Hello folks. I play NCA, and I'm fairly new to infinity, 16 games maybe. Last night, on my opponents active turn, he shot at my Locust with a unidron. Now, his legates was a few inches from an objective console, and my thinking was chuck a drop bear up toward the console as my ARO. As far as we could tell in this situation, because I was throwing the DB, this resulted in a FtF roll against the unidron. Correct? Could I just choose to place the DB in BtB, as my ARO, and not participate in the FtF? Thanks in advance!
It wouldn't be an FtF (if you had thrown Drop Bear). Yes, you could also directly deploy Drop Bear in B2B without a roll (similar to a standard mine). Btw. for the next time there's dedicated subforum for rules questions :) https://forum.corvusbelli.com/forums/rules.49/
Yeah, well not just targetless because special dodge smoke is targetless too. It's because both rolls have no effect on each other one, dropping a mine doesn't negate getting shot at. Getting shot at only is negated by shooting and dodging or special smoke dodge. If an assault hacker walked into 8 inches of your tag or something and you Reset while he decides to shoot you both are roll normal rolls. This is because reset only affects hacking attacks or Immo-1 and shooting is only negated by dodges or shooting. If you look at the basic skill descriptions they talk about what ARO's cause face to face roles.
Yeah, sometimes it's very helpful to deliberately avoid the F2F roll, so that you can perform an action with a larger impact and keep the roll unopposed. Your example with the Drop Bear is a perfect one, avoiding action against the model attacking you (the Unidron) so that you can make an unopposed action against a more important model (the Umbra.)
I'd put it differently than "It's not a face to face roll because rolls don't affect each other". This creates circular logic (It's F2F because rolls affect each other, because this is how rulebook tells us to play F2F, with roll being made as F2F because rolls affect each other... okay, I got it, it's F2F because it's F2F ) and therefore isn't helpful. I was banging my head against this kind of answers when I was total noob and had to go with specific rulings until someone provided the answer that made a bit more sense. Problem I have with this phrasing is this: when rolls affect each other during F2F, that is because rules tell us how to play F2F. But we apply them because we already know that this is going to be F2F. The better criteria is to see whether results of trooper's skills in use are going to directly affect the state of the opponent that tries the same to the trooper in question. If both involved models are going to change each other's state given successful rolls - it's F2F. There are some exceptions, for example skills that can be used to create F2F roll because rules of said skill explicitly say so (see Dodge or Reset). Another prominent example would be Discover: upon success Discover affects target's state (cancelling marker state), but nevertheless target shooting back does so on a normal roll. This happens because marker reveals itself with a shot and since Discover doesn't do anything against revealed model, it is effectively cancelled and no attempt to change target's state actually takes place during resolution of that order. As you can see, it's technically not an exception from aforementioned rule of thumb, but it's worth remembering early on that interactions like that exist in order to avoid confusion when figuring out how other F2Fs work. In the scenario with drop bears it's not a F2F because regardless of drop bears landing successfully or not, you don't attempt to change the state of the opponent's trooper with your skill.
