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[Main_man_vern]

If I used kings court on a hermit, and did not buy anything could I trash the hermit and gain 3 madmen?  My take on it is no because you are only trashing 1 hermit.  What do you all think?

[sudgy]

If I used kings court on a hermit, and did not buy anything could I trash the hermit and gain 3 madmen?  My take on it is no because you are only trashing 1 hermit.  What do you all think?

It says "when you discard this from play".  You can only discard it once, thus you only get one Madman.

If it said, "At the end of your turn, if you did not buy anything this turn, trash this and gain a Madman from the Madman pile", you would get three of them.  Gaining Madman doesn't rely on you trashing the Hermit.  That's why you can use scheme to put a hermit on top of the deck and still get a madman.

[Warfreak2]

For each Hermit that you discard from play, it gets trashed and you gain a Madman. There is only one Hermit in play so you trash one Hermit and gain one Madman.

[Main_man_vern]

Thanks, good point... Since the card leaves play before you are allowed to trash it, at that point it
is "out of play" and no longer affected by kc.

[scott_pilgrim]

If I used kings court on a hermit, and did not buy anything could I trash the hermit and gain 3 madmen?  My take on it is no because you are only trashing 1 hermit.  What do you all think?

It says "when you discard this from play".  You can only discard it once, thus you only get one Madman.

If it said, "At the end of your turn, if you did not buy anything this turn, trash this and gain a Madman from the Madman pile", you would get three of them.  Gaining Madman doesn't rely on you trashing the Hermit.  That's why you can use scheme to put a hermit on top of the deck and still get a madman.

This is the correct result, but not the right reasoning.  Compare with Scheme: "At the start of Clean-up phase this turn" only happens once, yet when I KC Scheme, I still get to choose 3 cards to top-deck.  The fact that "When you discard this from play" only happens once is not the reason that you only get one Madman.

Any text that appears above the line on a card (or all text on the card, if there is no line) happens every time the card is played; hence, when you KC Scheme, it sets up the same event three times, and by the time you get to the trigger, you have three events happening simultaneously, so you get to choose the order of them, and then resolve all three of them.  If the text on Hermit were not below a line, then if you KC'd it, you would get three Madmen, because you are setting up three events, each of which is triggered simultaneously when you discard Hermit.  Since there is a simultaneous trigger, you choose the order of resolution (which doesn't matter).  (Note that the Madman gaining is only contingent on whether you bought any cards this turn, and not on whether you just discarded Hermit from play.)  However, since the text is below a line, it is text that is generally true whenever that card is present in the kingdom (or Black Market), so it will trigger regardless of whether you play Hermit at all.  (If there were a way to get Hermit into play without playing it, you would still be able to get a Madman; the analogue does not apply for Scheme.)

Changing the wording from "When you discard this from play" to "At the end of your turn" would not change anything; each of these events is only triggered once.  What matters is whether the text is above or below a line.

Here is Donald X. on the significance of lines: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/8150227#8150227.

[GendoIkari]

Thanks, good point... Since the card leaves play before you are allowed to trash it, at that point it
is "out of play" and no longer affected by kc.

It sounds like you may have misunderstood the reason behind the answer. It has nothing to do with the fact that it has left play and is no longer affected by KC. The reason you only get one Madman is that having played the Hermit 3 times still only leaves 1 Hermit in play. Therefore there is only 1 Hermit available to discard from play.

This is the same way that Goons, Highway, Princess, and a few other cards work. Even if you King's Court a Goons, you will only get 1 VP chip each time you buy a card. And if you King's Court a Highway, the cost of cards will only be reduced by $1. This, just like Hermit, is because all that matters is how many copies of the card are actually in play, and playing the same card 3 times still only leaves 1 of them in play.

[flies]

short version: effects described below the line are not on-play effects, and are thus unaffected by KC.