A caster with “Inhospitable Ground” causes enemy models to treat Open Terrain as Rough Terrain.
Enemy Deepborn Dire troll with “Floodwaters” makes models in 5’ treat Open Terrain as Shallow Waters, which is Open Terrain for models with Amphibious.
What happens now? Can the troll move like normal thanks to being amphibious in shallow water, or does Inhospitable Ground take priorarity und the troll suffers -2" movement?
1 Like
So, this is an interesting one. Both Floodwaters and Inhospitable Ground say that “…models threat open terrain as…”, so they are both not actually changing the terrain , only how models are treating it.
So, we would have an area treated as Rough Terrain, but is still open. And an area treated as being Shallow Water, but it is still open.
And, as Terrain features can stack it would be Rough Terrain and Water both, so the Deepborn would still be in Rough Terrain.
1 Like
Shallow Water is actually just Rough Terrain
it is Amphibious that allow the model to treat Shallow Water as Open Terrain (amoung other things). I am pretty sure as long as an area of Rough Terrain is also Shallow Water it would still treat the area as open ground.
2 Likes
Unless an Infernal chimes in to really surprise us and tell us otherwise, Malkav has the correct answer. 
Here’s why:
Terrain rules can stack, as we can see with Burning Earth, Storms, Dense Fog, obstacles, etc. that can be placed on other terrain pieces.
Burning earth shallow water terrain has all of the rules for both Burning Earth and Shallow Water. An amphibious model would obviously only ignore the rough terrain penalty from the shallow water portion and would be affected by the Burning Earth portion of the rules, because Amphibious only does what it says it does.
Which is, specifically:
And, importantly, here’s what Shallow Water actually is:
Obviously, spell effects can stack as well, as long as they’re not same-named effects. (I’m not going to quote those rules.)
So, here are the spell effects in play:
So, an area of open terrain affected by both of these rules is treated as:
- a) shallow water (which is really just rough terrain with a special name)
- b) rough terrain
An area of open terrain affected by both spells must be both, because both spell effects are in play, and neither of these rules specifies an interaction with the other that would suggest otherwise.
So, an Amphibious model would treat shallow water as open ground.
However, unless that Amphibious model also has Pathfinder (or some other equivalent advantage), it also treats all open ground as rough terrain. Which means that Amphibious model reduces the distance it moves by 2", because of:
So, the TL;DR:
Open terrain + Floodwaters = Shallow Water
Open Terrain + Inhospitable Ground = Rough terrain
Shallow Water + Rough Terrain = Shallow Water Rough Terrain (which is really “special named rough terrain” + “rough terrain”)
Take away the rough terrain from the Shallow Water thanks to Amphibious, and it’s still rough terrain because of Inhospitable Ground.
(And the order in which it is applied does not matter. It works out the same either way. The commutative property applies. One of those spell effects doesn’t just vanish because you add it in a different order.
I can see no reason why Active/Inactive Player would matter, so the potential argument “I resolve Floodwaters first and make the open ground Shallow Water, and then the Shallow Water is not open ground and so cannot be affected by Inhospitable Ground” wouldn’t hold, because neither effect actually changes the open terrain to another type of terrain, it only tells you to treat it differently. Which cycles back around to the TL;DR argument above.)
4 Likes
Pretty sure both apply. So even with amphibious you would still lose the movement, but it certainly an interesting question. I would love to see an infernal chime in.
1 Like
As stated it would still move as though in rough terrain
3 Likes