This situation came up where my friends General charged my unit. They issued a challenge which I accepted with my units champion. My lowley spearman sargeant obviously got curb stomped (lol) but now is the challenge over and my lower initiative unit can hit back at his general or do challenges, regardless of outcome, remain until the next turn?
Thanks!
The rules aren’t very clear on this, I think the best interpretation is that a challenge lasts until the end of the round, even if one of the combatants is dead. This is implied in the “to the death” section where it says that, if the combatants are still alive, and the combat is still happening, the challenge continues as well. This implies that challenges last entire rounds, and could last multiple rounds. But it’s not perfectly clear. Seems like this is the intent of the rules, and how it has worked in past editions.
It would create some weird incentives if you could be attacked during a round where you were in a challenge. In your example, it would behoove the general to not kill the champion so that the entire unit couldn’t stab him at lower initiative. It would make you try to bring your opponent down to one wound but stop short of killing them, which seems like an unintended result.
Yeah I feel like that does make sense. It just felt weird having all the rest of my 15 man squad standing around doing nothing. My opponent did mention if your unit could just fight back it would basically remove the incentive to challenge as you’d just get clubbed to death after.
I appreciate your insights I did not know that is how it worked in previous editions.
Yes it’s a little unintuitive when it’s just one character fighting a whole unit. I suppose they are contributing in the sense that they add the rank bonus to the combat resolution. And it’s an advantage to you because you only lose your champ instead of having the general chop up 5 of your lads.
I guess that is true I hadn’t thought of that. I did end up winning technically when calculating the CR which I was not expecting, likely due to the rank bonus.