Beats Suck(?)

[Dinadon]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Thus, is it your point that these are the only things Beat is useful for? You'll note I point this out in the OP.

Do you have any suggestions as to how to bring it more into line with Feint, so that characters without unbelievable amounts of strength can take advantage of it too?

What, in the same way that it takes high amounts of DX to be good at feinting? High skill helps both, buying up the feint technique helps both, and both are only truly useful if you can guarantee succeeding by a reasonable margin regularly. To be honest, the most glaring issue with the expanded feint rules is that someone can always use a DX based roll to resist. I think its Icelander who has changed it so that beats are only resisted with ST.

I don't see much point trying to give high DX, low ST characters more incentive to use beat beyond raising their ST. In the same way I don't see much point trying to give high ST, low DX characters one for feint. Anyway, I won't argue that feint is superior in a one-on-one match up, because it is. Which is also why I don't think much of your example. Aside from the fact that strong guy is really lopsided, and isn't really a challenge so why consider him at all? You don't present a situation in which beat can make full use of the rules it has. If you have one person really good at beats, and his two competent buddies, how quickly do you think they can take down a single competent opponent? How about if the three buddies are equal, and any one could initiate a beat? What if there are only two buddies?

Beat and feint are tactically different combat options, and an interesting choice if their level is fairly equal. However changing beat without having a proper look at the situations where it is suppose to be more useful (in this case, group based combat) is a flawed method of reasoning.