stasis and initiative tests

[Nomadic Thunder]

I’ve seen a discussion on social media recently regarding characteristic tests and modifiers, specifically dark angels stasis weapons dropping initiative to 1 and then blind weapons using the initiative drop to force a blind test at I1 so increasing chance of failure.

 

Personally I think this is allowed, however, others argue the initiative check is taken at an unmodified initiative.

 

My second question is whether stasis effects sweeping advances too?

 

What are people’s thoughts on this?

[Allart01]

Stasis reduces your initiative to 1 until the end of the (game) turn, so I think that's what you'll use both for Blind tests and sweeping advances.

Keen to see what other fratres think.

[Slips]

Initiative vs blind is definitely not done against Unmodded initiative otherwise gear like the Ravenguards Infravisor would have literally no downside.

[Nomadic Thunder]

This was my thinking too, nice to see some consensus.

Thanks for the example slips! You’re a wealth of knowledge. I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head.

[SkimaskMohawk]

From what I can tell, the argument of unmodified is that characteristics tests tell you to look at the profile and use the given characteristic. However, the wording for modifying characteristics doesn't say anything about adding or subtracting (or other mathing) the roll; it just tells you to change the characteristic in the proscribed way. So the profile would be set to 1 in the case of the stasis.

[Brother-Captain Gilead]

I had this same question in my gaming group and basically the way it seems to work is that when it comes to blind, the test is just an initiative test and if the initiative is dropped to 1, the test is taken at one. When it comes to sweeping advance, however, the Age of Darkness rulebook states the following: "When a Sweeping Advance is performed, both the unit Falling Back and the winning unit roll a D6 and add their unmodified Initiative to the result." (page 82 on my ebook version of the Age of Darkness rulebook). This makes it pretty clear that even though I personally would love it to work a different way, in practice the stasis effect will not have an impact on any sweeping advances other than potentially making them happen in the first place by making the enemy strike at initiative 1.