Hello there! Still pulling into N4 rules, and I got a daylami shot in the back last night, outside his ZoC, he failed his dodge, but did somehow survive! But then I was told he could not turn to face his attacker on successful ARM saves, is this true?
No. First the Daylami could decide to fail its Guts roll (https://infinitythewiki.com/Guts_Roll) and turn around. Second, the trooper could use Alert (https://infinitythewiki.com/Alert) to turn around if they never got an ARO, but were attacked. EDIT: How did they get a Dodge roll? They usually would not get an ARO.
Sorry I made a mistake, ko dali was in ZoC but outside front arc, and yes Daylami passed guts roll. I figured they would automatically turn to face their attacker so just tried dodging. So what I am reading in this situation is, kind of yes they can turn to face the attacker, but it involves voluntarily failing Guts, in which case they move the gain cover against the attacker and in the process can turn and face.
If he got shot in the back arc outside his zone of control you only get an aro in the case of the trooper having "sixt sense" ea from a 4man link or having the special rule. So in your case you could not have dodged. But if you have to make saving trows and did NOT have a legal Aro, you can change the facing of the trooper after the order ends. The common skill is called Alert. https://infinitythewiki.com/Alert
For Alert, the trooper does not need to have made a saving throw, only to have been the target of an attack (or have a friendly in their ZoC have been the target of an attack) and not have declared an ARO (either by not having a ARO triggered or by deciding to not declare one).
Oh then that changed from N3, my mistake. It used to only be possible if one got hit and had no aro otherwise, the saving throw thing made the hit part clear for me but a non-lethal weapon like "forward observe" should also trigger this. Do I understand you right that you can even alert if the attack failed? Well I scimmed over the text again and yes the attack dould fail and you do not even need to be the one beeing attacked. the more you know N4 things ;D
It worked the same in N3, only needed to be targeted by an attack, not hit. :) Being hit causes Guts Roll, which could also be used as a possibility to modify your LoF.
They can always turn around with a guts move: " If the two previous options are not possible, the Trooper must go Prone, facing in any direction its player chooses."
I'm sorry, but are you sure? The rule says: "The Trooper CANNOT have been activated". "CANNOT" is specially marked and it makes me anxious... I understand this as "it was not possible to be activated". Am I wrong?
Choosing to not declare an ARO means that the model wasn’t activated. To have been activated it must have declared/executed an ARO skill.
It’s not a matter of “was it possible to activate?” If you’re in your reactive turn and you have an ARO and don’t take it, you don’t activate. If you declare an ARO and it gets converted to Idle, you did activate. The important, critical difference is that passing on your ARO opportunity isn’t an ARO.
Literally, this means that trooper CAN be activated, but you chose not to. This directly contradicts the rule that says "CANNOT" be activated. That's what I'm trying to draw your attention to.
It says "cannot have been activated" it does not say "cannot have been able to be activated". Those two are very different grammatically.
With all my respect, "Cannot have been" already means "not have been able". can /kan,kən/ verb: to be able to; have the ability, power, or skill to https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/can
The sentence structure tells the reader that there is a strong degree of certainty that the action has been taken (or in this case the negation means it has not been taken) https://commonenglisherrors.com/cant-have-been-couldnt-have-been/#:~:text=While Can't Have (Been,learners find them rather confusing.
From your link: "Expressing the Impossibility of a Past Event As with the Can’t Have (Been), Couldn’t Have (Been) can also be used to express the impossibility of a past event." Both constructions used to express the impossibility of a past event. Can't = impossible. Exactly what I'm talking about. "Impossible" is not something about willing refusal.
Have Been vs. Has Been vs. Had Been: How to Use Each One Correctly - The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation (grammarbook.com) "Have been activated" is in the present perfect tense, meaning it refers to the state, in the present, of having been activated in the past (in this case, at an earlier stage of the Order Expenditure Sequence.) "Cannot have been activated" means that, to use Alert, the unit cannot (in the present - note "cannot" is a present tense verb) be in the state of having been activated earlier in the order. To refer to whether the unit could have been activated in the past, you would use the past tense "could not" rather than the present tense "cannot." So, "the unit could not have been activated" would mean that at the point of declaring AROs, the unit did not have the option to activate.
What? No, that's entirely not how those phrases work in English. Cannot have been activated = the binary choice between "has been activated" ("1") and "has not been activated" ("0") is "0". The model has not been activated yet. This is equivalent to the phrase "MUST not have been activated" (which editorially would've been a much better choice, but CB writing and editing in English is what it is). This answers to a "Has it been activated yet?" check. If negative ("cannot"), the rule applies. Cannot have been able to be activated = there was no option to be activated, the above binary choice did not exist. "MUST not have had the chance to activate" is the equivalent phrase. This answers to an entirely different "Could it have been activated?" check. This check doesn't apply in this case at all. It's only the matter of whether having the option to activate (ARO) and going with IDLE counts as having activated in the ruleset. If it does, it fails the "cannot have been activated" check. If it doesn't, it passes that check.
