So this came up in a recent game playing MO where a hospitaller wanted to fail guts and drop prone after being shot. He had courage from joan so i assumed he could do so but after the game I was looking through the n4 pdf and found that courage has changed to pass any guts roll rather than choose the outcome in n3. Religous states you pass guts checks and must roll to fail. What do the rest of you think does this still let you choose or do we need to roll?
RAW - I'd say that Religious and Courage don't interact anymore. Courage allows trooper to automatically pass Guts Rolls; Religious troopers automatically pass Guts, and must pass a WIP roll - which isn't described as a Guts Roll - to fall back. The fact that there's almost no troopers with both Religious and Courage - I've found only Varangians, Rasyats, and Taryots - suggests that this was intentional.
The Maghariba also has Religious + Courage. If they don't interact, what is the point of having Religious + Courage on the same model? You could delete the Courage skill from the profile to reduce text space and as far as I can tell the model would function identically. (And TBF it mostly works the other way, too; if they do interact, Religious is just a skill that reads 'During retreat, this model cannot voluntarily abandon the battlefield'.)
Doing a search of the PDF... Courage has a side effect, being immune to the effects of Stun ammunition (rule in the Stun ammo rules) Three different skills are immune to the effects of Retreat: Courage, Religious, Veteran. But they each differ by how the generated orders end up. At least according to the reference chart on page 176. It's three overlapping skills, even after the N4 skill reorg.
Maghariba Guard still has Courage and Religious. I was slightly confused, but they do not interact poorly like in N3 so I guess it doesn't effect anything.
