Editing Combat (section)

== Defensive Skills ==

There are far fewer defensive skills available than offensive skills. The most important and effective ones are dodge, avoid hits, shield parry and weapon parry. Elite infantry and other higher level characters can train other, more effective methods of defense, but dodge and avoid hits are available to most characters, and can easily save your life.

The difference between parrying and dodging is naturally the fact that in order to parry, you need to wield a weapon. Parrying hits completely is hard, and depends on your weapon/shield parry skill. Even with low skill it is possible to parry many hits, but only partially. Avoid hits, on the other hand, always affects the enemies' chances to hit you, and sometimes you can wholly avoid the the hits with dodge. Note, that the amount of carried weight and your combat points greatly affect these skills.

Some more advanced defensive skills include block, which is a last minute effort to reduce the damage that you receive by putting a weapon in the path of the attack. This, however does not stop the attack, but simply reduces the damage the hit causes. The skill avoid hits is quite similar to dodge, gut it requires more wisdom than physical capabilities, and makes you a harder target overall.

Other fairly important defensive skills are determination and contact reflexes. Determination lets you ignore the pain of those really hard hits cause, preventing you from getting stunned. Contact reflexes enable you to reduce the actual damage from those hits by bending with them. Finally, Combat Sense affects all aspects of combat, including your defense.