Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

Yes, you can still Feint. Also, you Evaluate which is yet another option.

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

Skill+4 might be an appropriate roll for some jobs, less so for others. Not all jobs are equally difficult.

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

What does Evaluate do?

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

It's like Aim, but for melee weapons. You get a bonus to skill if you hold back for a couple of seconds to figure out how exactly you are going to launch your next attack.

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

It's described as the Melee combat equivalent to Aim; it "gives a +1 to skill for the purpose of an Attack, Feint, All-Out Attack, or Move and Attack made against that opponent, on your next turn only. You may take multiple, consecutive Evaluate maneuvers before you strike, giving a cumulative +1 per turn, to a maximum of +3" (4e Basic Set, pg. 365).

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

When rolling to see, "Can Joe go into the office and prepare a spreadsheet of the company's accounts receivable?", you'd roll at +4. It's a simple, routine skill, with a success/failure result.

When rolling for job success, you don't need to add +4. You don't need to mess with any of the Difficulty Modifiers, because whether you succeed or fail, you still do your job just fine. You're not rolling for any one task -- you're simulating a month's worth of work. So, basically, you're just checking for crits.

IOW, the "failure doesn't matter" part replaces the need for a +4 modifier for job success rolls.

(And yes, failure matters for freelance jobs, but even then, it just means you make a bit less. And you'll notice that most freelance jobs are actually a lot more difficult than the steady ones, so that's fair, too.)

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

In my mind, being able to hit the head once every two try on average while your opponent can only hope to hit *you* once every two time is a tremendous advantage. The kind of advantage that a well-trained soldier would get over an average Joe. So I believe your example makes perfect sense.

In real life, an opposed skill is always relative. Even if expert swordman can touch everytime normal Joe (like in your example if the torso is "aimed"), that same expert swordman will hit a lot less often against a clone expert. Now this seems to work perfectly in GURPS but if you think about it the other way around, expert swordman can almost always parry average Joe but can only parry expert clone 50% of the time. Then you realize in GURPS it doesn't matter if your opponent is good or not (I am not bringing feint into the equation there) if you have a 13 parry, you will have 13 against everybody may he be abysmally poor or a sword wizard. This is exactly why GURPS needs the feint maneuver.

But then we can try to push the enveloppe. What about master swordman (skill 36 with a parry at 19 with Combat Reflexes) battles master clone? This fight will drag on forever even with feints. I mean on a feint, if the attacker wins by 5, the defender still has 14 to parry. If he doesn't retreat.

On a relative system, it would matter because expert sworman versus espert clone (skill 15-) or master swordman versus master clone (skill 36-) would still get a 50% odd of hitting and whatever difference in skills (your skill is 4 higher than mine) would always mean the same along the line.

Edit because a post made me realize I didn't talk about deceptive attack here. My bad.

Then GURPS 4e brings Deceptive attack. I will not talk about it much because I already did in a following post on this same thread. With a Deceptive attack an attack/defense contest becomes a contest of skills (the defender must succeed by more than the attacker) except that the attacker decide before hand by how much he must succeed. So I am a little bit surprise that you believe contest of skills for combat "silly" and that they "make no sense" since you (or maybe Pulver) felt necessary to include just that option.

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

But it would have been so easy to make defenses on the same scale as attacks.

If both would be on the same scale, there wouldn't be any problem at *any* level. There is one now at high level (IMHO). See my previous post.

Hmmm... not a bad idea actually...

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

I think, and this may be flawed, a great combat skll should also be able to reduce the attacking skill of another character... thereby having a great swordsman make a child's ability to hit lessened... the opposite of Deceptive Attack...

On another note- an interesting rules I've tried in the last 2 weeks...
When a character misses an active defense roll(parry, dodge, or block) only by 1 I've reduced the damage by 2.

When a character misses an active defense roll by 2 I've reduced the damage by 1.

This demonstrates that while the defense did not prove fully sucessful it did lessen the damage by the mere act of defending...

In my time studying Ninpo(Ninjutsu) and Kendo there were MANY times that my defense was 'below-par' and I got whacked but by initiating a dodge or parry(which are really one- in Ninpo at least) I ABSOLUTELY lessened a blow that would have spoiled my day...

thoughts?

Re: Combat- Why not contests of skills?
 

Sure. And if you want to do it, you can just use, say, Skill-4 instead of Skill/2+3.

I'm not entirely convinced that there wouldn't be any problem at any level, but if they are on the same scale, it is less unreasonable to use quick contests, true. OTOH, you have to modify a bunch of other rules that are adapted to the 2:1 scaling of attack vs. defense modifiers.

Okay, using that scenario, you have Master Swordsman (Skill 36) with Combat Reflexes, which gives a Parry of 22 (you seem to have left out the +3 that applies to all defenses). Does the fight take forever?

Probably not, if they are aggressive. Whoever attacks first does an All-Out Attack (Determined) to do a Deceptive attack, taking a -26 penalty to skill, which gives a -13 penalty to the defense roll, giving a 14 (36 + 4 - 26) effective skill against a 9 parry. Pretty good chance to get through. Possibly, both sides take a few Evaluate maneuvers first -- counting on their defense to protect them if the opponent jumps sooner, and hoping to get the drop on the opponent once they've boosted up a bit -- mybe two rounds for an additional -2 they can take to skill (-1 penalty to opponents parry) without reducing their chance of hitting.

Its a mistake to assume master swordsman just sit around and do Move and Attack maneuvers against each other.