I missed something from the first post of my WFB 3rd ed retrospective, tournament and friendly games. There is some differential between friendly games and tournament games in the current WFB environment, army composition guidelines/limits, no house rules, tournament referees being the main ones. In 3rd ed the differences are bigger.
A friendly actually has no constraints on army construction barring the two players just agreeing that they’re happy with their opponents army. Equally there are no rules for setting scenery, again just what the players agree. And finally for a friendly game a GM is optional whereas for a tournament game it is mandatory.
In 3rd ed the GM sets the scenery, determines all random events, makes all non-player specific dice rolls and has complete authority to overrule the rulebook. A fair bit more power than a tournament referee. And whilst there isn’t anything to stop players in a friendly game adopting army construction limits and rules for placing scenery, as 3rd ed is written, a ‘proper’ game of WFB is a three-player affair.
A couple of people have pointed out that one of the main effects of moving the Magic Phase up to behind the Movement Phase is that magic can be used to enhance the other phases. Models which have just moved could be moved again using magic and the ensuing shooting and combat phases can be affected by spells in a way they couldn’t if magic was done last.
