Quickie question, peeps: I assume that the Block & Strike maneuver requires a neutral stance to perform?
Nope. It’s an Aggressive maneuver. Go to town behind that shield!
Wait, really? So, can you not allocatr extra dice to the block portion, or something?
You can allocate your skill dice between strike and block however you’d like, just like Counterstrike.
Hm. Seems like cheating, somehow, to get those extra 2D AND be able to block.
Does it list aggressive / defensive maneuvers in BWG?
Well, if I remember correctly, the block half of B&S gets penalized because you’re in aggressive stance, so you come out behind.
There’s a reason why people use shields in real life.
Please someone confirm this with a page number. To do this seems awfully complicated. It’s not a “Block” action and a “Strike” Action. It’s a single action called “Block and Strike” and is an Aggressive action. I could totally be wrong, though, and often am. (See my sig.)
p. 445 has the rules for Aggressive Stance. It doesn’t say you get a bonus to “Aggressive Actions” (I can’t find that term anywhere.) It says you get +2D to Strike and Great Strike and +2Ob to Block and Counterstrike.
So either B&S gets neither bonus nor penalty from Aggressive Stance since it is its own action and not covered by the stance rules, or it gets both bonus AND penalty if you treat it as a block and a strike.
I remember seeing on these forums in Revised that it got the bonus and penalty. I don’t know if it was intended for that to change.
This is why page numbers are good. My mind is a muddled-mess of rules stretching back to the beginning.
Shows me that I shouldn’t post things at work while I get confused between BWR and BWG. Yeah, in BWR (if I remember correctly, apparently all my copies are on loan right now) B&S was an aggressive action with a special caveat that the block half got the Ob penalty. Or something like that… I do remember that it was marked as aggressive, and I do remember that there was something about penalties. Yeah!
Re-reading the stance rules in BWG, they are a lot more explicit about what gets bonused and penalized than before. It used to be (IIRC) “Aggressive actions get a bonus, defensive actions get a penalty” and now it actually says which actions get bonused and penalized. Way clearer! Go book!
Ok. So, are we saying that Block / Strike simply gets no bonus or penalty?
Because the +2D, +2 Ob also makes sense to me…
Yes, B&S is unaffected by stance by virtue of it not being mentioned in the “change stance” move set.