Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I searched the forum and googled for this, but didn't seem to find an answer to this question. So here it goes...

My question is about the Feint maneuver scenario where the foe fails their quick contest roll but you succeed on your quick contest roll with a margin of success of zero.

Page 365 of the Basic Set says this about the outcome of the quick contest during a feint:

"If you make your roll, and your foe fails, subtract your margin of success from the foe's active defense if you attack him with Attack, All-Out Attack, or Move and Attack on your next turn."

The example I find problematic is: If your skill is 15 and you roll a 15 (a margin of success of zero), your foe defends against you at -0 next turn (i.e., you succeed but get nothing for your success).

It seems like the rule should be revised to read "subtract the sum of 1 and your margin of success from your foe's active defense..." and, for balance, that same change should probably be made to the case where "you and your foe both succeed but you succeed by more".

Or maybe the easier fix would be to revise the rule to say that the minimum you subtract for a successful feint is 1 (to cover the case of a zero margin of success, but that still seems like your are getting cheated in the case of higher margins of success).

Am I missing something here, or was this considered such a minor edge case that it wasn't worth addressing?

I also looked at the Third Edition Basic Set Revised rules for the Feint maneuver on page 96, and the problem is there too. I find it hard to believe that I am the first person to ask about this, but I had to ask.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Generally speaking, in cases where a Success with MoS 0 would have no impact (Lifting is another example, as it gives +5% to BL per MoS), my inclination is to treat MoS 0 as MoS 0.5 if a fraction makes sense, as MoS 1 otherwise. As -0.5 to defense isn't really a thing in GURPS*, treat MoS 0 on a Feint as MoS 1, for -1 to defense (while for Lifting, you'd have MoS 0 give +2.5% to BL).

*If you don't mind a bit of added complexity, you could indeed have -0.5 come into play by having it be retroactively in effect prior to any rounding. This would mean anyone who is using a Block or Parry off an even effective skill level or is using Dodge and has Basic Speed that is an integer value or an integer +0.25 would suffer an effective -1, while anyone who is using a Block or Parry off an odd effective skill level or is using Dodge and has Basic Speed that is an integer +0.5 or +0.75 would be able to defend at their full defense. For example, a character with skill 12 and Basic Speed 6 simply has Parry 9 and Dodge 9; -0.5 reduces these to 8.5 each, which round down to 8, so a net -1. But someone with skill 13 and Basic Speed 6.5 actually has Parry 9.5 and Dodge 9.5. Normally that gets rounded down to 9 each - but when suffering a -0.5 to defense, they simply get reduced to 9 each before rounding comes into play.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

What Varyon is your best bet. If it isn't present RAW, just rule it as whatever you'd like. Although if you want the most realistic option, see Varyon's. Personally, Varyon's more complicated option is what I think works better.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I would recommend not bothering with complicated calculations, specially during combat.

A success by 0 is 0 penalty, it is a one second action, it is a turn...you need at least MoS 1 to make feint something relevant.

Or call it MoS 0 = -1 defense if the characters are low points and you want to help them to encourage the use of different combat options instead of just bashing the enemies with regular, unmodified, attacks.

The game will play much better if you don't stop it to check if the NPC have a 9.5 or 9 dodge or anything like that.

Keep things moving and interesting.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

True, I was coming from the Play by Post perspective.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

That's probably the best route to take, yeah, I was just saying if a group is inclined to tack on complexity, this would be an option. Currently, from an optimization standpoint, melee combat skills are best to have even values (as this is where you get a +1 to Block/Parry), while Basic Speed is best to have an integer value (as something like Speed 6.5 costs [10] more than Speed 6, yet the only thing it generally gets out of that is sometimes getting to act a little earlier in the turn sequence); giving benefits to odd skill levels and non-integer Speed can somewhat encourage their use (although "the foe has MoS 0 on a Feint and you fail your roll" is quite the edge case).

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I go with this. There are a lot of examples of rules saying "treat success by 0 as success by 1"; doing so for feints, too, is a quick and easy fix.

(The text on BS p. 365 really should explicitly state this, though. Or whatever the official rule is!)

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Yeah, I agree. That is my plan. Honestly, if I noticed this during a game session, I would make the ruling that you get at least a 1 point penalty to the foe's active defense even if the margin of success is zero (i.e., player characters should always get something for success, although I wouldn't feel bad about cheating the NPCs/monsters in this case, ha).

