Incentivizing secondary attacks House Rule

[ericthered]

This is extremely common in cinematic films. Watch the light saber duel in the phantom menace and observe that the weapon that hits the most is Darth Maul's boots.

I've got my own article on how to handle such things when running long combat scenes (in terms of in-game time), but those aren't exactly compatible with Gurp's signature blow by block combat.

My initial concern is that this method has the secondary attack happening too much for not enough hits. Right now it optimizes to every other blow with a mere -1 to defenses on the off-blow. I'd like to see less frequent attacks that hit more. My initial thought is if the foe makes a defense by 0 or 1, you can afterwards make a secondary attack (using normal attack pacing) at -2 (or more).

Another thought is to give the foe -1 to defense, but if you hit you have a random hit location AND a random weapon.

[phayman53]

Originally Posted by ericthered

This is extremely common in cinematic films. Watch the light saber duel in the phantom menace and observe that the weapon that hits the most is Darth Maul's boots.

It's common in real fighting techniques as well. Rapier and Dagger uses it, and Longsword masters taught an opposite-side pommel strike as a follow-up to a parried slash. Likewise, a quick opposite-side strike with a staff is pretty common and effective.

Originally Posted by ericthered

My initial concern is that this method has the secondary attack happening too much for not enough hits. Right now it optimizes to every other blow with a mere -1 to defenses on the off-blow. I'd like to see less frequent attacks that hit more. My initial thought is if the foe makes a defense by 0 or 1, you can afterwards make a secondary attack (using normal attack pacing) at -2 (or more).

Another thought is to give the foe -1 to defense, but if you hit you have a random hit location AND a random weapon.

Well, my initial thought was to give something like the Counterattack Technique penalties, so an additional -2 to defenses with the active defense used against the first attack and -1 to all other defenses. However, I thought this might be too generous when compared to a Dual Weapon Attack, which is only a -1 on all defenses (though it is for both attacks) for a -4 to skill on the attacks.

As it stands, I still think it would not be too over-used because usually the main attack has a much higher damage potential (and quite possibly higher skill), so repeated deceptive attacks at a -2 or -4 to skill would still be preferential against most opponents. Only in the case where an opponent's defenses are particularly challenging would the follow-up attack incorporating a sub-optimal weapon to get an additional -1 to active defenses be efficient. That's my theory, anyway.