Avoidance versus Resistance [Supers]

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I find it best to keep the tongue at least partially in cheek when roleplaying

That's a thing I systematically avoid doing. Even in comedy, as The Great Lorenzo said, "The essence of comedy is playing it straight."

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's a thing I systematically avoid doing. Even in comedy, as The Great Lorenzo said, "The essence of comedy is playing it straight."

I agree, but I'm not sure how that isn't what I was saying.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I agree, but I'm not sure how that isn't what I was saying.

I've always understood "tongue in cheek" to be more or less the opposite of playing it straight. Perhaps I've misunderstood.

[Ulzgoroth]

I'm not sure what follows is really an avoidance vs. resistance dichotomy. Usually with that we're talking about defenses that don't care how strong the attack is (active defense, mirror images, etc) vs. defenses that do (various forms of being tough enough to take the hit). And especially in supers, there's little or no barrier to using the former sort of defense while also having a powerful offense and being basically able to hold ground.

Originally Posted by Kromm

"Drawing aggro" is a thing.

Ninjas aren't used to protect cities from invading armies; that's a job for big, static defenses, and other armies. Unless you run in super-cinematic mode (not required for supers, which absolutely can pair exotic powers with gritty, harsh realism), your ninjas won't be able to assassinate the entire army or stop it by "decapitating" the leadership (unless the enemy leadership is bad and fragile). You need massive targets to draw all the fire while people get to safety.

This still applies at smaller scales. Your streetwise vigilante can be the night and all, and take out bad guys without ever being touched or even seen . . . but if the bad guys are busily holding a city hostage and murdering people in the streets, you need somebody who can walk up to the bullies in plain sight, take their best shot, spit out teeth, and end them. That isn't cinematic; that's how you deal with bullies.

There's a good reason why there are both undercover detectives and SWAT teams, intelligence services and armed forces, collision-avoidance radars and airbags. Avoidance is always better, but it isn't always possible.

Drawing aggro is a thing, but in the strict sense it's a quite limited thing. Actual drawing aggro is about making the enemy attack a target that is blatantly tactically wrong. The entire point of it is that if the enemy loses because you control their target selection.

When you're not fighting intentionally stupid MMO mob AIs, that's not entirely impossible, but it's a much more limited gambit. It can work against dumb animals, and it can work against smarter animals briefly, but only until they take a moment to think about what they're doing and what they should be doing.

That's a problem with fixed fortifications in war, after all. Unless the enemy's ultimate objectives are inside the fortification or it is entirely blocking a choke point, they can leave a force to prevent sorties and then bypass it with their main force rather than stopping until it can be reduced.

Armies and SWAT and brawlers are not to superspies and detectives and stalkers as tanks are to DPS. Line fighters are the DPS. They don't make the enemy come at them by being big or resilient or impressive, though none of those hurt. They make the enemy come at them by being able to destroy anyone who tries to bypass them. (Or, of course, they go at the enemy - SWAT doesn't tend to fight defensive actions.) Meanwhile those sneaky specializations generally don't do a lot of damage fast - they do a little carefully selected damage (when that's what they're after) to targets that line fighters wouldn't be able to reach.


Some of that carries over fine into ttRPG situations, but some of it not so much. In supers, the obvious issue is that blasters tend to hit harder than bricks on the same points, and not do so from a position where the enemy (at least the enemy blasters) would have to go out of their way to return fire. Pretty much exactly unlike line troops and artillery on a battlefield. (Stealth types do seem like they'd work fine in the view you're going for - a noisy attention-holding diversion is a great boon to stealth, sneaking up on people is slower than openly hurling yourself at them, and it's hard to hold ground when your core paradigm is never letting the enemy know what ground you're currently occupying.)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Meanwhile those sneaky specializations generally don't do a lot of damage fast - they do a little carefully selected damage (when that's what they're after) to targets that line fighters wouldn't be able to reach.

By your definition, snipers are tanks. They tend to provoke far more effort chasing them than is justified by the damage they do.

By a more conventional definition, infantry are tanks (they're something disproportionately tough you're forced to attack rather than the stuff you want to attack), it's just that they do it by creating zones that are expensive or dangerous to pass through rather than 'aggro'. Tanks and artillery are dps, as they're more focused on attack than defense.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I've always understood "tongue in cheek" to be more or less the opposite of playing it straight. Perhaps I've misunderstood.

Maybe I misunderstood too. To me, it's taking the absurd and comedic and playing it straight. It's lampshading without taking away gravitas. It's being able to have an anthropomorphic frog knight jump down from rafters be treated as a serious character who will help you save the queen without either being a parody or farce but at the same time wanting that frog knight in the first place.

To be relevant to the thread, it's accepting that supers don't really follow anything close to 'realistic' rules while still being able to use those rules for gaming and storytelling. It's building things so bricks can punch radiation death beams away with their bare fists. It's letting the 'supermundane' dodge grenade blasts with cinematic powers. And it's saying that all supers can always seem to survive anything that ends up happening to them without undermining what happens to them.

