Combat as a contest of attack skill vs defense

[Tai]

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.