Wise Turtle Publishing

Perhaps I'm just confused and just need to look at the book again, but based on a prior thread, it sounds like you need to take an action just to defend yourself. I'm not talking about the "Special Defenses" that take up lines on your sheets; this is just the two-dice default reaction-time defense.

It seems kind of unfair for those with higher initiative counts because if they attack, their Defense value becomes 0 and then the enemies lower in the count could practically gang-rape the person.

So does taking an attack option drop your DEF to 0 for the round or does the default 2 dice take over? If not, is there a way to defend/dodge without taking an action? Cover's nice, but not in a swordfight.

One always gets to defend against an attack with the base 2 dice + modifiers. That's how I've interpreted the rules.

You only need to take an action to defend against attacks with the Rapid Strikes perk (pg. 71).

Otherwise, you roll normal defense against all other attacks...except if you're countering (pg. 81), or doing a Kamikaze strike (pg. 82)...or a Don't Hurt Me maneuver (pg. 83)...you get the idea ~_^

Hope that makes things clearer!

TBP

Thanks for making it clearer, BP.