If they possess the ability, can monsters and heroes choose not to use the sweep and reach abilities? Thanks!

rdh174 said:

Well apart from the question of why you wouldn't want to use either of those:

1) The only Hero I can recall with Sweep has to spend 2 or 3 fatigue to use it, so for him its optional.

2) Reach isn't optional, but I don't understand the problem there as you can still hit targets adjacent to you, the target doesn't have to be 2 (or more in RtL) spaces away.

3) For monsters, I don't think Sweep is an optional attack. But again, I'm not sure the problem with that since it only hits friendly figures. The heroes could be standing next to 3 Beastmen, a Giant could make a Sweep attacking covering all of them and it will only hit the Heroes.

Well, there do exist times when it is actually to your advantage to keep an enemy figure alive, such as if they are blocking LOS for another enemy's attack, or if a hero is in a worse-than-death trap and would gladly pay 3 CT for a clean slate and a free trip back to town. And while it doesn't matter for Reach by itself, in combination with Sweep, it could matter.

Neither of those abilities is written as optional, though, so I think you're stuck with them, unless you can somehow remove or negate the source (e.g. don't attack with the Reach weapon).

Thank you for the replies. To explain the reason for the question, in a recent scenario a master giant had all four heroes within his melee range but he only needed to hit two of them to win. These two were adjacent to the giant. One of the other heroes that was two spaces away was dodging. The OL was attempting to avoid the dodge reroll. Thanks again.

Ahhh....that makes sense now. The Giant didn't have any room to step back a space huh?

In the FAQ, they only state that the Blast and Breath abilities are not mandatory, but i guess that the same logic can be applied to all special abilities. Ability means you are "able to" do something. It's turned on by default and you don't need to declare that you are using it.

But in your example, the Giant is sweeping or is not sweeping. He could not sweep only 2 of the enemy figures and leave 1 out.

Well, that's my opinion, not the offical rules.

Ezhaeu said:

I disagree. Abilities are 'on' and may not be turned 'off' unless they are specifically allowed to be. If you specifically are allowed to turn an ability off, then you must declare it is off before you roll the dice.

You cannot extend 'exceptions' logically to everything or the value of 'exceptions' is lost entirely.

Ezhaeu said:

From the way I understand the example, they wanted to turn off the reach and use the sweep, as the two that were not dodging were closer to the Giant.