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So yesterday I had a full day of 8th games, in one of them, a weird quirk came up. The scenario was as following, my unit and his was locked in melee since last round, I elected not to fall back.

Then I wanted to shoot at his character with another unit, but the enemy unit locked in melee, which I could not fire at. was closer, it was however, the closest VISIBLE unit, as written in the targeting characters in shooting part of the rulebook. It looked like the attached image. So RAW, I would be forced to fire on the unit BEHIND the characters(My opponent and I ruled that was silly, so we went with the shots at the character, the character survived and arrived in melee to mop up).

Did we miss something, or is that actually intended by the rules?

This is how it works now.
It is kind of protection if one of your units with Character around charge and Character fail charge - he would be to easy target.

This is intended. Since Characters don't "join" units anymore, they need this restriction or will be blasted away from half a table away.

This is intended see the design notes.

https://17890-presscdn-0-51-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Warhammer_40000_Designers_Commentary-ENG.pdf

Col_Caffran wrote:
This is intended see the design notes.

https://17890-presscdn-0-51-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Warhammer_40000_Designers_Commentary-ENG.pdf

Thanks, must have missed that part!

So even though the unit is locked in combat it still provides de facto bubble wrap?

 3orangewhips wrote:
So even though the unit is locked in combat it still provides de facto bubble wrap?

Yes. I assume this is because the character doesn't get the protection against shooting by being engaged in combat like it would in earlier editions where it would be part of a (engaged) unit.