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Old 11-23-2014, 10:26 PM   #541
DouglasCole
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But (a) your attacker presumably struck from one yard away and
Punches are Range C attacks. Kicks and many weapons are Range 1.This example covered the most visually accessible form of arm lock - the Aikido-like defense against a punch, which transitions into a (standing) arm lock.

So as noted in the example, Dodeca steps into close combat to punch on his turn, bringing the distance to 0 yards; Lockenkey's retreat brings him back to one yard.

I did make that explicit in the post (emphasis added): "Mr Dodeca [starts his turn] steps into close combat to punch (punches are Reach C!). He will hit 75% of the time."

I make pretty much your point, though, when I talk about weapons, which can have high Reach.
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Old 11-24-2014, 09:40 AM   #542
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Steven Marsh*looks at how to shake up a bog-standard dungeon crawl by taking a bit of a mutually-exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive look at how to alter the concept. Bring something new to the table. Add something that wasn't there before. Take something away that usually is, or take a trope and tweak it hard.

Also includes links to reviews for every other article in this issue, which overall was very strong.

Http://gamingballistic.blogspot.com/...eons-review_24
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Old 11-25-2014, 11:51 PM   #543
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I continue my exposition on the "four step" taxonomy for grappling in gaming: (Grab, improve grab, improve position, win) by discussing improving grapples in GURPS.

I consider both the Basic Set/Martial Arts versions of what this looks like, as well as the alterations made with Technical Grappling.

As always, comments and suggestions are appreciated!
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Old 11-26-2014, 02:30 AM   #544
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I continue my exposition on the "four step" taxonomy for grappling in gaming: (Grab, improve grab, improve position, win) by discussing improving grapples in GURPS.

I consider both the Basic Set/Martial Arts versions of what this looks like, as well as the alterations made with Technical Grappling.

As always, comments and suggestions are appreciated!
One thing that seems somewhat odd, or at least not handled in an intuitive way game-mechanically, about getting better grips:
Suppose you're tightening the grip around someone's neck to cut off air/blood supply, i.e. doing HP/FP damage; that requires spending CP; the fewer CP you have left, the weaker your grip becomes. Since my real-life experience with grappling is very modest, I would like to ask: what real-life effect does this grip-weakening-by-gripping-tighter represent?
----
As for B/MA: Oh well, I was expecting that steps 2-3 will be harder to separate neatly and keep both of them on most victory paths.
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Old 11-26-2014, 08:30 AM   #545
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One thing that seems somewhat odd, or at least not handled in an intuitive way game-mechanically, about getting better grips:
Suppose you're tightening the grip around someone's neck to cut off air/blood supply, i.e. doing HP/FP damage; that requires spending CP; the fewer CP you have left, the weaker your grip becomes. Since my real-life experience with grappling is very modest, I would like to ask: what real-life effect does this grip-weakening-by-gripping-tighter represent?

It represents a game-mechanical decision to unify the mechanics for spending Control Points, honestly. Threre's a reason I keep noting that this mechanic is inelegant but effective. Most things happen too quickly using RAW, and the spend/recover pattern fixes this to some extent.

The choking example is the most egregious example, because once you have the right hold, and tighten it, a blood choke just kinda works.

A less-bad example is applying pain from an arm bar, but it still squeaks around the edges.

The basic principle in the game is that if you want to hurt someone or cause an effect with CP, you have to spend them, and that necessitates recovering them. At the time, my goal was to preserve the basic mechanism (in this case, that's a double meaning: I wanted to preserve the damage mechanism in the Basic Set, as well as the one listed).

The mechanism for spending to upset someone's balance (imparting penalties to a DX roll) is yanking them around, which can give them an opening to recover if you don't follow up. For injury, the principle was "CP spent set the upper bound for injury."

Could we have found other mechanics? Well, in the year or so that's past since the book's release, and the even longer time from playtest close to now, I've come up with at least three.

Does that make the existing mechanic errata. NO. It does make it inelegant, as I've been the first to admit. But it's functional.
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Old 11-26-2014, 11:14 AM   #546
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I continue my exposition on the "four step" taxonomy for grappling in gaming: (Grab, improve grab, improve position, win) by discussing improving grapples in GURPS.

I consider both the Basic Set/Martial Arts versions of what this looks like, as well as the alterations made with Technical Grappling.

