Empathic Touch stops the Empathy and removes her from the Away Team, along with the personnel she saved. However, since she has already encountered the dilemma, been targeted by it, and resolved all direct responses to it, she can no longer escape Barclay's targeting and dies anyway.
This
should be intuitive. As Jason notes at the top, this is the TrekSense on the card. Jason made the ruling he thought best, but even he noted that the outcome of his ruling is bizarre.
It is
not intuitive right now, though, which is why this is even a question. I believe this confusion is at least partly because the proliferation of bugouts and other suspends-play cards has established the (erroneous) idea that removing a ship or personnel from a dilemma encounter will always and everywhere protect that ship or personnel from the dilemma's effects, even in defiance of TrekSense. This is often true, but not always. Even a
![[DL]](https://www.trekcc.org/forum/images/smilies/icon_download.png "Special Download")
bugout will fail if played too late in an encounter. (See footnote.)
The principle is the same as in ship battle: if you (somehow) cloak a ship after both forces have used WEAPONS and scored hits, but before damage is actually drawn from Tactics decks and applied, you are no longer part of the battle (because you cloaked), but you still took a hit and will still take the damage. (Rules was asked about that during work on
The Neutral Zone, so we recently studied that issue.)
We're considering whether we need to modify
actions - step 3: results to make this situation with Empathic Touch (and similar cards, like
Sickbay: Menagerie) clearer; whether this is such an obscure situation that we can treat it as a one-off and leave it as a bluetext; or whether some other part of the Glossary should be modified to explain this issue better.
Jason, of course, made the best ruling he could, about a tricky bit of timing, on his own, without two days to pore over several different Glossary entries. I know Kris has no beef with Jason (and good on Kris for being a good sport about it), but I want to make clear that the Rules Committee supports T.D.'s on the ground, even when they get a close call wrong.
***
FOOTNOTE
Here's an example of a bugout failing due to late timing, and I'll try to be as clear as I can about a
very tricky bit of timing:
Suppose that your Away Team faces
Barclay's on a planet, while
Anastasia Komananov is on a ship in orbit. You fail the dilemma. You have one key personnel in the Away Team whom you cannot afford to lose, so you play
Empathic Touch. Opponent plays
Amanda Rogers to nullify Empathic Touch.
You then decide that you
really need to save this one personnel, so you're going to burn your bugout on this. You use Anastasia to
Smoke Bomb to your Away Team on the planet.
Since Empathic Touch can only be played during the results step of the encounter, that means you are currently in the results step. That means it's too late: your personnel are already "about to die," and it is too late to modify the dilemma's targets (per
actions - step 3: results). It's exactly like the situation we had in this ruling. Smoke Bomb stops your personnel and removes them from the Away Team. Then, they all die. Discard dilemma.
If you'd done the
before playing Empathic Touch, you could still claim it was happening during the response step, when the dilemma is "just encountered," and targets can still be modified. (
have no enforced timing of their own, so, whenever they are played at a boundary between timing steps, the player is free to declare which step the
is happening in.) In this case, your Away Team would be stopped and removed, and Barclay's would no longer have any targets. Per
dilemma resolution - targets, the dilemma would be reseeded, and you'd get off scot-free -- all because you burned your bugout before trying Empathic Touch.
This timing weirdness also applies to other
cards, including the "bug-in" cards that pull skills, personnel, or equipment
into a dilemma encounter. They, too, can fail if used too late, with "too late" being determined by other seemingly unrelated actions. But the Empathic Touch situation is closer to a bugout than a bugin, so I built a "bugout" example.
Rules Manager | Official Rulings in
blue. All else opinion. |
Rules Archive
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime
![[Rom]](https://www.trekcc.org/forum/images/smilies/icon_romulan.png "Romulan"){kind=icon}
/ ![[NA]](https://www.trekcc.org/forum/images/smilies/icon_nonaligned.png "Non-Aligned"){kind=icon}
personnel template and put it on a Doorway instead. Then you could put anyone you wanted under Temporal Benefactor and tell your own story! Admiral Mendak was built to support the version of reality where Future Guy was Romulan, and 
![[KCA]](https://www.trekcc.org/forum/images/smilies/icon_alliance.png "Klingon/Cardassian Alliance"){kind=icon}
- By The Ninja Scot
- By Ashigaru