Also, looking at the OP question again, gurps kind of lets you do varying ways of both. You could tank hits via high DR and HP or you can laugh them off with Diffuse or not care with Unkillable + Regeneration. You can avoid getting hit with dodge+luck or with Warp or not let them know you didn't get hit with Illusion. You can combine them with things like Duplication letting a shell take the damage while you do something else important or literally punch bullets out of the air with indestructible fists.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by Anthony

By your definition, snipers are tanks. They tend to provoke far more effort chasing them than is justified by the damage they do.

By a more conventional definition, infantry are tanks (they're something disproportionately tough you're forced to attack rather than the stuff you want to attack), it's just that they do it by creating zones that are expensive or dangerous to pass through rather than 'aggro'. Tanks and artillery are dps, as they're more focused on attack than defense.

When you are talking about snipers in Supers settings, they do tend to draw a lot of aggro. For example, imagine a 'sniper' with Affliction (HT; Delay, +20%; Extended Duration, Permanent, Removed by burying the statue in concecrated earth for 1 day, +150%; Incapacitation, Petrification, +150%; Malediction 3, +200; No Signature, Mundane and Mystical, +50%; Super, -10%) [66]. With a Will 20 and Talent 4, they have a good chance of transforming anyone into a statue and, if they miss, no one knows that they were doing anything. Even when they succeed though, no one can tell who attacked them, and the 'sniper' can leisurely take out an individual every few seconds (or set a delay for it to activate hours later).

Now, imagine the terror that the potential targets feel when their friends turn to stone. Imagine the panic that they would experience if one of them was petrified in midflight and shattered when they hit the ground. After a while, it would start to seem rational to kill everything in sight, just on the chance that you would hit the culprit.

[oneofmanynameless]

Let me tell you guys, as a long time WoW tank, that you don't have to be a tank to pull aggro. The ranged DPS who accidentally pulled aggro and caused endless problems is a long-standing tradition.

Being a tank is about forcing opponents to fight you instead of your higher priority allies, and then being tough enough, and having the suppression tools necessary (such as area denial attacks) to draw out that combat and make it really suck for them.

And as a LoL player let me tell you that if well built a tank played well can absolutely force intelligent and tactically minded opponents to fight them instead their more dangerous allies. It largely involves keeping your body between them and your allies, and generating enough suppression to make getting to your allies without getting rid of you first an endless and nasty slog under fire (in real life that mostly means area denial and suppressing fire, in fantasy combat those things are joined by CC and terrain alterations).

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Anthony

By your definition, snipers are tanks. They tend to provoke far more effort chasing them than is justified by the damage they do.

By a more conventional definition, infantry are tanks (they're something disproportionately tough you're forced to attack rather than the stuff you want to attack), it's just that they do it by creating zones that are expensive or dangerous to pass through rather than 'aggro'. Tanks and artillery are dps, as they're more focused on attack than defense.

Snipers could be, but usually aren't. Effort spent on hunting them might be wasted, but it's not tanking unless the effort otherwise was going to be spent attacking somebody else. Could happen - if you're defending Stalingrad and your enemy platoons that are supposed to be assaulting a position are drawn off because they'd rather try to kill that one aggravating guy than execute their objective, that's actually pretty pure pulling aggro! On the other hand, if they're just harrassing enemies away from the front line or interdicting an area the enemy wanted to advance through, that's probably not.

Infantry might be 'tanks'. I deliberately avoided the term, though - and as you say, infantry don't hold the line by manipulating 'aggro'.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

When you are talking about snipers in Supers settings, they do tend to draw a lot of aggro. For example, imagine a 'sniper' with Affliction (HT; Delay, +20%; Extended Duration, Permanent, Removed by burying the statue in concecrated earth for 1 day, +150%; Incapacitation, Petrification, +150%; Malediction 3, +200; No Signature, Mundane and Mystical, +50%; Super, -10%) [66]. With a Will 20 and Talent 4, they have a good chance of transforming anyone into a statue and, if they miss, no one knows that they were doing anything. Even when they succeed though, no one can tell who attacked them, and the 'sniper' can leisurely take out an individual every few seconds (or set a delay for it to activate hours later).

Now, imagine the terror that the potential targets feel when their friends turn to stone. Imagine the panic that they would experience if one of them was petrified in midflight and shattered when they hit the ground. After a while, it would start to seem rational to kill everything in sight, just on the chance that you would hit the culprit.

That sounds like the exact opposite of drawing aggro...

[AlexanderHowl]

One individual ends up drawing the attention and efforts of the enemy. While the end result may not be desirable from a tactical point of view, the fact that the enemy is focused on hunting one individual grants valuable time to your side. For example, such a 'sniper' might draw an enemy force away from a civilian population center or delay them enough for reinforcements to reach a defensive line.

In reality though, enemy forces will rarely go after a classic tank, especially if they do not deal sufficient damage to cause major injury. Harassing the weak points of an enemy before the final engagement is much more likely, as it makes sense to deprive an enemy of support and supplies before a major engagement. After a few days without support and supplies, the strong point becomes weak enough that it can be assaulted.