As always, comments and suggestions are appreciated!
All right. The summary of the basic rules is "Basically, an improved grapple either enables a follow-on technique such as a throw, lock, or crush, or boosts your ST in appropriate places." But it would help my understanding to have an explicit, itemized list of which options fall under each head, rather than having to go down the analyses and figure out where each one fits.

It's not entirely clear to me that the Basic Set really has this option, as distinct from step 3. What is there in the Basic Set rules that couldn't be subsumed under step 3?

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Old 11-26-2014, 11:51 AM   #547
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It represents a game-mechanical decision to unify the mechanics for spending Control Points, honestly. Threre's a reason I keep noting that this mechanic is inelegant but effective. Most things happen too quickly using RAW, and the spend/recover pattern fixes this to some extent.
Hmm. Somehow I didn't think of it from a purely game-mechanical PoV. I thought it was a mechanism that realistically represents tradeoffs in e.g. Wrench Arm/Spine/etc. that somehow got generalised to, well, everything with a Quick Contest affecting damage.

Regarding things happening too fast: is it really your experience that a grappler gets rid of more monsters/etc. as compared to the striker, per unit of time? In B/MA? In TG?

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The mechanism for spending to upset someone's balance (imparting penalties to a DX roll) is yanking them around, which can give them an opening to recover if you don't follow up. For injury, the principle was "CP spent set the upper bound for injury."
Actually, that one seemed neat and logical, in the context of having a ruleset with CPs, but I always saw this mechanism as totally different from the one controlling QCs.

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Could we have found other mechanics? Well, in the year or so that's past since the book's release, and the even longer time from playtest close to now, I've come up with at least three.

Does that make the existing mechanic errata. NO. It does make it inelegant, as I've been the first to admit. But it's functional.
Of course it's not errata.
Are those non-CP TG mechanisms posted somewhere? If not, will they be? If they will, blog or Pyramid?
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Old 11-26-2014, 12:42 PM   #548
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Regarding things happening too fast: is it really your experience that a grappler gets rid of more monsters/etc. as compared to the striker, per unit of time? In B/MA? In TG?
I think he means faster than it would in a real fight. Another thing to keep in mind in the spend/recover mechanic is that spending is typically a free action in the contexts of locks and chokes, so what's logical is to attack to increase CP, then immediately spend those CP for damage. The grip tends not to slip unless the defender succeeds at defending and the attacker dips into previously existing CP to attack.

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Actually, that one seemed neat and logical, in the context of having a ruleset with CPs, but I always saw this mechanism as totally different from the one controlling QCs.
There's a perspective that QCs involving ST have to die. I'm not 100% sold on the necessity of this, but it seems like a reasonable goal.

Would it be inappropriate to introduce a question about an old Gaming Ballistic article on Sumo here?
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Old 11-26-2014, 12:51 PM   #549
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There's a perspective that QCs involving ST have to die. I'm not 100% sold on the necessity of this, but it seems like a reasonable goal.
Yeah, there is. IMHO if they are to die, it would be nice to replace them with contests of Swing 'damage'. That seems like a way to make sure that (a) no longer will we have contests where a ST1 HT10 character can easily resist a choke (or whatever) by someone with ST8, the whole mechanic would scream 'only for use against other ST'; (b) it retains a nice +1 ST is +1 in the roll progression; (c) per-die bonuses would be much easier to implement.
Note that I'm talking more for a hypothetical 'GURPS 5e' (that will likely never be), not for rewriting GURPS 4e - too much trouble.
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Old 11-26-2014, 01:23 PM   #550
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Yeah, there is. IMHO if they are to die, it would be nice to replace them with contests of Swing 'damage'. That seems like a way to make sure that (a) no longer will we have contests where a ST1 HT10 character can easily resist a choke (or whatever) by someone with ST8, the whole mechanic would scream 'only for use against other ST'; (b) it retains a nice +1 ST is +1 in the roll progression; (c) per-die bonuses would be much easier to implement.
Note that I'm talking more for a hypothetical 'GURPS 5e' (that will likely never be), not for rewriting GURPS 4e - too much trouble.
I agree. There are times when stronger beats weaker, and HT or DX aren't involved. The Grappling Encumbrance Table (TG8) helps a lot: if I have ST 16, HT10 and no training, I have an even chance to pick up a human with ST 10, weight 145lbs and Judo 16, even though I'm rolling HT v Judo, because I have a +6 bonus for an opponent under 3x my Basic Lift.
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