This is how my friends and I have been handling Counter Attack so far, and it seems like a beast of an ability.

Counter Attack is allowed when you successfully Parry an attack. You get to attack someone on their turn, which means, RAW, that you cannot dodge or Parry yourself since Reactions are only used when it is not your turn.

Is this correct?

There has never been a clear ruling on this parry on your own turn thing, but I'd say yeah. Just remember that your counter attack suffers a WS penalty.

I think the "no Reaction" thing is quite important, or you could, with good enough fighters, end up in a never ending chain of Counterattacks.

Now, I don't think that is a definitive statement on the issue, as I think the original phrasing of Reactions was more down to the idea that there are very few instances where it would matter. I think Only War has actually removed that phrase entirely. However, I would certainly rule it that way on Counterattack. Also, I would allow Reactions in response to a Delay, as otherwise that becomes much more powerful than I think was ever intended (essentially, a "Delayed" character who starts acting is having a little bit of their turn, just later on).

Thanks for the input. I'm asking because I am going to be starting an OW game when it comes out, so if they changed the wording, then that should be helpful.

This question came into being, by the way, from our Deathwatch game where the Assault Marine had this Talent. One on one, he dominated anything that tried to hit him with a melee weapon. Ranged combat was a different story, but he could usually close the gap.

borithan said:

It's important to remember that you can only counterattack once per turn even if you have multiple parries per turn.

Face Eater said:

Well, holy s**t! That we completely did not know about. Is that stated in the Talent? Did we misread it?

Face Eater said:

Basically, the DH book says that you can immediately make an attack after a counter attack. It doesn't say anything about being able to make just one. It also (very important) doesn't mention the use of any type of action being used to do this: you just get to attack right away.

The DW book, on the other hand says that you can immediately make a counterattack as a Free Action . It doesn't explicitly say "once per round" but that's implied by the way actions work. You can only take the same action ONCE per round. So, once you've used a Free Action to make a counter-attack, you cannot use another one to do the same thing and counter-attack again.

Based on that, DH would let you counter-attack with every parry, but DW only once per round. We have since chosen to use the DW version of the Talent.

As to your original question: I'm not sure I've come accross characters (or potential characters) with enough reaction to keep a parry/counter-attack going on indefinitely. They'd eventually run out of reactions anyways… which would mean they couldn't use any to react to any other melee or balistic attacks they took that round.

I agree that the Reaction description was probably written to account for 95% of the situations: you would normally use a reaction when it's not your turn. In our group, we often (but not always) treat free actions and reactions interchangeably. (Basically, we see a reaction as - generally - a free action which you can take when it's not your turn. If something happened on your turn, why coudln't you react to it?) With that in mind, we DO allow characters to Dodge or Parry in response to a counter-attack. We've found it's made for some pretty awesom duels and it hasn't broken our game in the least, even before we adopted the DW version of the Talent.

Hope this helps.

And later rulesets change the text again. OW explicitly states "once per round". Depends on whether you accept these revisions as errata for DH or not.

We've pretty much assumed that if OW has a version of the Talent, that's what we're going with. For the most part, they address the confusion from previous games.

Addendum: I was reading up on action for our game on Saturday and I was a little surprised by what I read. Not being able to perform the same action twice in a round is only specifically stated for Half Actions . The text says: "Note that you may not take the same Half Action twice." This is primarily to prevent someone without the right talent from making multiple attacks, using multiple psychic powers, etc.twice in the same turn. I checked and it says more or less the same thing in OW: "A character can take two different Half Actions on his Turn instead of taking one Full Action." The only restriction on Free Actions is the GM's perogative, it seems.