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I played in a tournament at my FLGS this past Saturday and one of the games was my Necrons vs a Tau player. I won the roll to go first and destroyed his Broadsides with a shot from my Doomsday Cannon and with some lucky rolls was just able to make it into combat with my scarabs against his i believe it was a hammerhead and wrecked it. I thought I had a pretty good start to the match until he started his turn. He fired at my 4 man destroyer squad with his fire warriors and managed to take one down. this is where it gets fishy. he says he has marker lights in that squad and because he got something like 8 hits on the unit put 8 tokens next to the unit and said he was using all of them to lower my leadership, he then fired with another squad of fire warriors at my immortals and proceeded to do the same thing. Then a 3rd squad of fire warriors at another squad of immortals and again took my leadership to near 0. He then fired with an HQ crisis suit and 2 body guards of some kind at my immortals. He said they each had 2 or 3 weapons (cant remember how many) and ended up doing massive amounts of damage to the immortal squad with my overlord in it killing the OL and 7 immortals leaving 1 alive. I made some RP saves and half the squad stood back up. any ways, with what was left of his army he managed to spread out enough kills across my forces that my destroyers, and 2 squads of immortals had to take morale checks at 0 leadership because of all the marker light tokens. needless to say they all ran. then my turn comes around and he says the leadership debuff is still in effect so i have to try to rally with leadership 0. they all ran off the board. I still won the match only thanks to my doomsday cannon and the doomscythe that later came in and ran a fire warrior squad off his only objective. Now my question is are tau really that scary to face? forcing units off the board first round and massacring units with 3 crisis suits? the crisis suits i can probably see being fair but the leadership debuffs were insane. I know nothing about Tau and dont have access to the codex, so how do marker lights really work and how do you face something like that and his crisis suits?

You can't have 8 markerlights in a fire warrior squad full stop.

Assuming what you are saying is accurate, it's just not possible to have that many markerlight sources going off from what you are saying was firing.

The markerlight is an actual weapon that gets fired by itself and should be announced.

Hmmm... he said you only need one to mark the unit and that the hits from the fire warriors put tokens on. Me being the laid back guy I am just went with it

He probably was using pathfinders. He could get a lot of hits with pathfinders and they all have marker lights.

blindseer03 wrote:
Hmmm... he said you only need one to mark the unit and that the hits from the fire warriors put tokens on. Me being the laid back guy I am just went with it

Then yes, he cheated.

The markerlight is a gun that puts a single token on when it hits. Then those tokens can be expended by other squads later. To put 8 tokens on, 8 markerlights have to hit.

How'd you charge on the first turn with Scarabs?

And those can be used to drop leadership to zero? wow


Automatically Appended Next Post:
the tables were a little smaller then usual so the TO set them up the way he felt was right, with 12 inch deployment zones, which left i believe 22 inchs in the middle. moved my scarabs up 12 inch and then rolled 11 for my charge range

Yeah he cheated A LOT! Markerlights can be taken for a sergeant of a FW squad and he fires with it instead of his main weapon (it does no damage). Pathfinders can all have markerlights but again 1 shot per guy that does no damage it is also a heavy weapon.

As for the Ld debuff it applies ONLY applies in his shooting phase and ONLY to pinning tests not all morale tests.

Crisis suits can fire 2 weapons if they have a multitracker never more than 2.

u always pass leadership tests on a roll of ones btw (cant be modified any lower) just so you know

Markerlights can drop leadership to the point where you autofail pinning tests, even for fearless units. It doesn't lower leadership.

The guy was probably using firewarriors to count as pathfinders, I think.

Either he wasn't experienced playing, thought he knew the rules or was actually cheating, next time if you have a moment during his turn just ask to read his codex, if he turns you down feel free to grab a judge.

 juraigamer wrote:
Markerlights can drop leadership to the point where you autofail pinning tests, even for fearless units. It doesn't lower leadership.

Fearless units automatically pass pinning tests...

I knew something was up, just seemed to good. I hope he was just mistaken about the rules and not blatantly cheating. I have to let him know if i see him again. as for the double 1's auto pass, i knew about insane heroism, but i've never managed to do it

 pretre wrote:

 juraigamer wrote:
Markerlights can drop leadership to the point where you autofail pinning tests, even for fearless units. It doesn't lower leadership.

Fearless units automatically pass pinning tests...

Yes, they do, but when their leadership is lowered to 0 or worse, they auto fail, and the tau codex superceeds the BRB.

Where does it say that? The Tau codex only says that the penalties are cumulative.

 pretre wrote:
Where does it say that? The Tau codex only says that the penalties are cumulative.

Penalties are cumulative.
Characteristics can reach 0.
A characteristic of 0 means "they have no ability whatsoever in that field".

You can't even roll - for example, with a BS 0 you cannot make shooting attacks that automatically hit.

I believe page 8 of the rulebook for stats, when a stat is 0 and a test is required it auto fails.

Which means a conflict of two BrB rules. Not of the Tau codex vs BrB...

 juraigamer wrote:
I believe page 8 of the rulebook for stats, when a stat is 0 and a test is required it auto fails.

