Greg Stolze: Forums

My search skills are inadequate it seems...simple question I'll bet.

In the section on COVER, it gives an example (page 181) where Tud dives for cover with a 2x9 and a 2x1...the 2x1 is too slow to avoid getting hit, and as a result it is reduced to a failure by that hit, leaving him with a 2x9. The archers attacking rolled 3x8, 2x8, and 2x3, with the first hitting 3x8 as noted.

Then, before the other attacks can resolve (because his 2x9 is quicker than the other pairs), he makes it to cover and covers areas 10 and 8, and the book says this is a mistake because he should have covered other areas...the whole thing confuses me...and here's why:

Does the player never see the dice of the NPCs? Is this always behind a screen....if so it might make sense, but if not why wouldn't he have chosen to cover locations 3 and 8, insuring that he's not hit again at all, and at the start of the next round as noted he can shift to other locations...I guess what I don't get is IF you don't roll in secret (and I typically don't) then two things seem to be true:

1) By putting location 8 behind the rock, he actually MOVES the arrow's path into the rock

and

2) Since the next round he can choose 3 areas and MUST choose three, he's in some ways worse off, because he can't base his choices on a roll he sees. He HAS to choose 3 spots at the start of the round, using his whole round.

So is my whole issue because I'm not understanding that NPC rolls are secret? Or am I misunderstanding the rule/example? Is this why he shouldn't have picked 10, because he should have known that none of the SECRET/HIDDEN rolls would be 10s because they would have hit already....as I type this I think it HAS to be based on unknown rolls.

I wrote that with the assumption that rolls would be secret. I never look at anyone else's results, actually. It feels more like an etiquette thing to me. Or maybe it's because my eyesight is only so-so. OR it could be that I usually have enough on my mind that I'm only paying attention to my results, not anyone else's.

That said, I think the system works fine either way. If you roll open, there's the tactical element, and if you roll closed it's a slightly different tactical element. I'm not sure it's going to come up very often.

-G.

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Could it be avoided by requiring a more specific statement in the declare phase, or does that bog things down to much?

If when they declare they are leaping for cover, what goes wrong if you require that they list the areas they plan to cover in order of priority...perhaps placing a number of distinct/different colored dice equal to the potentially covered areas in front of them...

So they are leaping to get behind a bolder that covers 4 areas, they place (from left to right) four dice to show what they're trying to get to safety. If they only roll enough to obscure 3 areas, they get the first three.

You're right that it may not come up very often....and depending on the game I do sometimes hide rolls, but generally it's because I want to be free to fudge them (never to burn the player, but I have been known to have the kobolds miss a bit more frequently when hit points are near zero).