Originally published at: The Board plays… Peace In Our Time - StimHack
Discuss the latest article here.
The idea of “checkpoints” as written seems to fundamentally change Netrunner.
For instance if we use checkpoints, then trashing a Dhegdheer with Cobra allows a player to use the Deus X that was hosted on Dhegdheer to avoid the damage from the subsequent Cobra subroutine, simply because we haven’t got an official “checkpoint” in between resolving the two subroutines.
Working as intended? 
How do you figure?
Hmm I don’t believe you’ve got that quite right.
According to 9.2.4b and d, whenever you trigger an ability during a reaction window you get priority again after that ability resolves, and right befote any player receives priority a checkpoint occurs. And step 6.9.3d of a run says that subroutines are triggered and resolved as part of a reaction window. So in between every subroutine there is a checkpoint.
Ah, okay. (So for clarity, a player can receive priority even if they’ve already got it? Corp receives priority to resolve sub one, Runner never gets priority for anything cascading from that, Corp receives priority again to resolve sub two even though they never lost it?)
I’m kind of wondering what the “hard-coded” checkpoints actually do now! 
You use your priority to trigger an ability, the ability resolves, then the game gives priority back to you.
The hard coded checkpoints are placed in the timing structure where it is required to have them and abilitjes never or infrequently would require them.
One winner from the “can’t prevent costs” is Guru Davinder, who can no longer prevent you from stealing Obokata Protocol, making it possibly playable.
I do still have the question regarding Ultraviolet Clearance and the “must install”-external-validation problem, which is much like the search-fail-to-find problem.
It may need to be given errata at some point in the future, but we tried to be stingy with the errata for this first set.
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+1 to continue to post links on the forums here when new blog posts go up, please. 
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I agree with posting links here too
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Third-and-lastly, this will (probably) be our last post on Stimhack. We’ve appreciated the Stimhack crew giving us a home while ours was built, but I’ve noticed that we’ve kinda overtaken the site with our articles and that’s not really fair to the other people who post here. If you want us to keep posting links in the attached forums, shout out in the comments!
100% please have a NISEI thread where links to new articles will be posted. That would be much nicer than having to check the new website to find things.
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Yes, please continue posting stuff here, too!
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Example: If the first subroutine on Fairchild 2.0 resolves while the Runner has no
installed cards but 3[c], then the Runner must choose to lose 2[c]. When the second
subroutine on Fairchild 2.0 resolves, the Runner can neither lose 2[c] nor trash an
installed card, so nothing happens.
This should be “pay 2[c]” not “lose 2[c]”
The Corp can always use a purge effect, even if there are no virus counters
currently hosted on any cards. This is an exception to rule 1.2.5.
I like how this is a much more elegant fix for Clot not working with the “doesn’t change the gamestate” rule. Now you can always use CVS to block Dirty Laundry!
We’ll try to post up a consolidated thread with some links. Thanks for the interest!
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OK, I’ll keep posting links here. We’ll get an RSS feed set up at some point too.
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Brilliant, not having an RSS feed on Nisei had me concerned I might miss important announcements.
That’s… Not an elegant fix. It’s a targetted fix that allows one specific problem case to be resolved.
An elegant fix would work for all cases.
I’m of the opinion that the ‘doesn’t change gamestate’ rule is problematic at its core. If some action really didn’t change the gamestate, and a player took it anyway, then nothing happened, why are we bothering with this? And if something did happen, then the gamestate changed, so the rule shouldn’t apply.
Can someone remind me why the rule exists? My recollection is that people will point at Tech Trader triggers for things like using Forger without a tag, but that falls into my second case above; the game state does change. (Beyond just no longer having a Forger, that is.)
(Essentially, I’m inclined to give players rope to hang themselves with if it makes the ruleset cleaner. If doing an action had no effect and you took it anyway, that’s called a player mistake, not a rules problem, imho. The problem is that I feel like there was some other problem case this was designed to solve. Was it the Scavenge without target in grip/heap issue…?)
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Essentially every card is divided into “Cost: Effect”. Every now and then, you get into a situation where paying the Cost is the thing you actually want to do, and you don’t care about the Effect.
The rule says you can’t fire abilities if the Effect itself wouldn’t do anything to the game state, even though obviously paying the Cost would. This theoretically prevents you from paying Costs just to pay costs. Geist is usually the most obvious candidate for these cases, because he’d often love to trash cards (say a B&E breaker) just for the sake of drawing cards and earning Tech Trader money.
Lots of these cases where you really just want to pay a Cost and ignore the Effect, you can do them anyway even with the rule in place, because there’s some token change to the game state (classic one is card in Grip you’d rather have in Heap so you can Clone Chip it. You can trash it to Faust to pump his strength by 2, which is technically a change in game state even though it’s the Corp’s turn, not a run, and the change is pointless).
But a few of them are prevented by the rule (can’t trash Forger with no tag. Presumably you can’t trash a naked NGO Front with no advancements on it just to deny the Runner Dirty Laundry money?)
Whether those “problems” we prevent are worth the confusion caused by the rule is an open question. From a design space perspective, it allows the creation of more cards where “paying the cost” is actually something you want to do in certain decks, rather than a penalty required to earn the effect. Which I’m not sure is actually a good direction to go.
I’d probably be content to see the rule eliminated entirely, but am open to hearing “oh shit then you could do X” counter-arguments.
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To clarify: it’s a more elegant fix than the previous fix for purging vs. the “doesn’t change the gamestate” rule.
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You can’t trash an unadvanced NGO Front because its abilities require spending advancement tokens. Thomas Haas is a card that provides an example of what you’re getting at.
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