There is no precedent for "friendly characters" permitting you to attack yourself, that I know of. Since the restriction is on attacking yourself and not on targeting yourself, showing that you can target yourself when you can target friendlies says nothing about the self attack prohibition. I do agree that a ruling would be great, but I think the understanding should be you can't attack yourself unless an effect says so.

I agree that you shouldn't be able to attack yourself without an effect specifically saying you can, but EE says adjacent characters "become" targets which overrules illegal game states. So the only reason you can't target yourself with EE is that "other" is referring to the one using the power.

I don't think WK has ever clearly stated the "other" definition, but rulings have hinted pretty strongly to it. Like the Superman ruling. His power can be used on a character with no other characters adjacent to it. wK said he could use it if he was adjacent. That is because "other" excludes the user of the power, unless it is a situation where other couldn't refer to the user.

https://win.wizkids.com/bb/viewtopic...2fb1751da561ca

How many examples do we even have of attack friendly characters at all? It's pretty uncommon.

You quoted this earlier:
First of all, it literally says "can't target...with an attack", not "can't attack", so you can't use that to separate it from other examples of targeting friendly characters. This rule puts a restriction on what a character can target.

Secondly, I know WizKids don't always write the most easily understood rules, but surely they could do better than that, if they didn't want attacking "friendly characters" to include the user. There's no reason to have it all in one sentence, if that's the case. In order to get an interpretation where "friendly characters" doesn't let you attack yourself, but "all characters" does (which the Pulse Wave example shows), we have to split the sentence up like this:

1. A character can’t target itself with an attack unless the effect specifically says it targets “all characters.”
2. A character can’t target a friendly character with an attack unless the effect specifically says it can target a “friendly character” or the attack targets “all characters.”

If that was the intention, then it's horribly written, because that is a very illogical way to split up the quoted sentence, where the first and last bit go together, and the middle also goes with the last bit, but not the first bit.

People can argue semantics and technicalities all they want, but the answer from WK's will almost assuredly be that Bastion cannot MC himself.

I'm fine with that as an intent-ruling, but then the effect really should be errata'd to have an "other" in there.

Or you can just accept that the sentence in the rulebook is meant to be parsed the way others are seeing it.

It may be vague, but when there are two interpretations for something, and one makes sense, but the other does not, it's generally best to err on the side of the interpretation that does.

How can:

"Can't A or B, unless C or D"

be parsed as:

"Can't A, unless D"
and
"Can't B, unless C or D"

The way it's phrased strongly suggests that the exceptions that allow you to attack friendlies are the same as the ones that allow you to attack yourself.

Edit:
I could maybe see it parsed as:

"Can't A." (at all)
and
"Can't B, unless C or D"

but that goes against the Pulse Wave-example, where "other" was necessary.

Second edit, after I calmed down a bit:
I still don't like how vague that section of the Rulebook is, but I've said my piece, so I'll stop now.