Wow - not sure what happened when I posted this the first time - it said the server was unavailible, yet posted several times????
Webmaster please delete the other posts!
On page 48, the rules state:
You always assign your battle dice before you make position rolls.
Knowing how your opponents have assigned their battle dice (Attack or Defend) can make a big difference on how you assign your battle dice.
How do you assign your battle dice? In secret?
If not, then who assigns first, and do you allow others to switch some of their dice after seeing how others have assigned theirs?
Here's a simple yet effective way:
The players pick up their right hand dice and hold them in their right hand (fist closed), and do the same with their left hand dice.
The GM allocates his dice to the characters on the table.
The players then show their dice.
Whether you have player v player, or player v GM, this will maintain secrecy.
That's not the way I did it when I played, since I didn't have room to put dice on every NPC sheet I usually had in action. So while the PCs were putting their dice on their character sheets, I just wrote on a piece of paper what my NPCs were doing, and since no-one can read my writing (not that anyone actually tried), this maintained the level of secrecy you're after.
I do it the way Darren does most of the time. It's also okay for everyone to do it in the open and then make changes when they see what someone else did. People can usually fiddle this way until someone says, "enough" and then you go to the position rolls.