All-Out Attack + Precognitive Dodge

By SilverFayte, in Black Crusade

Some of you are probably raising your eyebrows at that title. First, I'll go over how I found this little oddity.

I was looking over the talents when I came across Furious Assault. You will note that it says if you use an All Out Attack, you can spend your reaction for another attack. Of course, this seems redundant: All Out Attack already forbids you from using dodge or parry, so there's no actual penalty in spending a reaction you can't use. ...Unless...

The wording for All Out Attack specifically says that a combatant cannot take a Dodge or Parry action; it does not say they cannot make an evasion test, nor does it spend or deny the use of reactions.

Meanwhile, Precognitive dodge is a psychic power, not a use of the Parry or Dodge actions.

Under this system, a Psycher can do an all out attack and still be able to use his reactiosn by means of using precognitive dodge; but cannot do so if they combine the All Out Attack with Furious assault, which spends the reactions rather than simply denying use of dodge and parry (though you might be able to argue that a psycher with step aside would still have a single evasion left.)

Either way, I just found it amusing, and I'm pretty sure it's just the result of badly written and redundant rules reacting oddly, probably wasn't intended for psychers to be able to precog dodge attacks after an All-Out attack. Thoughts?

well don't have the book with me to double check anything...but strangly it does make sense that a psycerr could use precog dodge with all out attack because he saw how it would work and how to avoid being hit back before hand.

SilverFayte said:

Either way, I just found it amusing, and I'm pretty sure it's just the result of badly written and redundant rules reacting oddly, probably wasn't intended for psychers to be able to precog dodge attacks after an All-Out attack. Thoughts?

I think you are right. There are a few tables and rules changes that don't look like they were properly updated for BC from RT.

Well, the old Frenzy and Battle Rage worked in a similar way. You could not use reactions to Parry (or dodge originally) while frenzying, but you didn't actually lose your reactions, so they could still be "spent" on other things. Battle Rage allowed you to "spend" them on making Parries, which wasn't the same as just using them to parry, getting round that barrier.

Not sure if that falls into the same kind of area, but the idea of special abilities getting past a ban is there.