even (so 1.5 = 2, 4.5 = 4).
Like everyone said, nothing really stops you from using 0.5 for check results. I'd probably just drop the decimal though (so round towards zero).
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You guys are just way too fun. I just love this community of veterans.
Zombie and similar banes that halve damage instruct you to round up on the card itself. In fact, every existing card that instructs you to round in PACG has you round up. So, I'd say that it's pretty safe to assume that this card has you round up as well for the time being.
Chief Technical Officer
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We don't have a default rounding rule—we tell you up or down in each situation. (Or at least, we're supposed to.) For this card, round up. Added to FAQ.