Should a *failed* Trip attack on a Radioactive die cause the Trip die to decay?

[jimmosk]

Sorry to add another picky point to the recent rewrite of the Radioactive skill's description, but as it currently reads, 'If a radioactive die is either the attacking die or the target die in an attack with a single attacking die and a single target die, the attacking die splits, or "decays", into two as-close-to-equal-sized-as-possible dice that add up to its original size.' That means that a Trip die targeting a Radioactive die with a Trip attack should decay regardless of whether it succeeds or not.
Is that what actually happens? Should it?
Or should that text be changed from "in an attack" to "in a successful attack"?

And of course, if we eventually have dice that are both Trip and Radioactive, should they decay when they make an unsuccessful Trip attack? [Edited to add: Well if I'd've looked more carefully... we do have one such die, in NoopMan. See below...]

[jimmosk]

Since there hasn't been any response to this in three days, I'm going to state my own opinion, in hopes of eliciting further comments.

The argument for having Radioactivity trigger a split only when the attack is successful is that that's the simpler solution, and consistent with how Morphing (currently) works.
The argument for having Radioactivity trigger a split regardless of whether the attack is successful or not - the metaphor being that the mere proximity to radiation causes the decay to happen - is that it's more fun and makes more situations possible. Consider a %t die making a trip attack on an unskilled die. The attack fails, but the attacker splits into two half-sized t dice, and the target, which was just as proximal to the radioactivity, decays into two half-sized unskilled dice.

Of the two, I favor the greater fun. So I'm for keeping the description as is, and changing the code to match it.

[blackshadowshade]

I'm also in favour of trip attacks triggering Radioactive, even if they are unsuccessful.

Are we sure that this doesn't already happen? Should be pretty easy to test.

[blackshadowshade]

So, jimmosk and I have shown that an unsuccessful trip attack targeting a radioactive die causes the attacker to split. The action log is wrong, but the game result is correct.

[blackshadowshade]

And the reverse also works, although the log is again incorrect.

[cgolubi1]

Hmm, for the record, it seems like a bug to me that, in the first scenario, the attacker splits but the defender remains radioactive. I think when radioactive causes a split, radioactive goes away. So in the first scenario, the target should become Ho(2,10), not %Ho(2,10).

[blackshadowshade]

Interesting. I don't think that it actually is a bug, though it may seem like one, since the description says that only dice that decay lose Radioactive.

[irilyth]

The odd thing here is that usually when a non-Radioactive die attacks a Radioactive die (and decays), the Radioactive die is captured. In this case, the non-Radioactive die attacked and decayed, but the Radioactive die wasn't captured.
.
We'll probably also need to think about this in the context of Rage -- there are buttons with Radioactive Rage dice, and I always thought they behaved strangely on the old site, but perhaps I was just thinking about it the wrong way...

[blackshadowshade]

I'm going to close this because I don't see a bug in the behaviour here. The logging issue has been described in #1440.

If anyone disagrees, feel free to reopen the issue.