If someone shoots a flamer at you can you try to dodge before you make the agility test or is a flame attack considered something different than a distance attack? I've read the description of the Dodge skill (DH pg 101), the description of the Flame special quality (DH pg 128), the descriptions for flame weapons (DH pg 134) and even the Errata about the Flame special quality (Errata v.3.0 pg 8) and I'm stumped.

I was under the assumption that you can try to dodge it before the agility test but I've been told different and now have no idea. Am I missing something?

You probably didn't need to post this in both the DH and RT sections, it's pretty much the same people who populate both.

I realize that now. I was just trying to be thorough. I'm OCD like that.

When you dodge an attack, you do so after the attack is rolled. It stands to reason that with a flamer, since the attack role is replaced by an agility test, you would roll to dodge after the agility test is made.

HERE'S THE CATCH:

Flamers are area effect weapons, so as with a grenade, in order to dodge the blast, you would have to possess an agility bonus high enough to move you to the edge of the a.o.e., which would happen after a successful dodge attempt.

This (TBNC's interpretation) seems to make the most sense to me, although I'll admit I haven't just gone and refreshed my understanding of the rules in question.

As a flamer is an AoE attack and does not require a roll to hit, I would assume the dodge would come first. Why would you roll an agility test to catch fire before you tested to get out of the way? If that was the case you could theoretically catch fire and then successfully dodge?

I don't have my books in front of me, but common sense tells me that you would dodge first. Its been a long time since I've been hit with a flame attack though, so I cold be wrong about the order of things.

Emprah_Horus said:

Just stick around these boards long enough and it'll happen...

HappyDaze said:

Ahahahaha! Thank you HappyDaze, you just made my day.

*can't stop giggling*

Mellon said:

I know, people complaining about other people not agreeing with them is quite funny, in it's own way.

You might consider letting someone roll Dodge INSTEAD of Agility if that suits your group. I would recommend against allowing a Dodge roll after a failed Agility roll though, or flamers become a TERRIBLE weapon choice. This effectively grants TWO reactions to a single attack without resorting to so much as a specially trained talent (Step Aside/Wall of Steel for example). It should be noted that even the talents I mentioned here do not allow multiple reactions to be used against the same attack, they merely grant the (very awesome) ability to attempt to negate two separate hits against themselves in a single turn if the attacks fall into a specified category.

The second Agility roll that the flame weapons rule is reffering to is for those caught in the flames to avoid catching fire. This means to prevent themselves from CONTINUING to burn after they have been hit, not retroactively aborting the hit in the first place. That is what fate points are for.

ZillaPrime said:

Actually it doesn't.

The Agility roll is a function of "to hit" for flamers rather than an actual reaction.

Normal weapons go like this:

Ballistic Skill > Dodge > roll to wound if the dodge failed

Flamers go like this:

Agility roll to avoid flamer > Dodge > roll to wound if both agility and dodge fail.

So the agility roll isn't a reaction, it's a way to see if the shooter actually hit with the flamer or not. The trade-off being that while you might not need ballistic skill tests to use a flamer, the targets are allowed to make agility rolls instead. The obvious boon of course is that you have a chance of hitting several targets in a cone rather than just having to aim at one specific target, or hope that you roll enough degrees of success with a full auto burst to inflict enough hits to hit several targets. That's a pretty wicked bonus if you think about it, even if your chances of hitting are largely governed by exactly how agile your targets are instead of how good ballistic skill you have.

from france

i will allow a player to spend a fate point for a quick reaction if you played a cinematic style of game. unless specificaly aimed at the ground all the movies i seen where a flamethrower is used are aimed at front of someone and not the ground. so the idea is to jump (dodge) on the ground and then roll. but that is just for a cinematic styles remenber.

Just remember that the Dodge roll only becomes an option if the target of the flamer has an agility bonus that can get them out of the area of the cone after the initial Agility test. This Link takes you to a thread where I posted a cone effect template that shows your dodge areas.

I am not sure why you would roll a dodge at all? You make an agility test to see if you avoid the flames....this is your dodge. If you fail, you take damage and roll an agility test to see if you caught fire.

Maybe Im missing something, seems pretty straight forward to me. Dodging after you failed an agility test does not.

"Ok I make an agility test to get out of the way...fail. Ok now I dodge."

/boggle

Smokes said:

You can be as boggled as you like but those are the rules. Like I said, the Agility test is something confered by the "flame" quality of the weapon, it's not a reaction but a way to measure whose getting hit by the flames and whose not (in the same way you measure if someone gets hit by rolling against the shooters Ballistic Skill with normal weapons, only flamer weapons use the target's agility instead of the shooters BS). Those who are hit can try to dodge, provided that they are able to move a sufficient amount of meters out of the flame cone (otherwise they get hit either way).

Those are the rules...

Agreed. I don't see where the ambiguity is here. It doesn't make sense to dodge a bullet after it hits, either, but that's how it works according to the RAW. It's an abstract.

The Boy Named Crow said:

This makes more sense, you test BS to see if the bullet will hit or if will go wide. If it appears like it is going to hit, then you get your dodge roll. Flamer dodging twice seems redundant to me. oh well I wont complain as it gets me an extra dodge against flamers Our GM rarely uses them anyway since I like to snipe the promethium tanks.

