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First of all, I believe I know the answer to the questions I am about to ask, however me and the people I play with have had to assimilate whfb rules in a very short time to get our teeth into the game as we all began playing at the same time, this means a LOT of the rules we play with are wrong or incomplete. I find myself in need of some clarity concerning the rules for challenges, namely:

Under any circumstances can a character who has won a challenge then be attacked by other models in the same cc phase?

If a character moves into base contact to accept/issue a challenge with an enemy character, there are no circumstances under which the displaced model can make their attacks as if they were in their old position? I assume this to be true, and therefore applying it to a situation where eg a master moulder who is standing behind his rat ogres, must displace a rat ogre to accept a challenge (if displacing the rat ogre is the only way to make base contact) I would then assume the rat ogre moves to the back (where the master moulder was standing) and cannot administer his full quota of attacks. However if it is possible to make a gap in the ranks for the master moulder to move into (eg 2 rat ogres at the front with the master moulder standing behind) while preserving base contact of both rat ogres with enemy units would this take priority over simply sending the rat ogre to the back? Maybe this doesn't come up much but my m8 plays with isle of blood armys and I play chaos so for us it will come up every time i charge his rat ogre unit :3

Again, I don't expect to be overly suprised by the answers, however I do not believe there is a statement in the rulebook which satisfies all situations I can dream up with respect to the first question, and as for the second question, I have been tripping over monstrous infantry rules since day 1 and I would not be shocked to discover that we have been skipping some rules.

I guess first off, my short answers:

1) No, barring weird army specific things?
2) No, the character really does move spaces, changing the attak possibilities of his unit (this often has benefits for ogre units, where T5 characters with armor/wards are used to absorb attaks that would hit T4 naked bulls in their place).

BUT on your master moulder question, the MM actually must be in the front rank all the time because he's a champion, so if he's swapping into base with something there isn't any moving forwards of backwards, just swapping sideways. If he doesn't upgrade the packmaster than your friend just keeps him in the back and doesn't worry about it (cause no challenges, naturally). It's an unfortunate rule that means the T4 6+ armor MM can be punched out by basic troops allocating to him ... but them's the breaks.

- Salvage

With respect to 1), as expected, however I wanted to be certain. As it is I have often charged a lone hero with a group of chaos knights and then ended up being in danger of rolling a break test because I am forced to challenge, and thus can only make attacks with 1 model. Intuitively it seems silly, but taken in context of the fluff it makes sense. What it comes down to is I have taken champion options in all of my units arbitrarily, and this rule alone seems a good reason to revisit that choice.

As for 2), first off between me and the people I play with we still lack full understanding of 'who can attack' and 'who can be attacked' in the case of strange CC situations. I had come to this conclusion by myself but still there was that nagging feeling that we may have glossed over some rules when such situations were put into practise. In the case of the rat ogres, it is likely that we are setting up the unit wrong. I suppose what I am not clear on is if a character can move into base contact in such a way that unit to unit base contact is not preserved (as in the character moves into a position where there was no model instead of simply swapping positions), furthermore it is not clear how models with different base sizes would swap positions, in all cases it seems like a character with a different base size moving into a rank/position where there is base contact with enemy models, would not preserve base contact (resulting in more or less models that can attack or be attacked). From what you say I summize that this would not happen in the case of a unit that only made base contact to the front (unless the unit contained lots and lots of characters with different base sizes) however if the master moulder had to move to a rank other than the front one, or to the side of the unit it could mess things up.

In the specific case of skaven I am assured that characters can 'lead from the back' and if so this becomes an issue (if indeed it is an issue at all?), also I am assured that in the case of beast handlers they too can stand behind the beasts in some wierd arrangement that while intuitively seems like where a beast handler would want to stand, does not seem to line up with the basic rules for setting up units.

Ok, the real issue here is I have personally not looked at many of the rules that do not affect my current army roster, this includes the use of monstrous infantry, and indeed where a beast handler would go in a unit so until now I had assumed the master moulder stands behind the rat ogres to better poke them with his big cattle prod for no other reason than he has a big cattle prod. Furthermore neither of us own a skaven army book so as far as I am concerned the leading from the back thing may be completely dreamed up.

