Basic Defensive Actions

Active Defense   Active defense is when a character takes action to avoid attacks. The three basic forms of active defense are dodges, parries, and blocks.   Blocking   The character tries to intercept an incoming attack with his bare hands (or some other body part) by rolling Dexterity + Brawl.   Humanoid characters wearing heavy armor can block attacks with weapons but their block difficulty is +1 difficulty if they don’t have the Advanced Training Merit: Living Weapon or some kind of supernatural enhanced hand-to-hand attacks.   Blocking projectiles is impossible unless the character has the Advance Training Merit: Arrow Deflector.       Dodging   The character tries to get out of the way of the attack by rolling Dexterity + Dodge against the attackers roll. Characters in an area of effect attack such as a fireball invocation can roll Dexterity + Dodge to mitigate damage. Each success on a dodge reduces a level of damage they have to soak.       Parrying   The character uses a weapon or shield to block or deflect incoming attacks. The difficulty for a parry is normally the base difficulty for the attacking with a weapon, usually 6 but shields often have a lower difficulty as do weapons with a parrying bonus such as the parrying dagger.   Parrying a brawling attack with a weapon can be done but the difficulty goes up by +1. Shields do not suffer a penalty when parrying brawling attacks.   It generally not possible to parry missile attacks unless the character took the Advanced Training Merit.     Defensive Maneuvers in Simple Combat Rounds:  If you have unused actions in a round and you are attack, you may abort your next action in order to perform a block, dodge or parry.   If you elect your action as full defense, you may block, dodge, or parry (choose one) all attacks that occur that round, deducting a single die from your pool for every subsequent attack.     Defensive Maneuvers in Cinematic Combat Rounds:  You can specify your movement action for a block, dodge or parry.  Add up all your successes.  These successes are applied to the first attack against you.  If the first attack misses, any remaining successes carry over to the second attack and so forth and so on.   If you elect your action as full defense, you may block, dodge, or parry (choose one) all attacks that occur that round with your full dice pool.