Monday, October 15, 2007

Lion El'Johnson Hutz, Rulz Lawyer

I got linked to this PDF of 2007 Grand Tournament house rules and I was surprised at some of the answers to disputed questions I’ve come across in the past. Problem is, these are still specific tournament house rules and GW hasn’t answered these in a more definitive FAQ on their website. I’ll get back to that in a sec. The ones that really mattered to me were:

- You only make one armor save for a Gets Hot!, even if you shot twice and rolled two 1’s or 2’s. Now that I go back and read it, this does seem to be spelled out in the RAW, I just never realized it. Sweet!

- You must try to remove whole models that suffer instant death wounds before removing already wounded models. Since I personally don’t play with units of multiple wound creatures in any of my armies outside of Nids (and those are generally high T anyway), this sounds great to me!

- Passengers of a vehicle that has been wrecked or blown up can disembark into the wreck or crater. What?! Bullshit! I hate it when people do this. Most if not all vehicle models are not made to be stood upon by a bunch of little round bases. And then when people complicate it further by saying “oh, I don’t want to scratch my model so I’m going to line them up around the wreck, but they still count as being in cover...” Come on, their transport is dead, if they aren’t behind it, they’re out in the fucking open, get over it. They had to jump out of a burning vehicle for chrissakes! Bah, I disagree with this. By the way, when a vehicle is annihilated, that’s a 6 on an ordnance penetrating hit and I believe all passengers are automatically killed. They probably meant to say explodes, but it’s still an unnecessary typo that could just lead to more confusion.

- An IC in a retinue or otherwise joined with a squad returns to being an IC immediately after the last squad member was killed, and is not compelled to take an ensuing leadership test at -1. I thought he would test at -1 for shooting casualties taken THAT turn but would test Ld as normal on the following turn. I’ve suggested the opposite in past games, but honestly I could go either way with this one. At least they realized it was important enough to clarify for the tournament.

- The short 12” edges of a long board edge deployment zone count as deployment zone board edges. This might make a critical difference in determining direction of a fallback move.

- Deep-striking jump infantry have to take dangerous terrain tests when landing in cover. Meh, I could go either way, in any case, nice that they at least thought out an answer.

- Psycannons don’t ignore cover saves, and neither does Mind War! W00t!

- Eldar bikes may not move the extra 6” in the assault phase after turboboosting.

While I don’t agree with all of these particular rulings, the main thing that hacks me off is how GW seemingly refuses to acknowledge around 50% of the most unclear and thus most heavily disputed rules conflicts in any kind of official capacity. It’s such a tease to read these and get clear answers, when they count for pretty much zippo outside of these events. I think the online FAQs and errata did a relatively good job of clearing up many old issues; why don’t they consider adding some of these little gems to those documents?

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