[Tomsdad]

Ok first off I really like the concept (accumulating and spending IP).

and actually I really like the way you use IP as currency to leverage effects, giving another trade off than just skill.
But there's a lot there and it impacts on almost every aspect of combat so will have to play it a lot before I can do a proper look.

At first glance it changes the current balance between attack and defence (this is not necessarily a bad thing of course, but it is a thing). Defences have gone from being functionally free unless AoA or trading against attack effect to having a delaying cost. But defences are quicker than attacks. The ability to increase defence for IP is a powerful one, defence having usually less negative mods and tending to float around the middle of the bell curve. Interestingly you've made parries slower than dodges and parries from long two handed weapons slower than other parries (I think*?). Which would seem to counter the rules in MA regarding their use. My issue with that is that dodge has more utility for defence (wider application, no worries about weapon size, don't need to carry shield, no issue with unwieldy weapons) normally this is counterbalanced by being harder to buy up. In your first example the knight can dodge for 20IP and parry for 40IP. Which means he could dodge at +4 as quickly as parry, and still suffer the unwieldy penalty.


We also need to ST ratings for shield as weapons (but then we need them anyway unless they are hidden somewhere and i've never found them)



One thing, posts on forum are probably not the best way to do this. Do you have blog where you could write this up in one go (or even put it up as word doc on a sharing site).

My first step is going to be copy and pasting your posts into a doc and reordering.

It is one more thing to track and there is no getting around the fact it is quite a complicated thing to track too

Ironically I think for it works well for multiple combatants as it blends them well, and the extra work for each subsequent combatant after the first 2 is less than it is for the first two.

Now I'm writing this from a back ground of playing shadowrun, and liking the tick systems from hackmaster and Twilight 2013 (but didn't play them so may be missing something), and I think initiative is one of the few gaps in GURPS left.

Anyway cheers for putting in what's obviously been a lot of work!

TD

*actually you haven't because parry is based off thrust IP not swing, but that means all thrust attacks are essentially as quick as each other which I'm not sure about (I'm thinking maybe variable trade off rates for effect/speed for different weapons but lets not add anything else just yet!)