Whatever mayhem your characters face, combat plays out in action turns, as described in Initiative and Movement.
All players roll their initiative to see who acts when, and then handle those actions on a turn-by-turn basis. From that point, each combat turn gets divided into three phases:
Combat turns typically last about 3 seconds in game-world time. For the Awakened, however, time is a toy in the hands of brawling gods.
As hostilities begin, each player involved makes an initiative roll. The highest initiatives go first, with the lower ones following behind them.
When guns fire and spells fly, the dice pool you employ depends upon what your character is doing that turn:
For the specific difficulties and results involved, see the various combat maneuvers. Weapons, combat circumstances, hazards, and fighting maneuvers are summarized on the Combat System Charts.
A character who doesn’t want to get hit with an attack has several options, all detailed below. These defensive maneuvers use the successes you roll to take away from the successes rolled by your opponent. (See Resisted Actions in The Book of Rules.)
Now, no self-respecting person wants to get hit. That’s why you roll attack rolls to strike other characters. A defensive maneuver, however, represents a character who’s making an extra effort to avoid injury. You can declare a defensive maneuver at any point in your turn, so long as your character has an action left to perform that turn. If you had already declared a different action for that turn, the Storyteller may have you make a Willpower roll (Difficulty 6), or else spend a Willpower point in order to change your character’s mind in the blur of combat.
You can perform a dodge, block, or parry as part of an attack — parrying a sword and then sliding your blade up your opponent’s own, for example, or dodging around a corner and then taking a shot at your enemies from behind cover. In each case, you need to divide your dice pool, as mentioned in The Book of Rules. A desperate defense, on the other hand, reflects all-out escape. A character can’t do anything else that turn.
To have your character bob and weave zirself out of harm’s way, make a successful Dexterity + Athletics roll. The Difficulty depends upon the nature of the attack and the distance that the dodging character wants to cover during that dodge. Dodging a hand-to-hand strike is easy (Difficulty 5), but dodging firearms at close range is far more challenging (Difficulty 9 or 10).
Each success on this roll subtracts 1 success from the attacker’s roll; thus, the dodging character needs to roll at least as many successes to avoid that blow as the attacker rolled to inflict it in the first place. Dodging requires a certain amount of room to move. If you’re in a tight doorway, it’s pretty hard to dodge.
If your character has both the Acrobatics Skill and enough room to use such moves, you could use Acrobatics instead of Athletics for a dodge attempt.
Many mystic attacks (fireballs, mind-crushes, etc.) can be dodged if the target sees them coming. For details, see Dodging and Resistance in Casting Magick, Step by Step.
To use a body part to deflect a blow, roll Dexterity + Brawl. The Difficulty depends upon the attack but often ranges between 6 (for a fist) and 8 (a table). Like dodging, each success scored by the defender removes 1 success from the attacker’s attempt.
Normally, only hand-to-hand attacks can be blocked. A martial artist might try to block incoming spears, other thrown objects, or arrows with a Dexterity + Martial Arts roll (Difficulty 8), but most folks are pretty much screwed in that department. Normal humans (like mages) cannot block Lethal or Aggravated damage attacks like swords, claws, and so on unless the character in question is wearing armor, using Life magick to harden zir skin, or employing either Martial Arts or Do to reflect specialized combat training. Even then, certain attacks — like chainsaws — can’t really be blocked without losing an arm in the process. For the results of trying to block a Lethal damage weapon, see Rebound Attacks, below.
When using a weapon to block an incoming attack, roll Dexterity + Melee. In other regards, a parry works like a block.
Rebound Attack: If the attacker uses a brawl attack that gets blocked by a parry (like, say, a punch blocked by a knife), then the attacker probably hurts zirself. To reflect that predicament, have the defender roll a rebound attack if the successes xe rolled to block the attack outnumber the successes xyr opponent rolled while attacking xem.
A rebound attack uses a typical Dexterity + Melee roll. The character who was blocking gets to use xyr full dice pool, though, as xe wasn’t actually attacking xyr opponent. If successful, this rebound attack scores the usual amount of damage... and then adds 1 more success for each success that outnumbered the attacker’s roll. (A parry that scores 2 successes more than necessary, for example, would add 2 more successes to that rebound attack.) The moral of this story: don’t try to kick someone who’s got a chainsaw in xyr hands.
