One could argue that you should never put suicidal troops on tall buildings and that a fall is never guaranteed to kill until after dice have been rolled.
I agree in part with that. With the difference I would count the whole vertical movement as part of the declared movement path. A 8" wall counts as 8" of climbing and another 8" of jumping/climbing on the other side. If you count falling distance as free, then you start having climbing plus model climb up a wall and jump the other side as a 1st MOV value inches jump can cover an infinite downward distance. And even further, you'll never jump down cause you can move further ahead by doing a 30" forward jump (of which you only cover your 1st MOV before falling to the ground), and that is an unreasonable way, from my perspective, to calculate movement path.
Umm... skill declaration is forced based on the orders you actually need to get to the target, not the possible distance you can declare (and fail to attain). A Climb+ model would only need to Jump from the building it would net them a quicker route than a MOV+MOV, meaning as long as they stay on the first floor they should be fine.
Neither of those is guaranteed to kill you. You can dodge, they can miss, you can pass armor saves, etc. A fall from a high enough can result in a DAM 20+ hit that is literally impossible to save against.
Spend the order to cancel the impetuous movement. Saved. (Also, what is your X-Imp troop doing 9"+ above the ground anyway?) We've (forum users in general, not necessarily us in particular) had this argument before. I don't think either of us are budging on this one.
Is it a FAQ then? Does an impetuous trooper have to fall to its doom if its a shorter path? I thought this was IJW confirmed as yes?
Yeah. That's the freaking point of Extreme Impetuous. You don't have full control over what the trooper is doing, which is why they have a huge points discount. If a route will take less Orders, that's the route you MUST take, regardless of how dangerous it will be. (Not in response to MindwormGames) To echo what other posters have said, why are Extreme Impetuous troopers being deployed where they may have to jump off? That's entirely within the player's control - if you don't want them jumping off anything, don't place them where that's going to happen.
I don't think it's something that really comes up super often - it's more that people find it immersion breaking to be told that there could be situations where a trooper is so excited to get into melee that they jump to their own death.
Replace "excited" with "hold my beer." They run at machine guns and mines and don't take cover, ever. And you are convinced they will pause and consider the safest path? Which of these options is immersion breaking? Which back to my earlier point would suggest they will jump the wall to save an order, even with the potential for a fall.
When I said "some people" I included myself. I find the two cases very different, for the reasons I mentioned in my earlier post.
In the interest of not having to link to dead threads back and forth, we should get a stickied topic where you outline impetuous movement requirements as you see fit. It would save a lot of time, these rules come up fairly frequently as needing clarification.
Quick reminder that while @ijw usually has something better than an educated guess and remembers offical rulings from half a decade ago he isn't CB taff and probably can't do what you are asking for his own sanity's sake. Especially now that the old Palanka rulings are as good as dead with the old forums shutting down for good and will be hard to use as reference unless someone wants to port them to this joint. Personally I think the risk of dying to AROs is and should be the biggest downside of (Ex) Impetuous. Thus I'd strongly advocate to assume some common sense on the Impetuous Trooper in case of fairly even Order cost towards the closest target. However if you've put your Daturazi Prone on a roof and jumping clearly is the fastest way with no argument, you better accept he is going to take some fall damage unless you cancel the Order. Biggest problem for me remains how to determine the "least Orders spent" path properly. Especially with the Move+X(Smoke/Shoot/Dodge...) option providing a legal "loophole" to circumvent a full distance Move-Move already. Having that option readily availble to cut movement on the ground short is the best indicator we have that Impetuous might not be intended to make troops act suicidal. Or simply that the rule wasn't thought through till the very end and might need a second look from official side. For now you need to be good at guessing and Impetuous troops can definitely actively try to kill themselves. Details beyond that are a bit wonky.
Move + everything you listed makes more sense than Move + Idle. That one never made any sense to me and I thought people were trying to pull a fast one on me the first time they did it.
I mean, there's no requirement for someone to have attacked you before you declare a dodge. So even if you don't idle, you can always dodge nothing.
I always considered impetus to be more of a not so well trained troop rather that suicidal. It's not that they charge into machine gun fire but more about not having the tactical awareness to consider the fact that there might be a machine gunner covering where they want to go. Similar with cover. Cover in Infinity isn't just about being covered, it's about actively using terrain to cover yourself and a less trained troop might not have the tactical awareness necessary to do that. All this of course rimes badly with requiring it to jump to it's death to save a few inches of movement.
Except designated targets, civilians, are trained enough to use cover. Impetuous truly is suicidal. Or atleast it is a rage so great they no longer care about their own life.
