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So a discussion came up where a guy was creating a 1k Brets list and had a ld.7 Damsel as the General of the army with a Ld.8 Paladin as the BSB, as is required for Brets. For the sake of the following discussion we disregarded any exceptions to this particular rule (DE Assassins, for example).

My questions arose asking if the BSB could have a higher leadership than the General. Per page 82 of the rulebook, the General is the model with the highest leadership. It goes on to say if there are multiple character models with equally highest Ld, you nominate one as the General, the emphasis being the rulebook still specifically states that the General must have the highest Ld of the characters in the army.

Another guy stated that this was false as upon giving the Battle Standard to a model, it (per the rules) can no longer be the General. It no longer has the option to be the General as it is now the BSB (barring Slaan). For example, if I wanted my Ld.8 DE Sorceress to be my General and have a Master BSB, I am certainly entitled to do so despite the Master having higher Leadership. The Master is the BSB, therefore cannot be the General so the Sorceress is the General.

This bugs me a little because under the rules for the BSB the book reads that the standard is usually carried by a model that cannot normally be the General. In my case, there is nothing stopping my Master from being the General of the army, so it seems that he would be disqualified from being the BSB as he must be the General as he has a higher Ld than my Sorceress. If I want a BSB Master, I would need to take two of them: one General and one BSB.

So, which is it? I'm definitely new to WHFB and the other person disagreeing with me has played for quite a long time so I'm inclined to believe him, it just seems rather backwards to me.

The Damsel would be the general, but I was under the assumption that the Bret. player would need 2 paladins...

Am I worong in thinking that the general had to be the character with the Highest Ld?

psf3077 wrote:Am I worong in thinking that the general had to be the character with the Highest Ld?

No, but if a character has a supplementary rule that disallows him from being eligible for the General's position then obviously he doesn't count.

With VERY few exceptions, being the BSB excludes a character from being the General. In this case, the Damsel would indeed be the General.

Alright, just making sure the rule was written in that order, check for eligibility for General first before determining who the General would be. In this case, the Paladin is the BSB so the Damsel must be the General. That works.

Normally I would say that you couldn't turn your highest LD model into the BSB, but the brets force you to so sure the Damsel's the boss.

That's what I thought, too, but in my example of Master BSB and Sorceress General, it seems that because the Master is the BSB he is not able to be the General, end of statement. So at that point you look to another character model of the highest leadership to be the General, in this case the Sorceress.

Another example is the Skaven Assassin, which has a higher leadership value than any other character in the army but is specifically unable to be the army's General. The idea that taking an Assassin makes any list fundamentally illegal is a bit silly.

Arctik_Firangi wrote:Another example is the Skaven Assassin, which has a higher leadership value than any other character in the army but is specifically unable to be the army's General. The idea that taking an Assassin makes any list fundamentally illegal is a bit silly.

I specifically mentioned Assassins in the second sentence of the original post and how they had clearly written exceptions.

Heh, sorry, I forgot about that in the time between my posts. I don't know the DE list besides.

Kinda like vamps under 2k points. Wight Kings are leadership 9. Regular vamps are 7. Your army must be led by a vampire, though.

Are Wing Knights character models, though? That was my whole confusion, highest Ld. character model.

Yeah, whight kings are characters.