Incentivizing secondary attacks House Rule

[Kromm]

Another possibility would be to treat a secondary attack on the same turn as being "set up" in a way that prevents the defender's chosen defense against the primary attack from being a valid defense option. For instance, if two rapier-and-dagger fighters face off and one attacks using both rapier and dagger, the other couldn't parry the rapier and the dagger with her own rapier – she would have to parry one with the rapier and the other with the dagger, or parry and then dodge.

Among other things, this would make kicks, open-handed grabs, etc. more viable: Faced with a weapon attack and then an unarmed attack, most defenders would use their high weapon parry vs. the weapon attack and devote a lesser defense to the lower-threat unarmed attack. If they have just one weapon, that would mean nobody's limbs would be endangered by being parried by a weapon.

This would only apply when the attacker is striking using two different attacks. If all the attacks came from one of the attacker's weapons, with the usual penalties for Rapid Strike, then I see no reason not to allow all the defenses to come from one of the defender's weapons, with the standard penalties for multiple parries. Particularly against fencing weapons, this would make sequences like "rapier stab + kick" more attractive than "rapier stab + rapier stab," as someone with high Rapier skill would probably just parry twice in the second case, but would have to fall back on a less-reliable dodge in the first case.