"Flashing Steel Ranged Combat Question" Topic

A buddy of mine and I are planning on trying Flashing Steel this weekend. Reading the rules, I noticed something that doesn't seem to make sense in the Ranged Combat section: the second entry in the Ranged Combat Modifiers table is "Firing and Moving in same Action -1". I don't understand this. It is an action to move, and it is an action to fire. Separate actions. So how do you fire and move in the same action?

Dave

Thought of this after I posted: does it mean "same Activation"?

"Activation" and "Action" are different things.

The activation is when you nominate a figure, decide on a number of dice, and roll. Then, that figure takes as many actions as you had successes on the die roll.

So you could activate a figure, roll two dice, get two successes and thus two actions. If you move and make a ranged attack or vice versa the attack will have a -1 penalty.

Andrew,

Thanks for the response. I agree with you completely that "Activation" and "Action" are different. I also agree with your second statement.

However, in my opinion, your third statement demonstrates the modifier should be worded "same Activation", as I thought of after my original post. In your example, one action is Move, one is Ranged Attack. There is no single Move and Ranged Attack ACTION.

Dave

Ah, I apologize, I didn't read your question closely enough.

I looked it over again and can think of only two explanations:

1 – The combat modifier should apply to Activations even though it says "Action", ie it's a type.

2- The Move action says: "inside a Move the model may perform one other activity that may require a voluntary Quality check or a Swashbuckling check." I would normally read that to mean *not* an attack, since that doesn't require a Quality or Swashbuckling check but a combat die roll. That's for knocking something over as you move or whatever. But a much, much more serious typo could mean that this phrase means you can attack while actually moving. That's kind of ridiculous, but it's the only other way I can explain the wording.

So I think it's number one, that's how we always played it.

I looked for a FAQ for Flashing Steel or Song of B&H (which has pretty much the same rules here). Didn't find one, though people said Andreas answers questions on Facebook.

I would says, having played the system many times, that it means activation and not actions.