ATR and Feint

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

A person with ATR does not really need a feint though, as Block and Parry (which tend to be more effective than Dodge) suffer penalties for multiple use during a turn (ATR also does not prevent Deceptive Attacks). A person with ATR can just keep on attacking, burning through their opponent's blocks and parries unit the opponent can only dodge (when the person with ATR switches to Deceptive Attacks). A person with ATR will even cause the defenses of a fencing Weapon Master to collapse if they throw enough DWA and Rapid Strikes at them.

I agree feint doesn't suddenly make ATR significantly more powerful, and there's lots of things someone with ATR can do.

The nice thing about feint is it gives it's bonus on all your attacks that follow in the turn, and depending on the genre you can build multiple defences a lot cheaper than ATR will allow you to inflict defence pens.

Against someone with a shield or two weapons, you actually need a lot of ATR to overwhelm defences (i.e. inflicting defence pens) as they can be getting 2-3 different defences. But yes as you say you can go ATR and rapid strikes / DWA to increase your attacks, but we're now talking high skill* to soak rapid strike pens and ATR = more points. Yep obviously you'll mince anything significantly lower powered than you, but IME when you get on a more equal level defence is cheap.

If nothing else if your opponent takes retreat that bonus adds applies to all your incoming attacks in that turn.



*of course if you don't have an advantage in skill, feint is not a great idea anyway! (I guess I'm used to Feint in a world of shields and high defences, which colours my perspective)

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Cool, but does that then mean you could wait with more than one action delayed, and thus do the trick I outlined above where you include one wait within a series of actions that are themselves a wait?

No, I require that once a Wait is committed to, all further ATR Maneuvers are on hold until the Wait plays out. This means that there is some "added" level of flexibility but it hasn't been unbalancing (it also means that occasionally a Character can 'lose' all remaining ATR Maneuvers, but that's pretty rare).

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

No, I require that once a Wait is committed to, all further ATR Maneuvers are on hold until the Wait plays out. This means that there is some "added" level of flexibility but it hasn't been unbalancing (it also means that occasionally a Character can 'lose' all remaining ATR Maneuvers, but that's pretty rare).

I get the point about you do nothing until the wait is triggered and so all remaining actions are held until then, but if you have more than one action "waiting" could one of those also be a "wait" that can be set and subsequently triggered after the first wait is triggered?

Weather you had to describe what the subsequent wait was going to be at the point of setting the first wait or only when the subsequent one was actually set (and after the first had triggered)


What's an interesting one for me with ATR (and ETS) is in a normal combat I'm a big one for not allowing the players loads of time to 'um' and 'ahh' and mull over what the exact best thing to do is in any given turn when we're in a combat were everyone's choices and actions are happening on the scale of seconds or even fractions of seconds.

This is why I don't allow exceptionally precise wait declarations on triggers that I think would be unlikely to be perceivable on a second by second basis, let alone in an ongoing combat on a second by second basis! It's also why I tend not to let everyone's combat choices be known to all involved (well unless they take pains to figure it out). And so on.


But ATR and ETS by their very nature legitimises the kind of play style I usually try and avoid! I'm also never quite sure how if you have one player with a character with ETS and your supposed to given them lots of extra time how you can do that without by default giving everyone at the table extra time?

(There is also the meta game point that trying to appeal to "realism" in regards to frenetic and chaotic combat and allowing powerful supernatural traits like multiple levels of ATR may well be a bit of a thematic clash anyway!).

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

Cheers, this basically means ATR includes a hefty chunk of enhanced move then?

Not literally speaking. Similarly, ATR is not a bundle that happens to include a level of Extra Attack with some Enhanced Move.

ATR lets you move faster, but that's because you might be taking (say) four Move Maneuvers, not that you're moving four times as fast in one Move Maneuver, as you would with Enhanced Move 2. There will be some subtle rules differences, like the size of a step, or how far you can move with All-out Attack, or how far you can reach in your turn. ("Move 5, Attack; Move 5, Attack" is not the same ability as "Move 10, Attack, Attack".)

Casually speaking, you might say it's like Enhanced move (but with a linear increase rather than a doubling). But in practice, it's probably much better to think of it as multiple separate, full and completed, Maneuvers taken in sequence during your turn. ATR lets you move farther per turn, but a lot of other mechanics during your turn are different than simply having a larger Move stat.

You could probably just call ATR "Extra Maneuver" to put it in line with all the other "Extra"s, as well as help make it clear that it's not the sole source of speedster abilities.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Not literally speaking. Similarly, ATR is not a bundle that happens to include a level of Extra Attack with some Enhanced Move.

