Knowing the outcome of an attack before choosing to actively defend

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

No. You have no way of telling which attack is going to be a good one or not. Using your suggestion you will have to allocate most of your skill to defense every turn ad infintum. The only alternative is to randomly pick a turn in which to reduce your defense and hope that he gets a low roll that turn. We quickly realised that it was a waste of time allocating anything to parrying and, instead, going for what GURPS would call an all-out attack every time. The only instance in which it was worth defending was when you had a buddy who could hit him while you were keeping him busy - and in that situation you may as well allocate all of your skill to defense.

To be honest this sounds like the paradox of defence to me. But TBF I think Tros was a better example of allocating resource between the two that RM/MERP* was, because you could build between turns. GURPS does building between actions in combat very well too

*I always thought they combined too many different things into too few system variables, I seem to remember it was pretty easy to do the maths and work out what was the optimal choice in a lot of different situations (because they weren't treated as being that different)