Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

My group started handling combat as a contest between the attacker's attack margin of success vs the defender's defending margin if success. For an attack to hit, the attacker must succeed and their margin of success must be greater than the defender's margin of success.

We started doing this for no other reason than to speed up combat. Attacks are far more likely to hit, which they seem to like.

I think I remember this option from 3rd ed., suggested for Supers games; I think(?). Can anyone remember where/if this idea was officially published?

I'm curious if any other groups do this. Also, I'd appreciate being warned about any unintended consequences when adopting this mechanic for combat.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

Suppose that I miss my Brawling roll by 2 and you miss your Dodge roll by 4. Is that interpreted as your having dodged into my blow, so I hit despite myself? Or do you play that a miss is still a miss?

In the former interpretation, combat will be over in fewer exchanges of blows, especially with less skilled combatants, as failed defenses will turn misses into hits. On the other hand, you'll have a defense roll for every attack roll, so that you'll be making rather more defense roll.

In the latter interpretation, you won't be making any added defense rolls, but you'll also be having less speedup, as missed blows won't turn into hits.

Either way, you'll have really nerfed defense. Consider: A typical competent (but not heroic) combatant will have Attack-12, but will have Dodge-9 (assuming Combat Reflexes). So an average attack will succeed by 1-2 points. To beat that, the foe has to succeed against Dodge-8 or -7. You've lowered the chance of Dodge working from 3/8 to 1/4 or even 1/6; that is, you've reduced its value by between a third and three-sevenths.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

I've seen a group use something similar - except your defense was equal to your skill (they had a Dodge skill, for dodging).

I bowed out immediately on seeing this, given the ways it changes the combat game at a glance.

There's no more choices:

• If you're facing somebody better than you, you can't afford to go for a low blow or a high-value target and try to get lucky, because you're just crippling your odds further.
• If you're facing someone worse than you, you can't afford to show off your skill by going for high value targets or crippling attacks, in case you reduce yourself below them.
• If you're facing someone equal to you, you can't go for high value targets or limb hits or anything but straight shots to the torso, because you're reducing your odds of success too much.

All combat ends up becoming 'I attack, here's my damage if I hit'. Which is essentially D&D, except a bit deadlier and more fiddly.

If you're preserving the normal defense rolls, then you're still damaging choices - attackers will feel a little more confident taking small risks, since defenders' starting odds are so low, but you'll still not see things like Rapid Strikes or skull hits very often.

If that's what you're aiming for, then I suppose mission accomplished, but I find the Deceptive Attack rules do the 'make hits on target more likely' job a bit more elegantly personally.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

Only the Best Shall Win, from one of the Compendia.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

Also, bear in mind that +/-1 to defence generally costs 2 times as many resources as a +/-1 to hit. As such, if they are treated as being on an even footing, investing in defences becomes ineffective. If you really want to make this change, you should double the defender's margin before comparing to the attackers. This will still increase the frequency of hits, because it's basically like saying the attacker gets to know how (s)he will roll before determining level of deceptive and thus, there will be more deceptives and therefore more defences penetrated.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

I suspect anyone who uses the contest mechanic is wanting to avoid the complexity of things like deceptive attacks.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

A miss is still a miss.

Agreed. They like the attack and damage rolls, but seem to find the defense rolls to be nothing more than an inconvenience.

Ah! It's actually one page before that: GURPS 3e Compendium II: Combat and Campaigns, p. 73., in the Faster Combats sidebar, where it says "For fighters with Dodges of 13+, it is recommended that combat be resolved with a Quick Contest of Skills…". (The Only the Best Shall Win sidebar recommends giving the defender a -1 to their dodge for every 2 full points an attack is made by.)

That is definitely correct in our case.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

Okay. Then just for clarity, I recommend not calling it a Quick Contest. Nor a regular contest, because those work more like standard GURPS combat. I'm not sure what would be a good name, but either of those will mislead people. Perhaps it's best to just say "a variant combat rule, as follows:".

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

The Quick Contest where you have to also succeed in your roll to effect your intent is used in Technical Grappling a lot. I wanted to call it a Resistance Roll in an early draft, because the text on p. B348 describes it perfectly. You must both succeed in your roll AND win the contest.

However, the guidance given was that was for resisting supernatural abilities and powers . . . but by the text itself, Resistance Roll is the correct mechanic.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

Tai makes great points. The minute you make it a Quick Contest, a lot of the attractive to me parts of GURPS combat gets flushed down the drain. Specifically, targeted attacks.

If your players don't like that there is defense, they don't like deceptive attacks (which really aren't that complex--they are just "I take a -2 to my attack to mess up his defense!"), they are fine with cutting out targeted attacks, rapid strikes, etc...do they actually want to play GURPS or would they rather just play D&D? If they prefer D&D, maybe that is what they should be playing?

