If it were the way everything were supposed to work, it wouldn't need to be a special rule, now would it?

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Or it would be listed in the rules as an option. It isn't so quite being silly buggers and trying to pretend that there are precedents in the rules to support this sort of obnoxious power gaming.

Rug's not a power gamer. He's been known to take Arty Companies! And Griffons!
He just thinks outside the usual box.

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Also true, but I didn't want to really entertain the idea that general precepts of the game are hidden in individual army lists' special rules.

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The Apocrypha of Skaros 1.1
Rogue Trader Expedition 0.4
The Horus Heresy 0.5
Night Lords 0.1
My Trade Thread

That's part of the list construction though. The Grots are either added or not at that point, but after that they are part of the formation if added, and if they are not added they can't be later on. However, the use of optional in list construction does not appear to me to have any bearing on the discussion at hand - a modification of a formation after list construction is complete.

I'm not 100% sure how I'd personally go on this one, but on the balance I'd probably be against it - on the one hand you (a generic you, BTW) aren't taking things you've paid for, on the other hand by not taking those things you allow the formation to do things it was not designed for and not balanced for. And by doing so the implication is that you feel the formation is at leat as capable without the units you didn't take in one or more ways - by induction it would appear that the units left behind would either not affect costing or in fact increase it if the list were desinged for that eventuality.

This is where the 'gamey' feeling comes from, I think: by leaving units behind without compensation, either you are intentionally taking a suboptimal list (unlikely if you are bringing it to a tourney) or you feel the added capabilities of the unit more than compensate for the loss of a few units, which means you should be charged more for the privilege.

In a system with so many distinct lists, adding capabilities like Wraithguard air assaults should be factored in at the design stage - there are enough campaigns and craftworlds to do so. Otherwise it does feel like gaming the system for advantage.

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

My own opinion is that if wraithguard were meant to fly, they'd have wings.

It feels to me like an ingenious way of getting around the intentions of the original list/rules designer, I like epic and would rather play it in what I perceive to be the spirit of the game. That being said, a large part of that spirit is not getting hung on up on awkward technicalities and resolving differences in a fair and amicable way.

Personally, in a friendly (non tourney) match I'd let it go and be interested to see the result/effectiveness. It wouldn't be something I'd do myself but it's not worth shedding blood over. A tournament scenario would be a different story and I would want to be informed of the position on this tactic at/on entry as I'd imagine it could be an unwelcome shock and may leave people feeling somewhat cheated if an interpretation of the rules they disagreed with or hadn't expected swung a game.

After all the rules are available to everybody as it's intended that their use should be fair and open without surprises and I (along with several others it appears) wouldn't be expecting a situation like this after going through them.

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Or be mentioned in the Transport section of the Vampire (hey, they are!)

I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that it's an intentional design issue that Wraithguard aren't supposed to be airdropped when they're actually mentioned in the Vampire stats.

But it would be nice to have some sort of ruling on wether or not leaving units at home at the start of the battle is allowed.

Fair point, I was being a bit flippant. However including waithguard on the transport options could just as easily be a nod towards other future lists which hadn't been designed at the point the stats for the vampire were first published that could feature WG in vamps such as Iyaden. Without the obvious synergies in unit sizes in other lists I would interpret the intention as either allowing guardians to be transported in a vampire or take wraithguard upgrades.

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My point is more that I'm not sure that leaving air-dropped wraithguard out of the Biel-tan list is an actual conscious design decision, rather than something that just didn't come up. I can't remember any discussion about it at all, but it's been a long time and I wasn't necessarily very active back then. Maybe somebody else who was more involved back then knows?

It's probably like the Tacticals entry for Land Raiders: intended for later use, but then SG got shut down.

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My concern is that if Airdropped WG aren't a part of the consious design decision, they aren't costed for the eventuality. They may not have been excluded intentionally, but unless there is a good reason to believe they were intentionally included, their use would not have been a factor in balancing.

That opens a door I don't want opened - the ability to use a list outside of the assumed constraints. It would make balancing new lists an even longer process than it is, and would virtually require that existing lists be gone over with a fine tooth comb to allow for any eventuality not specifically excluded, instead of only those that are specifically included.

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.

In some ways, I am not sure that this suggestion actually is operating outside the lists constraints. The point is that Eldar do have air-transport options which are unavailable to other lists. However, most Eldar formations are explicity prohibited from garrisoning, which is the other occasion where people might want to discard units at the start of a game.

Also I do not think this is a 'thin end of the wedge' issue. There are very few cases where discarding units would be willingly exploited in other lists; doing so would be folly. Players are usually very reluctant to discard units that have been paid for, not least because they have built the list with some form of strategy in mind, and discarding units would be detrimental to that strategy. For example, no-one would discard all but one Leman Russ from a formation to allow that last tank to garrison.

As for this example in the Eldar, I think there are already sufficient constraints in the lists and general make-up of the Eldar that will prove it to be a sub-optimal choice. This is mainly because the Eldar work best when counter-attacking their opponents, moving after the opposing army has been committed to a particular course of action. Committing the Eldar army to this strategy with a single Guardian formation costs 800 points to planetfall, is hard to plan and unlikely to sway the battle significantly; while planetfalling more Vampire / Guardian formations gives the opponent more time to counterattack and destroy that section of the Eldar army piecemeal (and if the Eldar elect to fly on instead, they risk destruction by AA as well). I might add that while the Eldar do have Storm Serpents to deliver the same formation to the same kind of area on a battlefield, I have rarely seen it work successfully for exactly the same reasons.

The fact you can already get the same effect for close to the same price without resorting to the controversial method of leaving units behind means that this particular case adds nothing to the army, and while there are few situations you would want to try such a method, it would still add a great deal of effort to playtesting to ensure abuses were not unbalanced.

Take Cadians. If I want to fit a Kasrkin Company into a single Stormlord, I have assumed that the only way to do that is to have the Stormlord be the only upgrade. Allowing units to be dropped means I need to consider the effects of every possible combination of units that would be allowed. Some are easy to rule out; I don't feel the need to see how adding an Infantry Platoon and dropping the excess units would affect balance. But would paying +25pt for a single Battle Psyker stand and dropping a Kasrkin stand be as or more effective than a straight company? What about two? What about adding Sabres for AA and dropping a Sabre and a pair of Kasrkin stands to maintain transport? Each of these cases needs to be considered during development.

The question for me becomes: does the ability to leave units behind add enough to the game that it is worth the extra permutations that need to be considered at the design stage, lengthening an already long devlopment time and adding more potential pitfalls to a process that can be divisive as it is? If it does not, then it should in my opinion not be allowed by default.

It's perfectly reasonable to allow such oddball formations in a scenario or by agreement before a friendly game, but I don't feel they add enough to an already rich game to allow them in tournament play or in pickup games, i.e. to add the ablity to the core mechanics of the game.

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SG

Ghost's Paint Blog, where everything goes that isn't something else.