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Minimum 1 is a really simple solution. The rule I've used for a lot of MoS things is that if the foe fails by more than you succeed by, you (can) use their MoF. This usually doesn't come up much with competent NPCs but can still matter.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I always thought it'd be more interesting to use Margin of Victory instead, that way you can have a margin based purely on their failure, and narrow-ly missed feint defenses would be lesser penalties than big losses.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

If you want to do it that way, I'd suggest using half the MoV, otherwise Feint may become too powerful. Then again, from my understanding it's fairly rare that Feinting and then Attacking is actually better than just Attacking twice, so maybe using MoV would give Feint the boost it needs to become more competitive. After all, in just about any case where the foe actually fails to resist a Feint, that same roll on a defense would have been a Failure, and thus if you'd actually tried to hit them, you would have done so. So giving Feint a boost in that sort of situation might not be a bad idea (the utility of a Feint in that case is that you can potentially leverage that defense penalty into making it easier to target a high-value hit location).

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I love MoV much more than MoS on basically everything, but I haven't checked to see how unbalancing it is yet personally. I really should check it here, Feints are just not quite good enough for players to really want to use it even 1 in 3 fights.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

If your skill 16+ feint is good, random but good. Especially if enemy skill 14 or lower. (Ok, it's worthless if enemy defense is 10 or lower). Or for low skill character fighting high defense character (because random, not the best option, but can be useful).
Yes, not a strategy for every encounter, but that's kinda good, more interesting that way.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

So you can basically either Feint and Attack, or do two Attacks. If you're a big fan of crits, in each case you'll want to keep your Attack at the full 16; if instead you just want the highest chance of actually landing a hit, you'll want to use Deceptive Attack to drop skill down to 14 (as a general rule of thumb, using effective skill 13-14 gives the highest overall probability of actually landing a hit, due to the way Telegraphic and Deceptive Attacks work).

In a 16 vs 14 case, on average you're looking at a Margin of Victory of 2. Certainly, you can get lucky (particularly if using MoV rather than MoS when the foe fails), but that's the average. So, on average, the Feint+Attack option means you will likely (~98.5%) hit and give either a -2 to the foe's defense (no DA) or a -3 to the foe's defense (DA down to 14). Meanwhile, the Attack+Attack option means you'll likely hit twice (90.7% each, or ~82% together) with the foe defending at either +0 or -1.

The foe has a base Parry of 10. In an extreme situation, this could go as high as 14 (Combat Reflexes and Large Shield), but that's unlikely. We'll say Parry 12 here (either CR and a Small Shield, or just a Medium Shield). In the first case, this gets dropped down to either 10 or 9, for 50% and 37.5% chance of defending. That's pretty solid. In the second case, this either stays at 12 or gets dropped down to 11, but the target has to defend twice. That's a 74% or 62.5% chance each - if the target has to defend twice (which happens more than 4 out of 5 times), their chance of succeeding both times is either around 55% or around 39%. Note this is only a slightly better chance than the Feint+Attack, plus you have the benefit that there's a chance (roughly 1 in 4 or 1 in 3, respectively) that your first attack will hit, likely preventing you from being at risk of harm between your first action and second one.

Ultimately, Feint is a gamble - and as is the nature of gambling, the house always wins (that is, the player is at a disadvantage when gambling). But if you're feeling lucky, you can certainly go for it. You can also boost your chances by investing in the Feint Technique, which makes it less of a toss-up (although note that same investment in the base skill will give you a general +1 to skill with [1] left over). However, do keep in mind that, absent extreme cases where the foe's Defense is comparable (or even exceeds) their skill, a lot of the time exchanges where you get a large MoV are cases where, if you'd made an attack and the same rolls occurred, you would have hit then and there, rather than needing to wait a round and hope your foe is still in reach and you're still in a condition to pull off an attack.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Parry 10 is skill level 14, without CR (or 12 with CR) and it's 50/50. Not a reliable defense at all.
Normal human with CR is 9 dodge, 12 on retreat. And this is without shield bonuses, extra efforts, defensive attacks
Even with parry 10 it can be defensive grip, retreat or fencing retreat.
I'm not saying anything about +4DB shield spells.

So active defences can get pretty high. With low skill.