Losing targeted attacks and all that comes with it is a big negative for me to the quick contest method. Treating as equivalent numerically something that is not (Attack and Defense--an attack roll with a sword is likely to be twice as much as a Parry roll) is a negative for me. But the worst would come for me as a player when the shoe is on the other foot. Combat might well come faster because my PCs are getting killed because their defenses have been hampered. And I spend a lot of time on my GURPS characters...a lot more than I do on a first level D&D character...which is quick to make and somewhat disposable.

I wouldn't play in a game like that. There are other ways to speed up combat.

But if your players are happy, I suppose that is all that matters.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

As a system it can work perfectly fine if you compare like with like as is down in other contests between skills. If you want to decide who wins in a sword fight just roll sword skills and the person with the largest margin of success is the winner.

I have found a different option works with my players. If the fight looks like it is dragging on too long out of character have people react like it is dragging on too long in character. No one should just stand there and mechanically throw the same attack over and over again (unless they really are automatons) just to have it deflected in the same way.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

In my group we have a little different house rule.

The parry, block and dodge defenses are skills just like any other one. You can raise them as you would rise any other one.

If you are hit, you have a penalty to the defense roll equals to 10-attack skill of your enemy. In this context "skill" means your value without adding any modifiers such as "visibility", "higher ground", "magical weapon bonus", "telegraphic attack bonus" etc...

If your enemy attack skill es less than 10, then your penalty is 0 (you can't claim a bonus!)

This way you don't have to calculate the margin of success of every roll, because these "margins" are precalculated. For example if you have Sword-13 then your enemies have a -3 to dodge, parry and block you. As a side note, as the attacker you can make a deceptive attack and sum up all the penalizations to the enemy's active defense.

We are happy with this rule, but we don't play with called shots.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

The only reason they're playing GURPS is to accommodate me. There are three GMs in the group; we each use a different system in a different genre. My GURPS Star Trek game gets run about every other month, which means they never get comfortable with the combat options.

You said it, trooper6. I was a bit disappointed they didn't embrace the tactical nuances that GURPS has to offer; but as GURPS makes it easy to adjust complexity to taste, it's no a problem accommodating their proclivities.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

I'm just wondering if there might be other strategies.

In my experience getting D&Ders to play GURPS, they often don't like anything that is different from D&D mechanics (because they spent a lot of time learning those mechanics). They would start by complaining about defense rolls, about the 1 second combat turn, about this and that. I found that trying to make GURPS more like D&D by ditching all the things that made GURPS special didn't, in the long run, convert them to GURPS. They just kept seeing it as a "not as fun D&D."

So instead, I amped up all the GURPS specific things. I kept the defense rolls...but highlighted the called shots and other cool things you could do with high skill. If they felt combat was slow (which...was never as slow as those high level D&D3e fights), I showed them ways to speed it up. If they were frustrated they didn't get to hit all the time (because of defense), I threw some low level people at them with poor defenses that they would hit all the to give them a sense of "I'm badass." To give them a healthy appreciation of defense I put them up against some big foes who would do LOTS of damage if they hit...they big foe with a club would hit a red shirt and make them paste...showing the effects...then the players really appreciated their defenses. I gave them my combat options handout that makes things easier for them. I showed them the awesomeness of GURPS character creation in one-on-one sessions.

I have converted D&Ders to GURPS...but usually not by trying to make GURPS into D&D. However, if the players are dyed in the wool D&Ders only, and your enthusiasm for the system won't convert them...I just don't know if it is worth it to make them play it. They will only go and bad mouth the system to other gamers behind your back...and it seems like it would be counter-productive in the long run.

Oh! One more thing...which, I don't know if it is doable, but you might consider it.
They might like GURPS combat if they had a bit more familiarity with it...and playing once every other month isn't all that conducive to that as you noted. In my rotating GM group, each GM would run an adventure which would last 5-10 sessions before we would switch. Perhaps your group could play a few more consecutive sessions of each game before rotating to the next. It would let people get more into the groove of a new system.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

I used the contest option in 3e and it worked well for my game. You need to tweak defences because they're nerfed as mention above. It speeds up combat for high skilled characters because they can reliably deliver unstoppable blows. The main problem or feature if you prefer, is that high weapon skills become extremely preferable and therefore common.

When I switched to 4e, I dropped it because the array of combat options available now make it unnecessary IMO.

Re: Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense
 

I agree with Trooper6 you must highlight gurps strength rather than try to make it into D&D.

My group uses a cheat sheet for combat which lists all the maneuvers, hit locations and etc. This helps the people who barely bother to read the system