Thursday 6 September 2012

Nightscythes - 50 Shades of Grey.... area

So, Nightscythes. You either love them* or hate them** and on the surface of it they look like the best transport in the game. But if you delve deeper the transport rules for Nightscythes do not work in 6th edition and Ima tell you why...

First off, lets look at the mechanic for destroying a transport vehicle. First up, Wrecked. The unit must disembark and be within 3" then unit must take a pinning check. After the pinning test has been taken the vehicle becomes a wreck.



Ok, pretty straight forward, so how about Explodes!? Models take a S4 AP- hit and survivors are placed where the vehicle used to be, they then take a pinning test. Ok, also straight forward. Where the hell am I going with this?

So time for the Left*** turn. Under the flyers section, there is the Crash and Burn! rule. This is where the flyer is repolaced by a large blast marker and scatters smashing everything underneath it into horrible paste****. Read further and you get to the transport section of the rule. All models embarked suffer a S10 hit no saves and any survivors are placed within 3" of the blast markers final position.

OK, so you may be saying "so what? what are you talking about? I'm scared and confused and its cold and there are wolves". Enter the Nightscythe rules. In the codex entry it states that - If the Night Scythe***** is destroyed, the embarked unit is not allowed to disembark, but instead enters reserves. Unfortunately, as per the Crash and Burn! rule in the flyers section, the unit embarked upon the flyer never gets to make a disembark, it is instead placed withing 3" of the blast marker, exactly the same for Explodes! in the transport vehicle section. Why is this important? Because the Necrons don't ever get the option to disembark when it crashes, the Night Scythe can never place the unit into reserve.

Now, I know the fluff says they are never actually there, but the Night Scythe rules refer to the unit being embarked, so there is no argument there, the unit IS embarked or you cant use the rule in the first place. Next up we have the contention of whether the placing within 3" of the blast marker is a disembarkation or not? This point is relatively moot, as the big part we are forgetting, is that even before the unit gets to disembark / jump out of the flaming wreck, they all take a S10 no save hit. Why I hear you ask? Well, as above, they ARE embarked and the hits happen BEFORE the models are disembarked / placed. Thats black and white right there.

Here's where the grey comes in, and lots of it. If the unit counts as disembarking, and goes into reserve we get a number of issues. First up you cant make Reanimation protocol rolls as the unit is not in play and cant be interacted with (they have been moved into reserves and out of play before the end of the phase). Before we get wrapped up in that argument, lets look at the reanimation protocols rule in the Necron codex - Place a counter next to the unit for every casualty the unit suffers.... At the end of the phase after all moral checks etc have been made, roll a dice for each reanimation protocols counter there is next to the unit - and stop. The unit is off the board, you cannot place a counter next to it, ergo you cannot roll a dice for each counter.Then do you get make morale checks etc? Again the likely answer is no as you cannot be interacted with off the board.

It gets worse with Everliving. If you have a model with everliving in the unit, as per the everliving rules, you place a counter where the model died (in the centre of the blast marker crash site) - at this point the unit is teleported away, meaning the everliving model is no longer part of the unit? But if some of the unit survives the model cannot be returned to play in coherency with its unit, so its removed from play? Again we have a very abstract but quite likely scenario here. in my view the model is removed as by the letter of the rules he cannot be placed with his unit - note that this is different to the unit being dead.

So, many questions. Questions which I will put money on not being answered by the GW FAQ's due out this month.

Id really like to hear you readers thought on this as I have not found two people who agree on the way it works yet.

So, lets wait and see what happens...


*Because you play Necrons
**Shut up nobody cares what you think.
***Right is Might, Left is Death. Words to live by.
****Or not as is usually the case.
***** Shut up, yes I know I've spelt it differently everywhere else, no I'm not going to fix it, because I'm lazy that's why, go to hell.


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