How do counters work?

[arxhon]

How do counters work? I did a search, and couoldn't fnd anything in the 3+ pages of returns, so i apologize if this question has come up before.

I tried them out on the combat simulator, but i'm not much closer to figuring them out.

I understand the activation cost, the "stealing" of successes, but i'm not sure about the table 3.4.  Do you get an "extra" attack for successfully performing a counter?

Or do you simply get the bonus dice for the next exchange and have to attack the area rolled on table 3.4?

[Valamir]

The second.  When you successfully counter you make an attack on the next exchange adding the bonus dice earned from the first exchange.  But rather than choosing a location to attack as for a normal attack, you randomly roll to determine where the opening was that your counter just exploited.

[Brian Leybourne]

Remember also that the counter works out the bonus dice differently. With most maneuvers it's your defense successes minus the attackers successes, but with the counter you get the attackers successes in bonus dice as long as you had more successes than that for your defense roll.

So, if you roll 8 defensive successes and the attacker gets 6 successes, with most other maneuvers you would get 2 bonus dice (8-6) but for counter you get the full 6.

Brian.

[arxhon]

Great, thanks a lot guys. :-)

[Spartan]

The second.  When you successfully counter you make an attack on the next exchange adding the bonus dice earned from the first exchange.

I'm sure this has been covered in the past (can't find it at the moment), but what about a "tie" in the counter attempt?  It's technically a successful parry, but in ties the initiative goes to the original agressor.  I've been playing that a "tie" in the counter attempt has no additional effect... it's just like any other tied parry.  Am I playing this right?

Also, one of the counter results is a grapple... it strikes me if you roll a grapple, you'd better pray your opponent doesn't have any CP left... he can ignore the grapple and whack you, even with the CP penalties from a successful grapple if he's good enough.  Has this happened in anyone's experience?  My TROS player doesn't have the spare CP to counter very often.

-Mark

[Ashren Va'Hale]

yep thats right, and as far as the grapple goes I have only gotten into a grapple a few times and it rarely has happened that my character would grapple the opponent and have the opponent attack since I usually did grapple to trap or grapple to throw which would preempt him from successfully executing a simultaneous strike and if he did try it, well, hope you win the contest of reflex and your blow lands first and kills his remaining combat pool (or preferably the opponent for that matter).