Black Blood

1. If a mutant with Blackblood is attacked while knocked down, will Blackblood still work? What if the mutant is stunned?

2. The Dwarf Axe rules state "if this warrior is using two weapons that have the Parry special rule, he is allowed to parry two attacks (if his two dice match or beat the two highest Attack dice against him) instead of the normal maximum of one." Does this mean he can roll two dice simultaneously and pick which die parries which attack, or does he have to roll individually and declare which die is parrying which attack?

1.) I'd say yes - it's the blood jetting out that does the damage.

2.) Declare individually which one he is paryring to my mind.

The normal sequence of events is:
1/ Roll to hit
2/ Roll to wound
3/ Roll saves
4/ Remove the wound
5/ Roll injury

If you are knocked down then steps 1/ and 5/ are altered - you automatically hit and the injury is automatically out of action. Black Blood kicks in just after step 4, so I would say yes, Black Blood will work if the mutant is knocked down.

If you are stunned there is no wound loss or anything - you are just automatically out of action. I think this would reflect that as the mutant is stunned those standing over him can carefully slit his throat or something without getting blood all overthemselves.


It is somewhat confusingly worded, but after digging through the tortured sequence of events in the rules the best sequence we can come up with in our circle that still obeys all the rules is this:

1/ Roll attacks
2/ Roll parries
3/ Allocate your highest dice to his highest dice to see which attacks are parried.

As far as we could tell there is nothing in either the Parry rule or the Master of Blades rule that suggests that you have to allocate parries.

Good stuff Lord 0. I like your ruling for Blackblood. That was actually my thought as well, even down to the fluff.

To clarify your ideas on Parry though: I've got the Master of Blades skill, so I can parry on a tie. He rolled a five and a four to hit. My parry rolls are a four and a three. By your ruling, do I successfully parry 1 or 0 hits?

Dwarves is a popular pick in our group so we have had the same issue. This is what we do:

You have 2 parries, both with reroll. You always roll at the highest hit so in your example:
He rolled a five which means you will have to equal or better his five on your first parry. If you do (either on first try or on reroll), your other parry can parry the four on two tries. If you don't your other parry will have to equal or better his five again. Essentially that gives you four tries to beat his highest or two tries on his highest and two on his next highest.
If you think this takes too much time, then instead of rerolling fails, immediately roll two dice and pick the highest (that's statistcally the same as rerolling).

I'd say that black blood works every time you're taken out of action. It's not as if your opponents know that you have caustic blood, why would they take extra care?

DRD1812 wrote:

Good stuff Lord 0. I like your ruling for Blackblood. That was actually my thought as well, even down to the fluff.

To clarify your ideas on Parry though: I've got the Master of Blades skill, so I can parry on a tie. He rolled a five and a four to hit. My parry rolls are a four and a three. By your ruling, do I successfully parry 1 or 0 hits?

In my circle you would parry one. At first we were trying to play as RAW as we could, but it became a bit too much of a wank so now we just play that he rolls his attacks and you roll your parries and you parry what you can. Nobody has to allocate anything and the game goes faster.

We have played that way for some time now and it doesn't seem to be unbalanced. Poweful, but still fun to play against.

As far as black blood goes, the attackers have taken the wounds off to knock the mutant or possessed down so assuming they are *still* ignorant of the danger posed by the blood is assuming too much stupidity on the part of the warrior.

Lord 0 wrote:

In my circle you would parry one. At first we were trying to play as RAW as we could, but it became a bit too much of a wank so now we just play that he rolls his attacks and you roll your parries and you parry what you can. Nobody has to allocate anything and the game goes faster.

We have played that way for some time now and it doesn't seem to be unbalanced. Poweful, but still fun to play against.

As far as black blood goes, the attackers have taken the wounds off to knock the mutant or possessed down so assuming they are *still* ignorant of the danger posed by the blood is assuming too much stupidity on the part of the warrior.

How does that work with the reroll then? Would you in the above scenario reroll the 3? And then you would have to beat the 5? Or could you beat the 4 again?

Not sure what you mean. The attacker does their rolls to hit, and then any rerolls. Once they are resolved the defender rolls their parries and then resolves any rerolls. Once they are done you compare the attacker's dice to the defenders dice to see if there were 0, 1, or 2 parries. As far as I can tell there isn't any need for any special re-roll procedures.

Lord 0 wrote:

Not sure what you mean. The attacker does their rolls to hit, and then any rerolls. Once they are resolved the defender rolls their parries and then resolves any rerolls. Once they are done you compare the attacker's dice to the defenders dice to see if there were 0, 1, or 2 parries. As far as I can tell there isn't any need for any special re-roll procedures.

This is what I mean:
If your opponent hits with 5 and 4. You roll 4 and 3 in your first parry roll. I then assume you only reroll the 3? What number would you have to beat to parry? The 5?

Oh, I see what you mean. If any dice beats any dice then that is a successful parry for that dice.

In your exact example, before any rerolls, you would be successfully parrying the 4. You could reroll the 3 to see if you parried the 5. If you rolled 1-3 the second parry would still fail. If you rolled 5+ then you would have successfully parried both. If you rolled a 4 you would now have the option of re-rolling your *first* 4 to see if you could use *that* one to beat the 5.

This sounds powerful, and it is, but remember that parrying has one significant vulnerability. You cannot parry anything that is 2* your strength or more. When there are significant parriers arround you start seeing more people with DHW and mighty blow.

If you have S3, DHW and Mighty Blow you are hitting at S6 so noone S3 or lower can parry you. Once you get to S4 your +s take you up to S7. With Dark Venom or a Diving Charge you will get up to S8 so anyone S4 will not be able to parry you. Note that Mighty Blow increases your strength when hitting your opponent, not when parrying.

That seems like a pretty solid ruling, Lord 0. Very straightforward.

My only concern is with the rerolls. Specifically, rerolling one die, seeing its result, and THEN choosing to reroll the second die. I don't believe it's in the rules anywhere, but I would postulate a "pick your rerolls" phase that you can't return to.

As far as I know, that rerolling, seeing the result, then rerolling other dice is exactly how the exploration phase works too. It would seem odd to invent a phase just for the parry situation and not for others.

Every group is different and we have played this way for a long time and found it both fun and balanced so that is probably what we will stick with .

Fair counter argument. I can actually recall doing that in the exploration phase myself. We'll have to see how my group responds, but in general I like it.

Something that might help the balance in my group is that everyone generally has one or two people specalise in high-strength attacks for taking out Posessed, rat ogres, trolls, and other big guys are also what you need to counter the awesome parryers. S6 means a S3 dwarf can't parry and S8 means a S4 dwarf can't parry (Mighty blow doesn't help when parrying).