Gambits

Gambits are special decisive attacks. Rather than doing damage, they inflict a condition or effect on the victim.

Regardless of the gambit’s success, the character loses a number of Initiative equal to the gambit’s difficulty +1. A character cannot attempt a gambit whose cost would place him in Initiative Crash.

I f a player wants to do something crazyduring combat that the rules don’t cover, and the Storyteller is left going “I have no idea how to represent that”—it’s generally good to make it a gambit.

Canon Gambits
Four “universal” gambits are detailed in the corebook, but gambits are customizable.

Disarm
Disarm (difficulty 3): A successful disarm gambit allows the character to knock an opponent’s weapon out of his hand, flinging it away to short range. Retrieving a disarmed weapon normally requires moving to the weapon’s location and using a draw/ready weapon action to reclaim it.

Unhorse
Unhorse (difficulty 4): A successful unhorse gambit allows the character to knock an opponent off his mount. An unhorsed character suffers one level of bashing damage and is rendered prone, and the mount usually flees in the confusion. This is generally an easier and less-costly option than trying to target a mount with a decisive attack to kill it.

Distract
Distract (difficulty 3-5): The character leads, threatens, or feints his target into the path of an ally’s decisive attack. The attacker declares an ally (who is not in Initiative Crash ) as the beneficiary of this distraction; that ally gains the Initiative the character loses as a result of successfully executing this gambit. The transferred Initiative must be used to attack the gambit’s target on the ally’s next turn, or it is lost. A character can only benefit from one distraction bonus at a time.

Grapple
Grapple (difficulty 2): The character seizes her opponent in a clinch, limiting his movement and gaining the opportunity to do truly severe damage. Grapples are a bit more complicated than other gambits, and are explained in greater detail here.