My group has debated this for a year, and the section in the book is extremely back and forth and not extremely clear. So can someone with experience PLEASE explain to me the combat turn step by step? Thank you.

1). Everyone has a base initiative, which is modified by their Agility and Dexterity modifiers, their weapon choice, armour, situational modifiers, any states they might be in, and any supernatural abilities they're using that might affect it.

2). Each character rolls for initiative and adds the dice result to their starting initiative, to establish their final initiative for that round.

3). The character with the highest initiative decides if they want to act first or hang back (which can be tactically useful). The rest of the players then also do so in order.

4). If any player has beaten an opponent's initiative by 150 or more then he is considered to have Surprise. In that case, if he decides to act as soon as it is his turn, his opponent suffers a -90 penalty against the first opposed active action that the player with Surprise makes (eg Attacking, or using Acrobatics to try to leave the battle etc). If he decides to hang back, he loses that benefit, but gains the benefit of being able to intercept another action at any point in the turn, even after the dice have been rolled (eg if an opponent attacks an ally, and it looks like being successful, he can choose to do the Push Aside manoeuvre to protect his ally).

5). Counterattacks are not affected by initiative, as you can counter as soon as you have successfully defended against an opponent's attack.

6). Any character who fumbles their initiative roll will automatically go last in the turn, and suffers a further penalty to initiative dependant on the level of fumble (which is only used for calculating Surprise).

Hope that all makes sense.

Ok, that's the way we were doing it, but the book states twice that you ask for player actions before rolling initiative, once in the table and once in the text i believe. However, it also contradicts itself more than once at the same time in the text. So is the table wrong? Do you roll then ask?

The players must declare the number of actions, not the type of actions, before rolling for initiative. But it is a little bit … stupid, because: A player could always declare his maximum number of possible active actions, but only doing less actions (he doesn't get a malus for this).

There are some other cases, which must be declared before rolling for initiative, for example the "charging" maneuver or change of weapons. Usually: Everything which changes the initiative must be declared before rolling for initiative (for example: changing weapons). And everything, who is stated, that it must be declared before rolling for initiative ("charging" for example) must be declared before hand.

Some examples:

- Ki-Techniques which change the initiative (Initiative + OR armor with slowness disadvantages)

- To draw a weapon or change weapons (also to draw a shield)

- Flying with a flight value of 10 or more

and so on.

So long,