Crimson
A World of Darkness
Vampire Chronicle
Melee & Brawling
Melee fighting can only occur when two parties are within weapon’s reach of each other. Characters using melee weapons often have access to special abilities if they also possess the Melee Ability. For example, a trained character using a fencing foil can take advantage of his weapon’s speed when fighting a character wielding a battle ax.
Brawling can only occur when two characters are within arm’s length of each other. Characters engaged in brawling may use unarmed combat techniques on each other, including trips, kicks, punches, wrestling holds and throws. However, regardless of the description, unless the character possesses some supernatural power or other ability that specifically allows for extra damage, all brawling tests result in one health level of bashing damage.
Specialized Fighting Styles
Buying a specialized fighting style under the Melee or Brawl Abilities allows you to describe how your character moves to allow retests and permits a certain flair for your attacks and defenses, but does not allow you to do extra damage or specific injuries.
Two-Gun Mojo
It’s possible to use more than one weapon at a time in combat, though it’s quite tricky. Just performing a task with the wrong hand is sufficient to penalize your chance of success; compounding matters by doing something else with the other hand doesn’t help any. For the purposes of simplicity, it’s usually easiest to assume that a character is the same-handedness as the player, unless the Merit Ambidextrous is taken. Furthermore, these rules do not apply to common uses of both hands, such as typing, playing a musical instrument or working a craft. When performing a task with the off hand, you suffer a two-Trait penalty. Thus, you must bid a total of three Traits to initiate the challenge, and you have a lower chance of success. The Merit Ambidextrous means that you suffer no penalty for an off-hand, since both
of your hands are equally nimble. You still suffer coordination penalties for using both hands. Thus, if you’re Ambidextrous, you can perform a task with either hand without penalty, but if you use both hands at once, you must bid two Traits for each hand. When you specialize in a fighting style you can choose Two-Weapon Combat or Florentine for your specialty. This negates one penalty Trait from your attacks with the specified form of combat. Thus, instead of bidding two Traits with your primary hand and three with your off hand, you would bid one and two Traits, respectively. Combined with Ambidexterous, you can use two weapons at no penalty whatsoever. Storytellers, take note of combat monsters in the making who try this combination. Developing such a specialty should take months of training. When using both hands, you only get one extra action, regardless of Celerity and similar speed-altering powers. Split your actions equally between your hands — if you have Legerity good for two bonus actions and you’re using both hands, you get your normal action, your two Celerity actions and your extra hand action, for a total of four actions. These would be split up to two actions with each hand; if you took an action or two to do other things, you’d split the remainder evenly.
- A leftover action is automatically applied to your primary hand.