If all you want is to get the hell outta Dodge, you can have your character perform a desperate defense. In this case, ze’s putting everything ze’s got into getting away from harm — as noted earlier, ze can’t do anything else that turn.
For a desperate defense, roll your character’s Dexterity + Athletics; again, if ze’s got Acrobatics and enough room to employ them, you can use that Trait instead. Your character gets to use zir full dice pool against the first attack, but ze must subtract 1 die from each subsequent attack that turn because it’s harder to escape several attacks than it is to duck a single assault.
Essentially a mystic dodge, countermagick uses Arete to undo a rival mage’s attacks. For more details, see Countermagick in Casting Magick, Step by Step.
If and when an attack hits the target, it’s time to figure out how badly that target gets hurt. The attacking player rolls zir dice pool against Difficulty 6, and each success inflicts 1 health level’s worth of damage.
Especially successful attacks inflict more damage. For each success above the first one that the player scores on zir attack roll, ze adds 1 more die to the damage dice pool. (3 successes on the attack roll would add 2 more dice to the damage roll, and so on.)
Remember, though, that dodges and blocks subtract successes; a character who rolls 5 successes on an attack roll but has 3 taken away by a dodge inflicts the damage from only 2 successes (1 extra die), not from 5, even though ze still hits zir opponent.
As noted under Health and Injury, attacks inflict one of three types of damage:
Again, for details about these three types of damage, and the process of recovering from their effects, see the Health and Injury page.
Pain adds up. A character who takes severe damage on top of minor injuries winds up getting depleted quickly unless ze manages to recover. So when you’re noting damage down on your character’s Health chart, the most dangerous types of damage go on top of that chart.
When recording Bashing damage, put a slash at the top of the Health chart; if you take Lethal damage, then turn that / into an X by writing another line through it. If you take Aggravated damage after that, then put another line through the X, turning it into an asterisk.
According to the rules presented in other World of Darkness books, those marks are cumulative; if you add that X or asterisk to the top of your Health chart, then you’d add another / to the empty square underneath the marked ones. Unlike vampires and werewolves, however, mages don’t usually regenerate their injuries, and so 2 or 3 blows can take a mage out of action unless ze’s incredibly fortunate. Therefore, consider it a Storyteller’s judgment call. Your troupe may elect to simply keep the marks as they are — turning slashes into Xs or asterisks if need be but not also adding new slashes to the empty boxes on the track. Considering the wound penalties associated with injuries (again, see Health and Injury), that’s a reasonable option for mages in combat.
Life’s tough, but living things can be pretty tough too. In game terms, characters who take damage can try to soak it before subtracting health levels from those injuries.
To soak damage, roll your character’s Stamina against a Difficulty determined by the damage:
Each success on a soak roll reduces the damage by 1 health level. If the soak roll eliminates all of the successes scored against a character, then that character takes the hit without getting hurt at all.
Optional Rule: Cinematic Damage
Mages can be unusually badass, especially if they’re martial artists, mercenaries, cops, Templars, Black Suits, and so on. And in the movies, badass people manage to shrug off gunshot wounds, burns, and other things that would, in real life, send them to the hospital or morgue. Therefore, the Cinematic Damage option makes an allowance for such people.
Under this optional rule, human characters may soak Lethal damage with a soak roll at Difficulty 8. This doesn’t mean that bullets bounce off the character’s chest but that the damage comes across as the proverbial flesh wound, rather than as gaping cuts and shattered bones.
Depending on the tone of your chronicle, the Storyteller may restrict this ability to characters with a Stamina Trait of 3 or higher; that way, you don’t have grandmas soaking shotgun blasts, but tough sorcerers can stand up to a dude with a switchblade. Even so, what’s good for the mage is good for the mortal. If your group chooses to employ the Cinematic Damage option, then all suitable human characters should get it — not just player characters. (For an additional option, see the Too Tough to Die Merit in Merits and Flaws.)
Regardless of Stamina, this option does not allow mages to soak Aggravated damage. Unless vulgar magick or certain types of armor are involved, mages cannot soak Agg damage, period. That’s why it’s called Aggravated — because it’s as scarily fatal as an angry werewolf’s claws.