Smokes said:

Yes, but it's pretty much the same thing with a flamer, only that each target risking to get hit test their Ag to see if the flames "go wide" rather than the shooter testing against BS to determine exactly how "wide" the flames go. You feel me?

And if those flames were to hit a character, then that character can attempt to dodge them.

Smokes said:

You're not dodging twice.

The agility roll isn't a dodge. Which is why it doesn't require a skill, and why it doesn't spent a reaction. It is just an abstract to see if the flames damage you or not.

Smokes said:

After looking over the rules, it seems that 2 tests are what the targets of flamers get. An agilty test, then a dodge, and the main reason for this is that it doesnt state under the flame quality for weapons that the agility test is a 'reaction' action. If it did, it would clear all this up very easily. BUT, under Dodge in Miscellaneous Actions in the main book, you are allowed a Dodge against any attack, as long as you know its coming. Silly but true.

I've simplified (modified) the RAW to speed game play...

• If you do not have a dodge skill straight AGL roll to avoid flamer
• If you do have dodge you get +10 to your AGL roll to avoid flamer
• If you have "dodge +10" you get +20 to your AGL roll etc.

Works well in my group.

Baldrick said:

I like your fix, Bald Rick. I may have to use that one for my group, because 2 dodges just doesnt make any sense. And yes, the peanut gallery will pipe up and shout, "But it's not 2 dodges", when in fact, if you read the rules for dodging and flame, it is 2 dodges; whether rolling an Agility test to hit is "abstract" or not. Both tests, dodge and agility, mean you are attempting to get out of the way of a large gout of flame. Where's the logic in doing that twice?

Jlid said:

In this case you aren't. The agility test is more like a passive test than an active one. Sort of how the GM rolls hidden rolls for Awareness when he wants to see if the acolytes spot or miss something, the Agility test for flamers is sort of a way to determine exactly which characters are in fact subjected to the flames or not. While every character within the "cone" are risking to get hit, it is ultimately the accompanying agility test that will determine if they were actually subjected to the flames or not (who knows? Perhaps another target was standing in the way of the gout and thus covered a luckier person behind him/he or something).

The subsequent Dodge on the other hand is the active "getting out of the way" action. Sort of like how a character initiates a Search test.

EDIT:

You might think that flamers were intended as no-BS-required weapons and no further limitations than that, but they aren't. Like I've said before, instead of rolling against BS to hit, the targets get to roll agaility to determine if they are hit or not.

Varnias Tybalt said:

You've made some very succinct points on the boards before, and I have agreed with alot of them, but I'm still going to have to disagree with this one. Actively testing agility means actively trying to get out of the way of the flame. It basically allows anyone, even those without dodge, to get a fair shot of jumping/rolling/leaping out of the way. Testing Dodge again is redundant. Being able to add +'s to your agility test for having ranks in dodge is a nice fix, IMO.

Jlid said:

Well the rules as they seem intended, don't use this interpretation. Whether a dice roll is an active or a passive action is largely up to a GM to decide. Most of the ime it is the GM that should roll passive tests in secret, but many groups don't bother to do this so the GM simply calls: "Roll an awareness check".

But still, like I said, the agility test isn't an active action according to the rules, it is a determining test to see which targets get hit or not.

It's also sort of the same thing as with Lore tests (Forbidden Lore, Common Lore etc.), when you roll for these, you don't roll it a s a symbol that you go to a local library and start to study the subject in question. The roll symbolizes that either you know something at the top of your head, or you don't (win = you know it, fail = you don't know it and have to read up on the matter). It's the same thing with the flamers agility test. Win = the flamer guy miss you, fail = the flamer guy hit you and you have to take matters into your own hands and try to dodge.

This might seem extremely penalizing for the flamer guy, but remember that a flamer is a weapon that let's you hit pretty much anything in a 30 degree arc in front of you at the weapons full range. That can potentially include an entire mob of people that are all susceptible to damage which is pretty nasty, and this would all be determined by the flamer guy's own BS, the weapon would be overpowered. Something more is needed to symbolzie the inherit complications of using a flamer, and thus you don't roll BS, the targets roll Ag instead.

Unknown said:

Like I said, they aren't leaping out of the way, they just happen to stand or move about in a manner that makes it harder for the flames to hit them. A successful agility test in this regard is the exact same thing as if the firerer had miseed a Ballistic Skill test with a normal weapon. It's just a test to determine if the targets are hit or not, not something symbolizing that they are actively lepaing out of the way.

The leaping/rolling out of the way comes with the dodge test. Also, this dodge test is severely hampered by the fact that a flamer is an area of effect weapon. If someone does get hit by the flames, they have to be have a high enough agility bonus to actually be able to move out of the flame cone. If they don't then their dodge test automatically fails.

So if you intend to just hand out bonuses to the dodge test and skip the flame trait agility test altogether, are you going to keep this aspect in or leave it out?

The trouble I see with a fix like this is that it can either make a flamer extremely overpowered (basically a weapon that requires no test to hit what so ever, no BS test and no accompanying Ag test like usual), or it can make it extremely underpowered.

Personally, I believe that if you wanted to "fix" the flame quality weapons, one would have to re-do the rules for them from scratch and build something better. Just taking away or adding tests like this will in some way either penalize the flamer extremely or make it overpowered.