To what extent can I put silhouettes around the table and check scenery sizes? Like, can I stick down a silhouette next to any building to check if they can see/vault over an obstacle? Can I stick a silhouette down where I don't have a trooper to check a LOF?
Could you provide some context? What's allowing you to place Silhouette templates around the table in the first place?
Nothing as far as I'm aware, but it is a common practice in my meta so I want to check if this is technically pre-measuring that we'll need to decide to make a house rule out of or abandon. Context is basically; McMurrough wants to move up the table but when deciding path the player plans 3 moves ahead and wants to check if it is possible for him to jump up on a building (is the building more or less than 4" tall basically) and also whether his silhouette will be hidden by the stack of boxes during the jump or if he'll eat some shots from a Moderator Multi Sniper. So at the start of the impetuous move, in the pretext of checking the shortest path, the player measures how tall the building is with a ruler. Then sticks a McMurrough-sized silhouette down near the boxes, a Moderator-sized one where the Moderator stands and peers from the side of the table to see if the Moderator could see McMurrough. Seeing as the Moderator would be able to see McMurrough when he clears the railing, McMurrough's player decides to take the longer and less risky path.
^ that’s very close to asking about “is intent play legal” without explicitly talking about intent. It’s worth thinking about in that context.
Thanks for the clarification, that was really helpful! I'm not happy with the clarity of the Impetuous Skill, but checking the shortest path for Impetuous activations is an N3 concept that doesn't exist in N4, because of all the premeasuring issues with N3 Impetuous. As per the Moving and Measuring rule, you can premeasure for your current movement Skill. There is no permission to check movement beyond that.
Read what he said again. AFAICT @ijw didn’t address the “can you place a SIL down to check LOF in locations that aren’t occupied by a trooper” part of @Mahtamori’s question. I would be extremely surprised if he did, because that’s a key element of the wider intent debate.
[Non-Rules Staff comment] I'm reasonably sure you're aware from old discussions of my personal opinion on intent, in terms of infinitely-fine pie-slicing - it doesn't exist in the rules. In N3 it was constructed from a single misread sentence in the Gaming Etiquette box, that was referring to disrupting Skills you couldn't declare while in LoF (for example Cautious Movement or recamouflaging). That sentence was removed in N4. But in practice it's pretty much a non-issue, based on experience seeing players with drastically different online opinions actually playing against each other.
Honestly I’m not trying to argue one way or another- practically I don’t think it’s an issue either. I’m just trying to establish that in your role as a Rules Staff personage that you haven’t made any comment on whether SILs can be placed in positions that aren’t occupied by a Trooper for the purposes of establishing whether LOF exists or not. The way your previous answer was phrased it dealt with premeasuring movement not with checking LOF.
I'd say forbidding this is unpractical. If they take too much time, simply say to the players to buy a laser-line, place the acrylic Silhouette marker, and flash a line to check height in the whole advance... Personally, I try to spend my deploying time making sure my ARO pieces are properly exposed and my non-ARO pieces are hiding enough...
I tried to avoid the stuff that veered heavily into the intent part of the debate, because I'm curious about the stuff that's not directly related to that and bringing it up has a tendency to poison the water. So, yeah, I'm trying to narrow the question down to just regarding figuring out scenery sizes, potential positional advantages/disadvantages, whether a miniature can actually stand on a ledge or if it is slightly too small before you move them, etc, through using actual game aids to measure.. Being honest, it always felt like we have a tendency to disallow horizontal pre-measure but allow vertical pre-measure all willy nilly, and it's itching me wrong. It's not taking time, nothing about slow play or people being douches. It's actually really quick both in real life and in TTS to drop a silly down and check. Well, faster in TTS, honestly.
I'd say the way to answer this one while avoiding a discussion of intent is: the scenery items exist before the game starts. They're in the local club's storage box or they're assets on TTS, and you can pull them out any time during the day to measure whatever part of them you like. If I try to tell my opponents they couldn't measure them during the game, they should respond with a policy of, before the start of every game, measuring all the dimensions of every scenery item that we plan to put on the table. That'll quickly teach me that it's a lot easier to just let them check in-game for simple questions like whether a given silhouette size can vault this crate or stand on that ledge. (That's my answer without referencing intent. Of course the question is even easier to answer if we acknowledge that Infinity is played by intent.)
This is my take on it as well. Or the terrain might be from one players collection and they're intimately familiar with sizes and heights. Maybe you want to have home ground advantages in your game, but for most I'll try provide the same information or allow my opponent to check.
“Can I vault over that?” or “Can I fit on top of that?” seems like it would fall under the ‘measuring stuff during your movement’ rules, and there’s a definite boundary specified for that in the movement rules.
I disagree. The boundaries are on measuring distance. You definitely can't check "do I have enough movement to reach this ledge," but I think you can check "could an S2 silhouette fit on this ledge." It would make for an incredibly poor game experience to have to guess whether you can fit in a given spot, potentially spending multiple orders to get there only to find that they were all wasted. Especially since it would confer an arbitrary advantage on the player who knows the terrain pieces better. ("Hehe, he's going for that ledge, little does he know he can't squeeze onto it! I found that out last week. Bwahaha.")
Respectfully, I think that's making a few too many assumptions. I don't measure all terrain for size, nor necessarily memorize them, and there's plenty of times when we're playing on terrain owned and made by someone else in the tournament as it's common around here for people to have a set or two of tables that they bring to tournaments. Anyway, more generally, my issue is how this always feels like it tends to set up situations where you're essentially allowing pre-measuring as long as you don't use a tool intended to measure stuff with. I won't lie and say I don't use information that my opponent leaves on the table to guesstimate better, such as state markers, play mat texture surface, flame templates, and so on, so I'm sort of aware how these things can calibrate a shoddy sense of distance. And, of course, if there are measurements I'm certain of that I think my opponent has use of, then I share them. E.g. a reminder that a flame template is about 8.3" or that the tiles on my table are 12" by 12".
Please remember which edition you’re playing. In N4 you sure as hell do get to ask “Do I have enough movement to reach this ledge?” From the measuring rules: You can measure Movement distances immediately after declaring any Skill with the Movement Label and before determining where the Trooper ends his Movement, always measuring from the same point on the base’s outer edge and underside. The sequence of events is: The player declares a Skill with the Movement Label. Measure to find out which locations the Trooper could reach with that Skill. Declare the final location, and the exact route that the Trooper is taking to reach it. Move the Trooper to the final location. That would put the boundaries on checking vaulting, how wide the ledge is, how far the ledge is away, etc. all in step 2, which is all going to be limited by the movement available. (You can.measure as far as you can move, if it’s out of range you won’t the distance.)
Sure, after you've declared the Move skill. I'm talking about what you can check without declaring a skill. Right, in step 2 you check whether the trooper has enough movement to reach the ledge. That's got nothing to do with whether the ledge is as wide as an S2, which is a general question unrelated to the activation of any specific trooper.
Definitely saves a lot of time. Though I think I'd draw the line at someone measuring the cross-table distance between two vantage points before the game, to see if they were within 32" or so.
