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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6479795" data-attributes="member: 6787503">Maybe it is time for Wizards to clarify just what was meant by this one phrase. Were they so pressed for space that they needed to express the conditions for surprise in as few words as humanly possible? I don't believe that rulebooks should require one to be a grammarian to comprehend their meaning, but given the sheer numbers of people that, to me, are misinterpreting the language in question, perhaps it may be useful to delve a little further into what is meant in English by the indefinite article.The use of the indefinite article "a" with the word "threat" indicates that the threat is one that is unspecified, meaning it is no particular threat. It is not necessarily the threat that is standing obviously in front of you. It may, in fact, be some other threat altogether. This was why I, rather clumsily, posted up-thread that I read this to mean "any threat." I did not mean that the word "any" should be substituted for the word "a", which leads to an entirely different reading, but rather that this could be any threat we're talking about here, not just the one threat that has already been noticed.With regard to the interpretation that "a threat" could mean "all threats" or "every threat," I'd like to remind everyone that the indefinite article can be semantically regarded to mean "one." Thus, "a character who doesn't notice one threat is surprised," should be equivalent to the present language, although I suppose that would be just as open to misinterpretation. To my mind, however, this indicates that if there is a single threat that goes unnoticed, then that threat is capable of causing surprise.Which leads me to the question, couldn't Wizards have clarified this by simply substituting the word "every" or by using the plural "threats" if that was what was meant? They certainly could have expressed the idea, that one who has noticed a threat is somehow immune to being surprised, without taking up any more space than they did. So why then did they choose to use the indefinite article, given the natural interpretation that an unnoticed threat causes surprise in the first round, if what they really meant was to restrict surprise to situations in which absolutely no threat has been detected?</blockquote>

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