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I cant find anything in the rules explaining how to run this scenario.
Lets say my guardsman squad gets charged by a single Archon, or any other IP or character for that matter that can easily rip the squad apart in one round.
Since he charges through cover or whatnot my initative step comes first. Can I declare a challenge with my sergeant, forcing him to either accept the challenge, leaving him to only be able to kill one model, or does he have a choice to refuse the challenge and attack normally?
What if he has an Archon and a single Wyche, making him able to "hide in the blob" should he refuse a challenge?
Guess the same cheese can be applied to bigger n worse things like Hive Tyrants and Daemon princes?

Challenges are declared at the start of the fight sub step not on the models inititive step. He can refuse but if he does he cant blow strikes at all which would be kinda stupid. So if he doesnt challenge you could do it.

A character that is a single-model unit (such as a Wraithlord or an IC that is not attached to a squad) cannot refuse a challenge. Page 64, "Refusing a challenge - Heroic Stand"

Keep in mind though that this is only going to be possible if his Archon actually charges your sergeant, or a model within 2 inches of your sergeant, as a character has to be engaged to issue or accept a challenge.

 insaniak wrote:
Keep in mind though that this is only going to be possible if his Archon actually charges your sergeant, or a model within 2 inches of your sergeant, as a character has to be engaged to issue or accept a challenge.

This is why you keep low initiative, high power characters (like Coteaz) in the back of the unit: since he's not engaged at the start of the Fight subphase, he can't accept a challenge and be blown apart, but he still gets to attack at his low Ini step.

Pretty ridiculess rule if you ask me
The fact that an Archon would bothered to be taunted by a lowly sergeant is absurd, when he knows he could easily cut through the whole squad in just a single round. Well well, since im IG its mostly in my favour, though my opponent will hate my guts for misusing the rules like this

It is one of the Rules that have caused problems in the past, I find a lot of people opting to replace 'engaged' with 'locked in combat.'

JinxDragon wrote:
It is one of the Rules that have caused problems in the past, I find a lot of people opting to replace 'engaged' with 'locked in combat.'

House rules............. have no place in a rules discussion.

yes you can challenge him, and if he's engaged in combat he can accept, or decline. if he declines you can pick a character in his squad to go to the back. if he has an IC and an upgrade character then he can accept with the upgrade character and still tear the squad apart with his fancy guy.

the fact that you pick is quite handy for tyranids with their smashing hive tyrants and other nasties like powerklaw bikerbosses - challenge so you can kill the special character, if they decline put the upgrade character to the back and pile precision hits on the special character anyway.

 some bloke wrote:
the fact that you pick is quite handy for tyranids with their smashing hive tyrants and other nasties like powerklaw bikerbosses - challenge so you can kill the special character, if they decline put the upgrade character to the back and pile precision hits on the special character anyway.

Always make the killy dude not swing. You can still allocate precision hits to a character that declined a challenge.

 don_mondo wrote:

JinxDragon wrote:
It is one of the Rules that have caused problems in the past, I find a lot of people opting to replace 'engaged' with 'locked in combat.'

House rules............. have no place in a rules discussion.

Yes, they do. So long as people are clear that what they are presenting is a house rule rather than the RAW, house rules are perfectly acceptable additions to a rules discussion, particularly when a rule is broken or seen as a bit silly.

Ohhhhh red texted!

Where are you guys seeing that a character has to be engaged to issue or accept a challenge? My book simply says that you nominate a character from a unit that's locked in combat and the opponent chooses a model from his assaulted unit.

The challenge is made before pile-in moves are made, before it's even decided who all is engaged.

Edit:

Never mind, I found what you were all talking about. Chalk it up to hideously written rules. Those are terrible.

You can only challenge if both your character and his character are engaged in combat, but you must make a challenge before it is determined who is engaged in combat. That is awesome.

Not to mention that you make the challenges at the start of the fight sub-phase but it mentions before blows are struck. Which is after the start of the fight sub-phase in fact it's the second step of the fight sub-phase.

Maybe they named those rules to test the patience of the gamers themselves,and just gave us a heads up by labeling the list of rules as "Challenges".

Thank you Insaniak.

I feel Idolator has pointed out best why this rule is considered to be... quite broken. Maybe the Authors did intend for the Rule in question to limit Challenges to Characters which are already capable of exchanging blows during that conflict, that would make a great deal of sense, but the way they went around it was quite poor. Technically, thanks to the fact we calculate Engaged during the Initiative Steps themselves, it is quite impossible to issue a Challenge thanks to the timing involved. Therefore something needs to be done in House, just to make this Rule function at all, and the toss up seems to between allowing Engaged to be calculated prior to Initiative 10 or allowing Locked in Combat to meet the requirements of Engaged for the purposes of issuing and accepting Challenges.

 Idolator wrote:
You can only challenge if both your character and his character are engaged in combat, but you must make a challenge before it is determined who is engaged in combat. That is awesome.

Yup. It's one of the big holes in the current rules that a lot of players just overlook without noticing, but it's been fairly widely discussed since 6th ed first dropped.

 insaniak wrote:

 Idolator wrote:
You can only challenge if both your character and his character are engaged in combat, but you must make a challenge before it is determined who is engaged in combat. That is awesome.

Yup. It's one of the big holes in the current rules that a lot of players just overlook without noticing, but it's been fairly widely discussed since 6th ed first dropped.

I haven't played in a long time, when I did an issue never came up. I guess we glossed over it too!

The few Chaos Lords I decked out to be Melee Slaughter houses all died before getting into Melee, quite a few of them to over-watch... so I never got to gloss over it like I would of as well.