AoS Can Chaos demons split when close to Saurus banner?

[Furnus]

Hey guys,

I was playing a game of Tzeentch vs Seraphon yesterday.

I had gone full alpha and teleported a (buffed) 40-man block of Saurus Warriors and a 6-man Ripper squad, who all made their charge, into some Tzeentch demon frontlines.

As you may imagine this caused a few battleshocks, especially amoung some pink horrors.

He rolled their battleshock and rolled a 1. Now, normally, they get D6 units back on a battleshock roll of 1, but in this case the unit was within 5" of my Saurus Warriors' banner. This meant he had to add 1 to his battleshock roll.

We then disagreed on whether my banner negated his ability to return D6 models, his argument being, that he had in fact rolled a 1 as required by the wording of the Pink Horror scroll.

Any input?

 

[Crowsfoot]

Looking at the warscroll there is no mention of a unmodified or modified roll so I think he is right as he did roll "1"

I'm not 100% so maybe @Aginor might be able to help.

 

[Aginor]

That's a tough one.

I tend to say that the result of the roll was indeed 1 and your opponent's interpretation is more likely to be correct. There are arguments for both interpretations though.


Here they are, for your viewing pleasure:

Games workshop tends to tell you when they mean unmodified rolls, both in 40k (it is even in the core rules there) and AoS.

Examples for that are the Knight Questor Warscroll, Locus of Shyish (ability in the LoN Battletome), the new Castigator and Sequitor warscrolls, and more.

Especially interesting for that are Demon warscrolls though. For example the one of Plaguebearers.
They have the same ability, but their warscroll says "unmodified".
Bloodletters have the same as the Tzeentch guys, their ability omits the word "unmodified".

The intention seems to be that the Demon player gets rewarded for rolling perfectly.


So as often we have two truths I'd say:
- Rules as written
- Rules as intended

RAW says modified result. Because GW tells you when they mean unmodified.***

***lately at least.

RAI says all demons are very likely meant to be the same in that regard. The newer warscrolls (Nurgle Battletome is newer than the others) have a clearer version and the others just aren't corrected yet.


In my opinion they should be unmodified rolls.

 

[Stevie754]

The ruling is abilities trigger after modifiers, you modified the roll to be a 2 so the ability does not go off.
Similar to giving units that do mortal wounds on a 6 minus 1 to hit, that roll becomes a 5 and the mortal wound ability would not trigger.

 

[ILKAIN]

Per 2 players (one of them Tzeetch) that have been playing Warhammer since the 80's or so (they are our resident old guys at the shop) the roll is a 2 as the way Stevie said it. order of operations is roll, re-rolls, check modifiers, check for ability trigger, do ability.

 

[Furnus]

Just to follow-up on the above. Now with the erreta out, they've corrected the wording to correspond with Plague Bearers:

Page 122 – Pink Horrors of Tzeentch, Icon Bearer Change the last two sentence to: ‘If the unmodified roll for a battleshock test for a unit that includes any Icon Bearers is 1, you can add D6 models to that unit, and no models from that unit will flee in that battleshock phase.’

 

[Killer Angel]

Just to follow-up on the above. Now with the erreta out, they've corrected the wording to correspond with Plague Bearers:

Page 122 – Pink Horrors of Tzeentch, Icon Bearer Change the last two sentence to: ‘If the unmodified roll for a battleshock test for a unit that includes any Icon Bearers is 1, you can add D6 models to that unit, and no models from that unit will flee in that battleshock phase.’

Yeah, they did a good thing specifying that, because frankly the way it was worded it would have been the modified roll.

 

[Aginor]

Yep. And this way all the demons do it the same way as well, which is good.