Ghostlier Movement

[Plane]

Originally Posted by naloth

At the very least you'd need to expect that defense and read your opponent.

Deceptive Attack sounds like it can just be "I'm attacking so quickly that you can't react fast enough regardless of what you do" where you wouldn't actually need to know what defense they're going to use, ie MA66 "Deceptive Attack that relies on sheer speed"

The other kind (also MA66 "Sliding a weapon along the enemy’s to bypass his
guard (a “glide” or coulé) is a Deceptive Attack.) sounds like something you would just use to bypass parries or blocks... "slide along" establishes contact too... so that's a key thing you wouldn't want to handwaive in a game of auras and electrified metal weapons...

IMO a "slidealong" sounds almost like a Bash (normally ST-based) that gets floated back to DX, where it only works in respect to a specific defense (bypassing "guard" like this wouldn't make your attack any harder to dodge, or parry with the non-COULEd weapon) and doesn't transfer to allies...

That or maybe it sounds more like a Counterattack (penalizes parries worse than dodges, can only be done after a parry)

MA76 "Add in Deceptive Attack (p. B369) for fast snaps and other tricky moves" covers both concepts even though "fast tricks" and "sneaky tricks" seem to be different (explosive v slow) applications of DX.

Originally Posted by naloth

You aren't going to be able to anticipate the pattern of a Blink Dodge until you're either familiar how Teleport is used as a defense or guessing that particular character's go to moves.

Makes sense with ranged, if you're referring to MA121 Tricky Shooting - Prediction Shots ?

That only works against dodges, in which case your bullets aren't exactly "harder to defend against" (you can't take a DX penalty to shoot faster, or from weird angles ... there's no penalty to parry or block them, but you normally can't do that anyway, barring Enhanced Time Sense) so much as it seems to interpret dodging as "moving unpredictably" (not actually reacting to the firing of the shot at all) and TSPS predicting it anyway.

"can read his adversary’s body language and guess when the shot will come" explanation under Ranged Feints sounds like something, if I were to try and adapt it to the Dodge This rules, would be instead of making the Per roll to perceive the bullet (a Vision roll based on the SM of the bullet) to instead make a Per roll to perceive the trigger/finger, and just know "I'd better jump somewhere" when that happens.

That's pretty much how Dodge and Drop is intended to work I think. You bail the entire hex because perceiving speciifcally which hit location is being targeted is usually impossible (possible exception: if they're using a lasser and you can see the dot, you'd know which location to move out of the intended path)

Tactical Dodging Redux (pyr57pg20) is a great approach to me (don't need to declare dodge against specific attacker but must declare it during your own turn) but I'm not sure how well that adapts to "discrete dodges" with activations/FP costs like Warping. It seems more limited for "when I can dodge unlimited times per turn" like how dodges work in Basic Set. Even the cumulative -1 from MA doesn't sound like it would work well with Redux, because that puts together an "order" to the dodges rather than just representing "I move funny".

What might be better is just randomly rolling dodge but rather than considering successes "a win", consider them "MoS penalty to attackers" but that's just a heck of a lot like "Defensive Feint against everyone".

Hm... that actually might be legal if we call that "Whirlwind Defensive Feint" or "Grand Defensive Feint" except those are I think Rapid Strike 5 extra for 6 foes (5x6=-30) halved to -15 for master advantages per http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...62&postcount=8 and some of the technique bonuses (RHL, crits, fixed order, swings) wouldn't apply to feints...

"limited to swings" is weird too, don't Combinations already need to specify attack type?
"all you can do", similarly... aren't you already prohibited from doing a DWA or RS atop a RS? "prohibited from fast-draw" sounds like the only extra here, and you'd want to word it "can't be done after a fast-draw" since that's done before the maneuve rbegins

Cole had something along those lines (maneuver dedicated to penalizing attackers) as Move and Attack (Evasive) which didn't work on Suppression Fire. B409 didn't have anything excluding Defensive Feint penalties but then DF did not exist at the time that was written...

B409 requires you to fire declared shots into an area regardless of whether or not anyone enters, so the way that's treated as actual attack rolls based on your skill is actually pretty strange. Hosing an area mindlessly just sounds more like Bombardment, so maybe the skill roll should be purely based on shots fired into hex and not on skill at all, except for that of targeting the hex at +4 ?

There's no visibility penalties but there are bonuses for aiming... which sounds like "I got X many bullets into the hex". With SF cap at 6+RoF bonus, that sounds like a great bombardment formula, and maybe you could just do a roll to target the hex and treat your MoS/recoil "rounds hit the hex" as the RoF for determining the RoF bonus for the 6+ bombardment effective skill which can't be penalized by Deceptive Feint?

MA100 could let the Warper use Evaluate on the attacker to cancel out a Deceptive Attack or Feint bonus used against them...

The strange thing about feint to me is how it seems like a "fake attack" yet doesn't actually trigger defenses, so no FP is wasted on Feverish Defense, or buying off Warp's -10 or similar...

Makes me wonder if maybe Feints emulating actual attacks should just be min-damage hits that stop short (ST 0) which can cause opponent to waste parries (-4) or dodges (-1) penalizing them that way...

Whereas the traditional feint isn't so much "he's making an attack" but "he's moving in a weird way, I'm losing track of him, and can't predict when he actually will attack" so that when he does, the normal MoV defense penalty occurs.

Kinda feel like folding 'Defensive Feint' bonus into that too, because "moving unpredictably so I can't predict where he'll be to target him" and "moving unpredictable so I can't predict where he'll be to defend against him" sound indistinguishable. Folding them together makes feints super-awesome (present-time defensive, future-offensive) and even more appealing in fights.

MA111's 3 kinds could maybe have different rules, like with change-up being a last-minute target change, throat>gut actually might not prompt a defense at all if someone was wearing a gorget. Change-ups could maybe be something like where you roll to target a location, prompt the choice to defend or not, but before defender actually rolls (they merely choose to defend or not) you can specify a last-minute chance. Then the defender could also change, and contest determines how well they change?

"Radical angle" sounds more useful to get around DB, and the problem with "field of vision" explanation is varying traits related to that, so that actually should be a mechanical sometimes-avoidable thing.

I like the "sheer speed" as the simplest in terms of hex/location, but it only goes so far. "Dodge This!" for example penalizes DX based on Speed/Range so at some point you're going to reach "faster than a bullet" kind of penalties from DA, and there should maybe be realistic limits on just how much of a DA penalty you can explain away from speed (thinking good guideline would be capped to Basic Speed on the Speed/Range table representing limb, plus whatever your velocity in last turn) and that should obviously make it equally hard to target fast-moving body/limb with attacks too, not just harder to parry...

Rather than make it a 'special effect' it might actually be possible to define all DA variants with different rules. This would make it easier to describe/RP them since the effects would match the tactics.

MA122 "body partly conceals" for some reason only gives -1 deceptive when actually taking a deceptive w/ Reversed but normal or telegraphed reversed don't get...