(1) Can a model with Ghostly/Flight trample small based models in a Guard Tower as long as it ends its movement outside of the footprint of the tower? Is there any difference between Ghostly and Flight for this purpose?
(2) Can warrior models with Ghostly/Incorporeal enter a Guard Tower by simply walking through the wall, or do they have to use the door?
(3) Can a Marked Soul in a Guard Tower be used to summon a Horror? If so what happens to the Horror? Does the base size of the Horror matter in this case?
(4) Can an Umbral Guardian be placed in a Guard Tower as a result of Shadow Guardian?
Currently as written, yes because Tramples do not target models. Ghostly shouldn’t work as you can only enter via the door, and Ghostly would need to enter the structure while Flight just moves over it. However, can a model fly over without entering?
No, you must enter via the door.
It should fail, as models cannot be placed within the tower, movement exception.
While the Flight advantage does say “Models with Flight advantage can soar above the battlefield, greatly adding to their maneuverability,” the actual rules for Moving Through Terrain & other Models specifically states that a flying model “can advance through obstructions and other models if it has enough movement to move completely past them.”
Unless there are other rules I am missing, Flying models never “move over obstructions,” they always “advance through obstructions” and therefore IMO would enter them.
No. We actually intended to have a line in there to disallow flight to avoid this exact confusion, but it missed the initial print. We will clarify to ensure the rules cover that possibility.
Have to use the door.
No, models cannot be placed inside the tower except through resolution of their movement.
See answer #3.
I applaud and encourage players to continue to find caveats to bypass dealing with the buildings as intended as it helps us shape and refine the rules. We have found balancing them to be very edge-of-a-knife as erring in either direction turns them from death traps to invulnerable fortresses. The end goal is that they enhance a game by adding new strategic points of interest while adding a greater sense of immersion in the game world. As neutral and optional they are able to be a greater obstacle than if they were part of an army, but we don’t want them to be a pariah. We’ll be gathering as much data as we can to see if and how they should be tweaked come January, so please keep feedback coming.
Would you ever consider removing the Bar the Door rule? To allow for troop combat inside of the tower? It would
A) Allow armies more options for dealing with the tower. You don’t need to be able to kill the tower, just the guys in it.
B) Be cinematic as all get out.
Alternatively, allowing combat over the first floor walls of the tower would work too, with a penalty for attacking over the walls.
It’s not clear to me why a model would have to “enter” a Guard Tower in order to Trample through it if it has Ghostly?
Ghostly specifies that models can advance through “obstructions and models if [they] have enough movement to move completely through them”.
A Guard Tower is an obstruction, which may or may not contain models.
As such, RAW, a Ghostly model should be able to move through a Guard Tower (whether it is occupied or not).
Per Erik’s post, they intend a line to “disallow flight” with respect to the Guard Tower. It is not clear, at present, if that is meant to prevent a model flying over (passing through) a Guard Tower, or if it is specifically meant to address the Trample issue, i.e. models in a Guard Tower cannot be affected by a Trample.
Furthermore, since Erik states that it requires an additional line, I think it is reasonable to enquire whether that additional line will include Ghostly.
If you go from being Outside of a terrain feature and then being Inside of it, you have entered it. Obstructions, which a model can normally not move through are allowed by Ghostly, Flight, etc.
However, the tower has a special rule saying that it can only be entered by the door. This would trump flight, ghostly, etc. and prevent a model from entering the terrain feature in another way, and therefore from trampling over it.
Ok, I can see the argument that the word “enter” is strictly defined in the Warmachine rules and that definition should be applied in to the Guard Tower rules. In particular, using that definition, we can state that no “terrain ignoring” rule can interact with the Guard Tower, and thus models with these rules must still go around it. If that is the intent, great, that is unambiguous and simple enough to work with. (I’ll confess, I find it counter-intuitive and awkward in that it makes the Guard Tower “super-impassable” without explictly stating it … but I can live with it.)
I was reading that section of the Guard Tower rules reads as in the commonly used “explanatory” style. That is, I read it as giving an intuitive description of an action, e.g. [From charge]:
“the model or unit rushes into melee range with a target and takes advantage of its momentum to make a more power first strike”,
not as the technical details of how to do it. However, “enter” is used outside of the descriptive text, so the technical usage does make sense. I think I was simply continuing to use “enter” in the descriptive sense, instead of making the switch to the technical sense.
