Author Topic: Help! Understanding maneuvers  (Read 978 times)

Offline Farbot

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Help! Understanding maneuvers
« on: July 25, 2011, 03:56:38 AM »
I'm new to this system and I'm having a little trouble with the concept of maneuvers. I understand that they are used to place a temporary aspect onto an opponent and that it is NOT an attack. But what I'm not getting is what sort of time frame that a maneuver occurs in. Once a successful maneuver is completed and the aspect is placed, can the PC immediately roll for an attack afterwards? Is it treated like a half action? or does the PC have to wait for their turn to come back around before they can tag the aspect for free? This is not really explained in the book very well...

Any help would be much apreciated, my game group is new to the system and I'm pretty new to GMing on top of that! :/
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Offline Sanctaphrax

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Re: Help! Understanding maneuvers
« Reply #1 on: July 25, 2011, 03:58:18 AM »
Welcome to the game and to the boards.

A maneuver is a full action. But the tag becomes available immediately.

Does that make sense?

Offline crusher_bob

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Re: Help! Understanding maneuvers
« Reply #2 on: July 25, 2011, 04:26:09 AM »
A maneuver normally takes a full action, just like an attack does.

Aspects generated by maneuvers generally only last for a scene, or a few minutes at most.
Remember that 'fragile' aspects go away when they are first used, while 'sticky' aspects can be used again by paying fate points.

Remember that the free tags generated by successful maneuvers can be passed to anyone as a non action.

So a combat round might look like:
Character 1: I maneuver against the bad guy

Character 2: I maneuver against the bad buy.

The bad Guy: I attack character 3, and hit with a margin of success of 1.
Character 1: I pass my tag to character 3, so he can use it to add +2 to his defense and make the bad guy miss.

Character 3's turn:
Character 2: I pass my tag to character 3.
Character 3: I Attack the bad guy, and use the tag from Character 2 to get a +2 on the attack.

------------------

That's one of the ways that a team of characters can fight a single bad guy much more powerful than them.  They generate a large pool of tags, and then can pass those tags to the party member under attack, or stack them up with one character (usually the hardest hitting) when that character rolls his attack. 
Because it is much better to hit with a single powerful attack that rolls over the stress bar and generate consequences than for several attacks to just get soaked up by the stress bar, this 'FORM VOLTRON!' combat tactic can rally help against tough baddies whose catch you can't satisfy.

Note that you can use whatever skill the GM and other players will let you get away with to maneuver, so even non-combat characters can be very helpful in combat by generating free tags.

Offline Farbot

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Re: Help! Understanding maneuvers
« Reply #3 on: July 25, 2011, 04:32:34 AM »
Wow! Thanks for the explanations :) That really helps clear things up and thanks for the welcome! Forums are also kinda of a new thing for me too. But it seems like a nice place around here :)
Who who? What what? Boy? Boy? I see no boy!