And I'm not talking about situation when you need to target chinks in armor, where deceptive attack isn't really an option.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I've seen players use Riposte far more than Feints for setting up attacks (especially where Deceptive Attacks aren't reliable), I wonder where the math lines up with that in situations where you can easily stack Defense Bonuses and thus lose little to lowering their defenses.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Rarely seen riposte. Most of the time it require AoD or evaluate (to reduce defense penalty), require parry (I would say yes to block and dodge ripostes, but it's not RAW) reduce only one defense fully (and if enemy attacks with unbalanced weapon it's kinda bad). And other big problem... No deceptive attack for some reason (I still probably would let to use both, but I don't know, because it's rare in our games.

It's interesting how different games can be in small details

And another interesting thing... I kinda hate feints, they are too random for my liking. I use setup attacks from 3/52 pyramid... But I don't like the idea of decreasing penalty on success of enemy roll. So I just ditched it, it was the only way my players would use it (or me for that matter) because you don't need to decrease defense that much if you can reliably hit, you need it when you can't hit at all.
I hope it makes sense.

Edit: and I'm sorry, I hope it's okay I'm making all this comments. Because I kinda moved from OP question. Don't want to be disrespectful or annoying.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

The main use case for feint (vs deceptive attack) is when you're significantly higher skill than your opponent, and you want to make an attack with a fairly significant penalty. For example, if you have a skill of 24 and your opponent has a skill of 20, +2 for a shield, and +1 for combat reflexes (total 16), you can make a deceptive attack at -12 (to reduce that defense to 10) and have a final hit chance of 38%. If instead you were to feint and attack, win the feint by 4, and still deceptive attack at -8, the final result is 16 vs 8, which is a 75% chance (since you spent two attacks, this is essentially no gain). However, if you were trying to attack a weak spot at -8, your choices are crit fishing (16 vs 16, about 10% to hit) and feint plus deceptive attack (12 vs 10, 38% to hit).

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

I do still also rarely see Riposte. Both are generally reserved for duels since otherwise there's far too much going on to look at even regular rules for determining actions (why Attack when you can Ready to drop a metal gate on someone?). And it's very important because Duels are plagued by defensive bonuses so it comes down to a game of "how do I hit more often than I can crit?".

As for lowering only one defense, I find both as a player and GM that enemies with high defenses either only have one high defense (their primary weapon skill usually) or have so much DX (and possibly HT) that it becomes quickly obvious this fight was a bad idea and 'playing by the game's rules' is how you lose.

I definitely would not let Deceptive Attack and Riposte stack. I remember someone on these forums doing the math years ago and it was clear that once you hit something like 22 skill that you can undermine defenses real fast if you know how to properly stack them. And I like giving my players a chance at living XD Riposte lets you essentially trade DA in for Targeted Attacks and other optional penalties so you can make sure your hit definitely brings your foe down if it hits.

On the other hand, I'd actually recommend making the change so that players will try doing these, then undoing the houserule once they like DA and Riposte so they get used to how they work and you can point out how it's too strong and you made a silly houserule ;)

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Most.of the time penalty would go on parry(because you attack with a weapon), some enemies have shields, some have two weapons, and some have more basic speed(it's adaptation to the amount of "ogres with clubs" type enemies and aoe attacks(I should say we use a little chambara for dodging AoE)).

As for stacking... That's the problem, with half the penalty rule it's not that big of a deal, as far as I see (I have astigmatism). But I don't know, rarely seen it in action. (Supposedly it was something like an enemy doing riposte, one player said "hey, I want to try too", gets hit, never do that again)

Another stacking thing. You can use feint for stacking with any of them. How is it different. Maybe because you can stack all 3. And riposte is risky.

As I said, everyone's game is different in details. So maybe what works for your, doesn't work for ours and other way around.
Or maybe It's really is a silly rule.
*Puts require testing tag*

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Eh, yes and no. The stacking of DA and Riposte basically just makes differences in skill more pronounced. With peer opponents, you basically just drop your defense and the foe's to the same level. Consider the case of skill 22, and tack on CR, a Small Shield, and a Fencing Retreat, for Parry 19. If dropping down to skill 14 via DA (which actually gives a lower overall hit probability than 16 in this situation, but it also gives the foe less room to work with for their Riposte), that's Parry 15. If you drop Parry to 14 to impose a -1 to the attacker's Parry, then when you use skill 14 to attack on your own turn, your foe is also at Parry 14. If your foe had skill 20, then them dropping their attack to 14 would give you Parry 16, while you dropping down to 14 gives them Parry 14. If you combine this with Riposte, you can impose a further -1 relative to what you could in the Peer case (total -3 rather than -2). If they had skill 18, this would be a base -4 to defense and you could get it a further -2 compared to the Peer case (total -6 rather than -4). And so forth.

