Step / Damage Animation

[Art Smitemeister]

I searched the internet a while to find a solution to my question, but can't find one - it's maybe something obvious nonetheless, I'm not an RPG Maker expert by any metric.

As I understand it, character sheets contain the movement animation for characters in a pattern of 3x4 sprites. Every row has 3 sprites: left foot up, both feet down, right foot up; so a stepping animation goes M-L-M-R-M-L-M-R-... (all in the same row).
The 4 rows show the character from 4 different angles, designated by the direction the character looks (Down, Left, Right, Up), which together makes it possible to show stepping animations for all 4 movement directions.
In hand-made animations you can choose the row (direction) by using the Choose movement route... event command Turn Down/Left/Right/Up . The stepping animation is used automatically when you check the Stepping box of the event.

Now I noticed that for damage animations the sprite order is different: there are only 3 animation phases, so every 3x4 block contains the damage animation for 4 characters, one per row. My question is: how do I play this animation once, as L-M-R (not as infinite loop M-L-M-R-M-... by enabling Stepping [\i])?

If this is even possible, I would much prefer not to use plugins.