Cover

What were you looking for?

• Take Cover (Combat Action): This action is used to seek cover from attackers, such as by crouching behind a rock, tucking into a doorway, standing behind a tree, or moving behind a wall. Taking cover requires a (Dexterity + Dodge) roll—the Storyteller sets the difficulty according to how easy it is to find and reach appropriate cover.

Cover may be light, heavy, or full.

• Light cover protects a significant portion of the character's body, such as leaning into a doorway or standing behind a waist-high wall.
• Heavy cover protects the majority of a character's body, leaving at most part of the head and an arm and shoulder exposed—shooting through an arrow slit would provide heavy cover, as would shooting around the edge of an ancient redwood tree.
• Full cover protects the character's entire body—standing behind a six-foot-high wall or retreating inside of a building are examples of full cover.

Cover raises a character's Defense against attacks by 1 for light cover or 2 for heavy cover. Full cover makes ranged attacks impossible. Attackers at close range also enjoy equal cover against attacks from the character in cover— crossing blades across a fence or around a tree is equally impairing for both parties.

Cover is subject to common-sense limitations. If a character has full cover because he's standing behind a wall, for example, that cover only protects him from enemies on the other side of the wall; he gains no cover bonus against opponents at his back. It may or may not be possible for a character to move without losing the benefit of cover. A character taking cover behind a tree will have to break cover to go anywhere, since he can't take the tree with him; one taking cover behind a waist-high stone fence, on the other hand, can freely range up and down along the fence without losing his cover.

Attempting to keep an opponent who's in cover at short or longer range while circling around him to obviate his cover requires a number of movement actions determined by the Storyteller—generally, the farther away an opponent is, the longer it takes to circle around to flank him.

• See also Combat: Movement Actions