StorminNorman wrote:
From my understanding, activating is not an option. You must activate every piece (or have them activated by an opponents SA or FP). If a piece is missed, it is actually an illegal state of the game.
Now it would be different if several things happened and then it was realized, but in this situation nothing else game wise happened, and it seems to me that player B would HAVE to activate his last character before anything else happened.
That's absolutely the way I would rule it. You're 100% that activating is NOT an option, so if you have 2 characters to activate and accidentally only activate 1, you've created an illegal game state. There are 3 ways to deal with illegal game states:
1) Fix it. This is almost always how I rule
if nothing else has happened since the mistake was made. Your example pretty clearly falls into this case. If nothing has been done at all, there is no reason to go back and do it correctly, and as a judge I would require it. This actually came up in our Regional this past weekend; one player had used Bodyguard to reassign damage taken from Self Destruct. Bodyguard only works against attacks, so that was illegal. Another player called this to my attention, I went over to the table, they said that nothing else had happened since then, so I just had the original character take the damage instead of the Bodyguard. Both players were fine with this since nothing had happened.
2) Rewind it. This means going back to when the mistake happened, fixing it, and then continuing. This is usually how I rule if some things have happened since the mistake, but not much (or not much important). If you've activated one or two characters since the mistake and remember the exact game state (and both players can agree to the game state) when the mistake was made, just basically "take back" everything that was done up to that point, fix the mistake, and then go again. This is only feasible when it's a very small amount of stuff that has to be taken back.
2) Ignore it. This is usually the case if it's something minor that happened a relatively long time. If you realize "Oh wait, 3 rounds ago when you killed my Atton Rand I should have rolled Avoid Defeat!", it's too late to do it now. This is also the case if two players can't agree on the game state that you would rewind to. I hate ruling this way, because it means that the result of the game (whatever it is) was achieved through an illegal move. Sometimes it's necessary though because there just isn't a fair or timely way to fix the problem. Depending on what it was, both players might get a warning for allowing it to get to this state, but if nothing else the player primarily responsible (like the player playing Atton Rand if he forgot the Avoid Defeat) will certainly be sternly reminded, especially if it's a big tournament where the result of the game affects everyone.
Your example very obviously would fit into case #1. Keep in mind that this is just how I judge, and others might do it differently, but I don't see an argument at all for doing anything other than letting him make the move. He HAS to make the move, per the rules of the game. Him saying something like "I'm out" doesn't change that.