Doubling the Evaluate bonus: "you drop your guard"

[Plane]

B557 unarmed critical miss 13:

Any Evaluate bonus or Feint penalty against you until your next turn counts double! This is obvious to nearby opponents.

I never noticed this until now... this possibility seems like it could be a big factor (up to an additional +3 to hit) in terms of the absolute possible difficulty of striking in hand to hand combat.

If someone WANTS to be hit, should they be able to voluntarily "drop their guard" to allow people to use double their evaluate bonuses?

It would seem strange if the only way to get a maximum evaluate bonus was because someone very clumsy crit-missed in unarmed combat a lot.

This also seems like a good way to distinguish "I'm all-out attacking and I can't defend, but my guard is still up so I'm sort of hard to evaluate/predict/target/hit" vs "I'm lying unconscious".

We could assume anyone unconscious to automatically be in this stated ("guard dropped") so evaluate bonuses are doubled against them.

This actually gives some incentive to use Evaluate instead of Telegraphic Attack against immobile/unconscious opponents, because +6 surpasses +4.

If house-ruling where Telegraphic and Evaluate stack (RAW they don't) then this would shift the max combined bonus from +7 to +10. Or from +11 to +14 if adding AOA:Determined on top of that.

This would mean even someone with DX 3 could attack at skill 17 giving pretty decent (skill 12) chances of hitting the face (from front) or skull (from behind) or neck. Or even better (-3 = 14) to just grapple a head.

Looking at this crit miss result, it seems like in basic set you avoid most of the drawbacks (basic penalty to active defences, added penalty to active defences from feint) if you just do an All-Out Attack immediately afterward (because you're not defending anyway) so if someone already had been Evaluating you is basically when you can't avoid that problem...

GURPS Martial Arts introducing "Defensive Feints" helps that a bit, because instead you could suffer double the penalty to your attack skill and be more likely to miss with an All-Out Attack.

[Andreas]

In order for it to make sense, you would also need to give an at least as large bonus to evaluate against unmoving targets. However, critical result rolls sometimes just don't seem to make sense (such as being able to penetrate superman's DR due to a critical skull hit), so I'm not sure they should be expanded into more general rules like this.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Andreas

In order for it to make sense, you would also need to give an at least as large bonus to evaluate against unmoving targets.

B550 has all the tools if you just ignore this:

In most combat between fighters on foot, and when attacking
inanimate objects, you can ignore speed.

A big advantage in the "Jet" enhancement (or in high-reach melee weapons like lances or whips) is ignoring this penalty, so if you apply this to melee combat in general then maybe Jet should be -5%?

If the sum of speed+distance exceeds 2 and is equal to or less than 3 it's -1. The enhanced accuracy against unmoving targets could just be in ignoring that.

If unmoving targets stay unmoving then I would just consider them as being "not guarding" and so they are more easily evaluated (double bonus) just like this crit result.

Originally Posted by Andreas

However, critical result rolls sometimes just don't seem to make sense (such as being able to penetrate superman's DR due to a critical skull hit), so I'm not sure they should be expanded into more general rules like this.

He could have cosmic ITDR allow him to apply a divisor to basic damage before it reaches DR...

Or maybe it could be explained as a low-level forcefield (think Tactile Telekinesis like Superboy clone had) supplementing his normal DR.

I think if you did a targeted attack against the head of someone who had forcefield, since you are hitting the force field rather than the face/skull/eye, you would just use the regular crit results on B556 since you're no longer contacting the head itself, but instead the field?

Consider for example: if I try to shoot a guy in the face who is behind cover.

He could have "cover DR" because I'm trying to shoot him through another person. Does that mean I ignore the cover DR? I would guess no because I it's not the TARGET's DR.

A big argument supporting that is bullet to eye in Superman Returns: normal DR doesn't protect the eyes, so unless he has Injury Tolerance: No Eyes, supes must have a force field, so eye/skull hits don't use the head crit table due to the force field.

It's sort of a complex idea though because if an attack DID do enough damage to puncture the DR of the force field then it probably should use the crit table.

So maybe the way to do it would be to roll basic damage first, see if that results in any Penetrating Damage, and whether or not it does determines what crit table to roll on, the normal one or head one?

[Andreas]

Originally Posted by Plane

B550 has all the tools if you just ignore this:

In most combat between fighters on foot, and when attacking
inanimate objects, you can ignore speed.

A big advantage in the "Jet" enhancement (or in high-reach melee weapons like lances or whips) is ignoring this penalty, so if you apply this to melee combat in general then maybe Jet should be -5%?

If the sum of speed+distance exceeds 2 and is equal to or less than 3 it's -1. The enhanced accuracy against unmoving targets could just be in ignoring that.

If unmoving targets stay unmoving then I would just consider them as being "not guarding" and so they are more easily evaluated (double bonus) just like this crit result.

That would still be different though since it is a penalty which always applies rather than just during evalutate and faints?

He could have cosmic ITDR allow him to apply a divisor to basic damage before it reaches DR...

Or maybe it could be explained as a low-level forcefield (think Tactile Telekinesis like Superboy clone had) supplementing his normal DR.

I think if you did a targeted attack against the head of someone who had forcefield, since you are hitting the force field rather than the face/skull/eye, you would just use the regular crit results on B556 since you're no longer contacting the head itself, but instead the field?

Consider for example: if I try to shoot a guy in the face who is behind cover.

He could have "cover DR" because I'm trying to shoot him through another person. Does that mean I ignore the cover DR? I would guess no because I it's not the TARGET's DR.

A big argument supporting that is bullet to eye in Superman Returns: normal DR doesn't protect the eyes, so unless he has Injury Tolerance: No Eyes, supes must have a force field, so eye/skull hits don't use the head crit table due to the force field.

It's sort of a complex idea though because if an attack DID do enough damage to puncture the DR of the force field then it probably should use the crit table.

So maybe the way to do it would be to roll basic damage first, see if that results in any Penetrating Damage, and whether or not it does determines what crit table to roll on, the normal one or head one?

If you think superman has cosmic ITDR, or a force field (though I'm a bit sceptical about that one since the force field enchancement doesn't mention it being treated any differently regarding hit locations except that it covers the eyes), you can just substitute superman for some else who has ridiculously high (not forcefield) DR in that example.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Andreas

That would still be different though since it is a penalty which always applies rather than just during evalutate and faints?

Correct, I'm talking about stacking them. If a difference of 1 point doesn't seem like enough then you could treat people who just attacked/parried/dodged as having moved at their Basic Speed, I guess?

If this seems to favor defenders too much then we could penalize basic defences by similar speed penalties. That's basically what "On Target" in Pyramid did for parrying/dodging firearms.

Originally Posted by Andreas

If you think superman has cosmic ITDR, or a force field (though I'm a bit sceptical about that one since the force field enchancement doesn't mention it being treated any differently regarding hit locations except that it covers the eyes)

I would say consider for example a Force Field which has Area Effect.

Conceptually it doesn't make sense that you'd ignore the DR if you aimed at the face of someone, but not ignore the DR if you aimed at the chest of someone. In either case, you're not even hitting the body, you're hitting the force field.

Originally Posted by Andreas

you can just substitute superman for some else who has ridiculously high (not forcefield) DR in that example.

I'd prefer to demote it to being armor divisor 1/100 rather than ignores DR, at least then something with DR 100 on their head could ignore 1 damage.