ZERO-LEVEL CHARACTERISTICS
Somecreatures havebeen givena 0for certain characteristics,
which means that theyhave noability whatsoever in thatfield
(thesame isalso occasionally represented bya'-').
Amodel with Weapon Skill '0' isincapacitated; they are hit
automatically in close combat and cannot strike any blows. A
model withnoAttacks cannot strike anyblows in close combat.
A warrior with an Armour Save of'-' has no armour save at all.
If at any point,amodel'sStrength,ToughnessorWounds
are reduced to 0, it is removed from playasacasualty.

No mention of autofail for 0.

Characteristic Tests
Amodel will sometimes be called upon to take a characteristic
test. Such a test can be applied against any characteristic that
the model has, except for Leadership and Armour Save.

AUTOMATIC PASS AND FAIL
When taking a characteristic test, a dice roll of6 is always a
failure, and a dice roll of 1is always a success, regardless of
any other modifiers. However, if the model has a characteristic
of 0or'-' it automatically fails the test.

Note that that is from the Characteristic section which explicitly excludes LD.

Just to add, I believe the tau codex DOES state that markerlights can be used to lower LD to the point where you auto fail the pinning test, however this may be because in 4th ed ld0 was an auto fail, where as now insane heroism applies, so its kindof a tough call.

Bobug wrote:
Just to add, I believe the tau codex DOES state that markerlights can be used to lower LD to the point where you auto fail the pinning test, however this may be because in 4th ed ld0 was an auto fail, where as now insane heroism applies, so its kindof a tough call.

It does not. I checked.

Well consider that it is impossible to charge first turn with scarabs on a Hammerhead. Since both must stat more than 12" from the center line putting them more than 24" apart.

Seems you both played incorrectly, I wont say cheated because, I can not know your intentions.

40k-noob wrote:
Well consider that it is impossible to charge first turn with scarabs on a Hammerhead. Since both must stat more than 12" from the center line putting them more than 24" apart.

the tables were a little smaller then usual so the TO set them up the way he felt was right, with 12 inch deployment zones, which left i believe 22 inchs in the middle. moved my scarabs up 12 inch and then rolled 11 for my charge range

 pretre wrote:

40k-noob wrote:
Well consider that it is impossible to charge first turn with scarabs on a Hammerhead. Since both must stat more than 12" from the center line putting them more than 24" apart.

the tables were a little smaller then usual so the TO set them up the way he felt was right, with 12 inch deployment zones, which left i believe 22 inchs in the middle. moved my scarabs up 12 inch and then rolled 11 for my charge range

I missed that, thanx.

It won't matter pretty soon as we will finally have a new Tau codex beginning of April.

blindseer03 wrote:
then my turn comes around and he says the leadership debuff is still in effect so i have to try to rally with leadership 0. they all ran off the board.

Well that is cheating big time. Markerlights cannot lower leadership like that. All Markerlights do is lower leadership for pinning tests. All other leaderships tests are taken as normal.

Or it may not be cheating and the player may not properly understand the rules...

 pretre wrote:

Bobug wrote:
Just to add, I believe the tau codex DOES state that markerlights can be used to lower LD to the point where you auto fail the pinning test, however this may be because in 4th ed ld0 was an auto fail, where as now insane heroism applies, so its kindof a tough call.

It does not. I checked.

Well the FaQ for Tau says clearly that you can lower leadership to the point of auto fail. So the conflict would come from the argument between auto fail and auto pass. Since auto pass comes from BrB and auto fail comes from Codex and Codex over rides BrB then I would say it is worthy of a FaQ. This happens a lot with multiple rules using words like "auto", "never", and "always". I'm NOT a GW hater, but this has always been a problem, they use these words too liberally. As a Tau player I wouldn't make a fearless unit make a pinning test. The rule for Fearless says they don't take the test in the first place. I'm just playing rules lawyer because it's a slow day at work and they found my back door through the porn filter.

As far as the effects lasting through an entire game turn that doesn't work. It says in the codex that marker lights go away at the end of the Tau shooting phase so the pinning tests are made during the shooting phase morale checks are not. Furthermore they don't effect morale, only pinning tests.

Lastly, as was said before, Fire Warriors can't get marker lights. They can get a max of two drones that could be marker drones, but still that means a cap of two per unit. He may have been using Path Finders, who can get eight marker lights in one unit, but with a BS of 3 they probably wouldn't hit eight times with one volley.

In any event, it sounds like there was a fair amount of misunderstanding in your particular game.

Tetsubo wrote:
Codex over rides BrB then I would say it is worthy of a FaQ.

Codex does not override BRB. This is a misconception based on previous editions. Advanced overrides basic.

As I quoted earlier:

Where advanced rules apply to a specific model, they
always override any contradicting basic rules. Forexample,
the basic rules state that a model must take a Morale check
under certain situations.If, however,that model has a special
rule that makes it immune to Morale checks, then it does not
take such checks - the advanced rule takes precedence.

 Eiluj The Farseer wrote:
It won't matter pretty soon as we will finally have a new Tau codex beginning of April.

That's not gonna change whether or not this player cheated, though, is it?

Seeing as we can't even agree on proper rule interpretations when we have all the resources we need and plenty of time to figure it out, I feel like this is just a case of him not 100% understanding the rule well enough.

I call unintentional cheating