The rules for skaven mixed units (from clan Moulder) are mostly specific to that book. I think that would be a good next purchase for the skaven player and might well clear a lot of this up.

Without a diagram, it may be difficult to explain exactly how this works without making things more confusing.

Ordinarily if a player refuses a challenge, the challenger may select a character and send that character to a non-fighting position. That unit may not use that character's leadership.

However, Skaven have a verminous valor special rule, that permits a Skaven character to continue to provide leadership benefits after refusing a challenge.

With regards to the Master Moulder situation, as Boss Salvage has mentioned, the Master Moulder is a champion and must be placed in the front rank. My understanding (and this may be incorrect) is that since his base size isn't compatible with the rat ogre base size, he should be placed on the edge of the unit.

One more thing to remember about challenges- if it ever seems that the model accepting the challenge cannot move in to base contact with the challenger, the challenger may be moved to meet the accepting model. If neither can be moved, leave them as is and imagine the two are able to direct attacks at eachother.

Yes it seems that my m8 had gotten the lead from the back idea from the isle of blood novel, though unless I am mistaken goblins have some sort of rule which allows their characters to stay away from the front rank? (Though I think I may have gotten this from fluff also)

In the situation I described I believe the only rules I had actually read which affect the challenge are the basic challenge rules from the brb, so there was a lot of filling in the blanks.

As for the last point, I was vaguely aware of this, infact the wording you use seems to describe it in exactly the same way as the rulebook, and you can understand my confusion with respect to how such a situation may affect other models being able to fight. However I am now armed with some context that I can apply to such situations, I guess it's one of those few cases where players simply agree on an outcome.

Anyhows cheers I am one step closer to just removing all the champions from my roster lol

Goblins have no such rule, just Skaven.

Yeah, I think the fluff is essentially saying "goblins refuse challenges and run to the back, where they offer no benefit to their fellows; aren't goblins just terrible? yuk yuk yuk."

Oiy. Just because an army concept is funny doesn't mean it has to be bad.

And the "Lead from the Back" was a rule in the old book, where the new rule "Verminous Valor" is an updated, less awesome version.

Finally, if you really want a Master Moulder (I'm not entirely sure why), why not upgrade one of the Ogres to a Master-bred one, so he can accept challenges?

Also note. If one model can't move to BTB (such as the commander has an incompatible base size to the unit) when a challenge is issued or accepted, the other must. In such cases where neither can move for whatever reason, you just assume the models are in base and figure it out that way.

IME, our group generally dispenses with the actual moving of the models (what a PITA), we just declare and decline/ accept challenges and work out the combats.

phw4 wrote:First of all, I believe I know the answer to the questions I am about to ask, however me and the people I play with have had to assimilate whfb rules in a very short time to get our teeth into the game as we all began playing at the same time, this means a LOT of the rules we play with are wrong or incomplete. I find myself in need of some clarity concerning the rules for challenges, namely:

Under any circumstances can a character who has won a challenge then be attacked by other models in the same cc phase?

If a character moves into base contact to accept/issue a challenge with an enemy character, there are no circumstances under which the displaced model can make their attacks as if they were in their old position? I assume this to be true, and therefore applying it to a situation where eg a master moulder who is standing behind his rat ogres

1) A master moulder must be in the front rank. He's a unit champion. Pack masters can be behind the rat ogres, but the master goes up front. If a unit is hit in the flank or rear, the unit champ (and characters) can "Make Way" to a fighting rank. If they can't/don't they can still accept challenges.
Once a challenge has been accepted, no other model may direct any attacks against them for that round of combat.

2) The only examples of a character dying after winning a challenge would be attacks that Aren't Directed:
A) Stomp/Thunder Stomp. It's distributed as shooting, and should the rest of the winning champ/characters unit be taking out (or below 5 models) then these hits could be applied to him.
B) Giant swinging his club or jumping up and down (as long and the unit had less than 5 rank and file)
C) Skaven Wrecker Ball: Artillery die of hits at the end of the fight, could whack the character as outlined above.

-Matt

I didn't think a champion could make way. I thought that was an ability solely in the domain of characters...

Me too.