(Basic Set) Dodge in action?

[jacobmuller]

Link below is to a news video of some local "rioting".
Some viewers might find it offensive / upsetting.

Teen at start of video dodges a plank.
I know he's Dodging but is that a Wait converted to Dodge? Is the plank an Area attack?
https://twitter.com/qnewsdesk/status...500770817?s=19

[Ulzgoroth]

"Wait converted to Dodge" makes no sense. Dodge is an active defense, not a maneuver.

Basic doesn't allow it, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to permit Waiting to perform an All Out Defense. Doing so would have rather limited utility, though - the only benefit would be postponing the maneuver's movement.

[Anaraxes]

I'd just treat the plank as an improvised thrown weapon. Lots of weapons are technically longer than a one-yard hex (almost all spears, for instance), but that doesn't mean they attack multiple hexes under the AE rules when thrown.

GURPS turns are a mechanism for resolving simultaneous chaos, not intended as a detailed specification of the exact order and timing of every action. So the teen's movement (running away from the impact point of the plank) doesn't have to be part of the Active Defense roll, as in Dodge and Drop. It's just the movement from the teen's turn.

[Varyon]

The teen used an attack action - possibly All Out Attack - to throw something (probably a rock) then followed it up with a Concentrate (possibly a couple of them, I didn't time that part of the video) for improved Situational Awareness (see Tactical Shooting) while taking a Step back. As a result, he passed his Observation/Per check to notice the plank being chucked. As it took over a second for the plank to reach him, he was able to simply use a Move maneuver to change his facing and to get out of the way - no Active Defense involved.

[EskrimadorNC]

I always felt this is a good example of GURPS Basic Set Dodging.

Also, it, along with plenty of other boxing vids and my experience in Martial Arts is what makes me believe there should be a technical or skill-based Dodge.

I know Technical Grappling has hands-free parries, but this isn't what I'm talking about. Those are grappling defenses and don't apply to someone striking at you when you aren't grappling them.

The kinds of movements in the video I shared is a trained movement. Someone old and overweight but well trained is MUCH better at this type of Dodge than someone who is an agile and fit athlete but has never trained in fighting.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

As it took over a second for the plank to reach him, he was able to simply use a Move maneuver to change his facing and to get out of the way - no Active Defense involved.

This part isn't compatible with standard GURPS rules - only guided or homing weapons have delayed arrival like that.

[jacobmuller]

Originally Posted by EskrimadorNC

I always felt this is a good example of GURPS Basic Set Dodging.

Also, it, along with plenty of other boxing vids and my experience in Martial Arts is what makes me believe there should be a technical or skill-based Dodge.

Yup, that's more like it. Reminds of the last Olympic boxing I watched - winning on points.
TQ all.

[Anaraxes]

If you want a skill-based Dodge, it'd be pretty easy just to take a Dodge score at 3+skill/2, just like Parry. Which is, of course, the chief disadvantage of that method. It's giving everyone two defenses based on the same skill (reducing diversity and losing the ability to differentiate a good hitter from a good dodger), and at the same value, for that matter, so less interesting.

Or you could introduce the "Trained Dodging" skill just for this purpose. Just to keep the connection with the Basic Dodge, you might make base it on Basic Speed as the attribute for the skill (x2, to get the normal human base back to 10), and calculate the Dodge from the skill as 3 + Dodging / 2. If it's an Easy skill, defaulting to 2xSpeed, then 1 point gives you a Dodge of 3 + (5*2) / 2 = 8, same as the default. (But the fighter is barely trained, after all.) 4 points gets you +1 Dodge, +1 for every 8 points thereafter.

(That's half the cost of Enhanced Dodge. You could make that match by basing it on 4xDodge and calculate 3+Dodging/4, so 4 levels of skill improvement needed to raise Dodge by 1, costing 16 points. But if you want it to match, you might as well not bother and just say trained expert fighters usually buy a few levels of Enhanced Dodge, along with all the other skills in their style that realistic fighters train in addition to just pumping one weapon skill.)

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Basic doesn't allow it, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to permit Waiting to perform an All Out Defense. Doing so would have rather limited utility, though - the only benefit would be postponing the maneuver's movement.

I like the idea of being able to postpone any maneuver's movement, or conversely to use the movement first and postpone the attack, or split them up in any way to delay some component's response to other triggers.

Originally Posted by Varyon

it took over a second for the plank to reach him, he was able to simply use a Move maneuver to change his facing and to get out of the way - no Active Defense involved.

Would be cool if we could possibly translate 'travel time' into a bigger effect for times when it doesn't last a full second, or know when you can or should delay projectile arrival for time.

I can for example, if targeting someone 2 hexes away with a rock, have it arrive in under a second if tossing in a straight line... but if I need to arc the rock over a 15ft (5 hex high) wall (meaning the rock is sailing an additional 30ft/10 hexes) then it should definitely be delayed.

if we plug hexes/yards into a freefall calculator such as https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/free-fall then you get "time of fall" as 0.9656 seconds, and I'm pretty sure you'd have to double it to get the time it would take to reach the top of the wall. This would be at least a second.

Basically you could throw something up faster so it reaches the top of the wall in less time, but since you didn't just teleport it up there, that would mean it has extra upward momentum and would keep going (unless for example there was a ceiling to bounce it off, to cancel it out) which would add extra fall time and ultimately make it slower: the fastest you can reach is presumably adding JUST enough momentum to tip it over the wall.

To get a non-bouncing arching shot to land in under a second would mean a fall time of under 0.5 which happens with 1 yard (0.4318 fall time) but not 2 yards (0.6107 fall time)