Getting back to play after several years off. Two questions.
The first simple and mechanical. Is it correctly understood, that if a character who has 2/1/1 action is playing against a char with 1/1/1 actions in Fight!
The first character can script a great-strike and not be countered by his opponent. The solution to the char with one action in this case would be to take the offense in the first action to somehow disrupt the great strike preperation right?
The second, somewhat more tricky including a guilty admission from a GM. I have somewhat a difficulty of making rutine tests for my players.
I seem to take “Say Yes” to the extreme to where it is only the difficult to impossible odds where the players have to roll.
Any tricks to the trade?
I have noticed with low exponent skills routine tests can be very hard to get. Once you get high exponent skills they become the only test you make. You should be using Just Say Yes liberally. You should also be handing out situation advantage dice liberally as well. (So long as it makes sense.)
Best advice I can give you is to talk with your players and make sure they know all the ways they can add to their dice pool. Because if they are not making the effort to lobby for advantage dice, or making use of relevant FoRKs or Helping Dice then it is just as much their fault as it is yours. The biggest thing that gets overlooked is the use of Working Carefully which can be found on page 29. Also, use linked tests. The extra dice from those can go a long way as well.
As for your first question. I believe ( and I could be terribly wrong) that if Avoid was scripted it will still work to counter the great strike. Don’t take that to heart though, and if I am wrong I am sure someone more knowledgeable than I will come round to correct me.
I believe that actions match up exactly, so the second player’s action would never correspond to the unleashing of the Great Strike.
Also worth noting: that Great Strike can come in one of three places: 1/1/2, 1/2/1, or 2/1/1. So you have to plan around it, and/or cause a Steel test first.
For low-ob tests, just remember to keep an eye out for stuff that’s easy, but could still have interesting results if the players manage to screw up.
For example, “Yes, you COULD pick the low-hanging fruit from the sorceress’s magic garden, but if you fail the ob 1 Perception test, you’ll grab a fruit that’s gone rotten on the branch and take a bite before you realize. I’ll leave it to your imagination what might happen to you if you eat the Fruit of Immortality and Wisdom after it’s gone rotten!”
I had a more mundane example in another thread about Circling up a beggar to help when there’s plenty of beggars around who’d do anything for a coin, but you might just get the one who would rather go for your throat with a sharp rock.
Say Yes has nothing to do with how easy the task is - just how relevant and interesting. It might strike you as a waste of time to go through the motions if the players have so many dice they’ll almost certainly succeed, but I, for one, have rolled all failures on as many as nine dice.
Edit: Here are a couple old threads that dealt with this issue.
Having higher reflexes is a huge advantage in Fight, especially the difference between 3 and 4+ because of what you noticed: the second action in a volley is always unopposed. Set/Great Strike is fine, but it leaves you open on that first action to whatever the slower guy can do to mess you up. What’s really dangerous is just a regular Strike in the second action after something safe and conservative in the first. That makes it a lot harder to do anything to prevent that Strike from going off as planned.
But yes, the best defense against a higher Reflexes foe is often to hit hard and fast. And remember that wound penalties will start dragging those Reflexes down!
Routine tests stop mattering when players have high skill, but SeaWyrm’s advice is great. Remember to have players roll for easy things too so they can get routine tests. And it’s also on the players to make sure to use help and FoRKs to get enough extra dice to make tests routine if they need to. BW lets players do a remarkable job of deciding just how many dice they feel like rolling.