ATR lets you move faster, but that's because you might be taking (say) four Move Maneuvers, not that you're moving four times as fast in one Move Maneuver, as you would with Enhanced Move 2. There will be some subtle rules differences, like the size of a step, or how far you can move with All-out Attack, or how far you can reach in your turn. ("Move 5, Attack; Move 5, Attack" is not the same ability as "Move 10, Attack, Attack".)

Casually speaking, you might say it's like Enhanced move (but with a linear increase rather than a doubling). But in practice, it's probably much better to think of it as multiple separate, full and completed, Maneuvers taken in sequence during your turn. ATR lets you move farther per turn, but a lot of other mechanics during your turn are different than simply having a larger Move stat.

You could probably just call ATR "Extra Maneuver" to put it in line with all the other "Extra"s, as well as help make it clear that it's not the sole source of speedster abilities.

Cheers for the summary, and yep definitely different in how the two game out in terms of movement in combat.

I was thinking more about ATR being used out of combat time so action by action not being the way it expresses (but it still increases movement).

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

I get the point about you do nothing until the wait is triggered and so all remaining actions are held until then, but if you have more than one action "waiting" could one of those also be a "wait" that can be set and subsequently triggered after the first wait is triggered?

Never had it come up*, but yes I would allow multiple ATR Maneuvers to be set as Waits.


* Mostly because that Character would then spend the rest of his ATR Maneuvers dealing with whatever triggered the Wait Maneuver.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

I was thinking more about ATR being used out of combat time so action by action not being the way it expresses (but it still increases movement).

ATR isn't limited to combat only by default, so sure.

Still mechanically different in that the Move a linear increase rather than geometric, so if you just want to move fast out of combat, Enhanced Move is a much better deal. (100 points gets you 5 levels of Enhanced Move, or 32x speed, rather than 2x speed.) Though to be fair, ATR would work in all environments (Air, Ground, Space, Water); you'd have to buy EM four times to match that exactly. Still cheaper at even one level, though, and the geometric growth will make EM rapidly pull ahead (so to speak).

You could accomplish many non-combat actions more quickly, but only those that depend only on your own work.

(You can't bake bread twice as fast. The yeast and oven don't have ATR. Some painting styles you could do fast, but others involve layering which needs previous layers to dry, anywhere from a minute with a hair dryer to overnight. The GM's going to have to make a lot of calls based on the specific task at hand. Extreme levels of ATR would bring up their own problems if treated sufficiently realistically. You can whittle at mad speed, but at some point the wood shavings can't get out of the way, get ignited by the passage of your hypersonic fingers, create an explosion since they're fleeing faster than the speed of sound in the surrounding air, all that comic-book physics debate stuff.)

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

ATR isn't limited to combat only by default, so sure.

Still mechanically different in that the Move a linear increase rather than geometric, so if you just want to move fast out of combat, Enhanced Move is a much better deal. (100 points gets you 5 levels of Enhanced Move, or 32x speed, rather than 2x speed.) Though to be fair, ATR would work in all environments (Air, Ground, Space, Water); you'd have to buy EM four times to match that exactly. Still cheaper at even one level, though, and the geometric growth will make EM rapidly pull ahead (so to speak).

You could accomplish many non-combat actions more quickly, but only those that depend only on your own work.

(You can't bake bread twice as fast. The yeast and oven don't have ATR. Some painting styles you could do fast, but others involve layering which needs previous layers to dry, anywhere from a minute with a hair dryer to overnight. The GM's going to have to make a lot of calls based on the specific task at hand. Extreme levels of ATR would bring up their own problems if treated sufficiently realistically. You can whittle at mad speed, but at some point the wood shavings can't get out of the way, get ignited by the passage of your hypersonic fingers, create an explosion since they're fleeing faster than the speed of sound in the surrounding air, all that comic-book physics debate stuff.)

Yep I agree ATR is is whole lot more than just the elements of enhanced move it crosses over with. My initial point wasn't really about directly comparing them, rather just I hadn't really realised or had forgotten that ATR allows you access to fast long term movement. I had been concentrating more on it's combat applications on a second by second scale.


A long term campaign of mine is nicely winding down so I thought I'd take the opportunity to branch out a bit from my previous usual campaign types,(generally 'gritty' v/low fantasy / historical stuff)

So I'm probably going to have some "do'h" moments about the implications of more fantastic aspects of the system, although I'll try not to clog up this forum with them ;-)!

Anyway

Cheers for your points!

TD