Of course, this all assumes the foe attacks first. If you attack first, they can do a Riposte, and you'll be at a disadvantage to try to counter with your own Riposte, as you're starting from a lower defense (but if your skill is higher, you can slowly build up to being at the advantage). This can result in both sides using Evaluate and not attacking, so you may need to figure out some way to resolve lulls in combat.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

Something I've doen to improve Feints - because as they stand they are inferior to Deceptive Attack - is to instead use the Margin of Victory, that is the MoS of the Feint plus their foe's MoF. As an equation this looks like Margin of Feint - Margin of Defense = , capped at 0 (the 'capped at - means the defender cannot get a bonus to their defense from this*).

As bonus you will never have a MoV of 0.


* I did do once allowing for the defender's to get a defense bonus on a bad feint versus a good anti-feint roll, but it made for Players once again never wanting to Feint to avoid that.


Now I also allow a 'failed' Feint roll to still succeed if the defender has an even worse margin. Frex:

Feinting PC has a Rapier skill of 15 and they roll a 16 for -1 Margin, the defender has a DX of 12 and they roll a 15 for a -3 Margin; (-1) - (-3) = 2, giving the defender a -2 penalty to their defenses against the Feinting PC's next attack.

As a bonus knowing that they can still succeed even on a 'failed' roll has made Feints a bit more popular among PCs with skills below 16.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

It is indeed. But another solution is this: Add some benefit to a feint in addition to "MoS* = AD penalty inflicted on foe". Do that, and success on a feint will at least yield that benefit, even if the GM handles MoS 0 as a big fat zero AD penalty.

*MoS or MoV, that is; feints are a little tricky in using both.

There are tons of ideas out there, and some in this thread, as plenty of players feel feints aren't worth the trouble. I'll point to my sole contribution in this area, noted here:

Whether or not your Feint succeeded (i.e., resulted in a defense penalty for the target), as long as your roll succeeded (even by 0), treat the action as a turn of Evaluate.

The concept: Whether or not successful as a feint, the action offers the feinter a chance to observe the foe's movements, test the foe's reactions, and maybe even leave the feinter in a better position for the next action. An Evaluate action, in effect, if not an automatic one (gotta have made that skill roll).

Which means: After a Feint, the usual AD penalty (if any) applies to the foe – and the feinter, if his roll succeeded, gets to claim a +1 TH bonus for Evaluate when making the subsequent attack. (Or the subsequent Feint, if the feinter is dissatisfied with the completed Feint yielding low or no AD penalty and wants to try again.)

So that's one idea for making Feint more appealing, even when MoS/MoV yields no sweet AD penalty. (It also helps remind players that Evaluate exists. : )

Tossing it out here for tinkerers to play with.

Re: Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)
 

This is basically changing a Feint from being a special case that is like a Quick Contest, to just being a Quick Contest. And while I was hesitant about it at first (as noted earlier in the thread), I think this is both a way to give Feints a leg up as well as something that simplifies matters a bit.

As for victory against a Feint attempt giving a defense bonus, a lesser version might be appropriate for a duelist or similar. Riffing off t-bone's suggestion, maybe have every MoV 3 count as a free Evaluate against the Feinting character - the character gave away too much, allowing the defender to spot holes in their defenses (as well as clue them in on future deceptive attacks and the like). It's a benefit to reward a character who does a good job at resisting the Feint, but not such a large one as to make the players no longer willing to use that option. If it does make them hesitant, consider locking it behind a Perk - such a Perk would be appropriate for dedicated duelists and others who have opted to invest in the Feint Technique, but the bulk of foes wouldn't have it.

I like it. It does make Evaluate a bit less valuable (sure, it's automatic rather than relying on a roll, but most characters who are going to be using Feint are likely to have sufficient skill to make the roll fairly reliable), but it also means you aren't completely discarding a previous Feint to try a new one.