Sacrificial Breakfall

[Plane]

Originally Posted by kenclary

1) B could maybe try to use the grip to hold A up. The closest official combat rule I could think of would be "shoving people around" from MA118. It's not a great match, and realistically holding someone up like this would require their speedy cooperation.

You got my wheels turning and helped me along to another possible solution...

TG37 is where Douglas Cole replaced and broadened the classicle Takedown from Basic Set with Force Posture Change, which not only can force people to lower postures but also bring them up to higher ones.

In theory there's already a legal way to do this... take a Wait maneuver and be "attack with force posture change to bring my ally to standing when he enters a non-standing state".

When you fall down you're presumably temporarily airborne in a non-standing state ("lying on air" so to speak) before you come crashing down, and maybe a Wait could allow you to intervene to right the posture prior to the Collision with the floor?

So since we already have a mechanic which allows changing someone from "lying down" to "standing up" as an attack, I'd just want to approach a way to do it without taking a Wait... we're basically looking to transform this into sort of an active defense.

We have stuff sorta like this such as Aggressive Parry where if you pass an active defense you can roll an attack and if it succeeds you can roll some damage...

In lieu of a damaging attack, perhaps instead a parry where if it succeeds, you get to roll a force posture change attempt.

Maybe with some "+1 because I'm not actually preventing an attack" since that's an inherent aspect of parries which aggressive parry still accomplishes.

Instead you're functioning more like a power parry or parry dodge just to see if you fire off something in time for it to do something.

Originally Posted by kenclary

2) Taking the "sacrifical breakfall" phrasing seriously, B could use "sacrificial dodge and drop" (B377) to attempt to drop prone underneath A, to act as a cushion. That tact has, like, zero relation to grappling, though.

Yeah, although I could see if you had a grapple that might be of some help in using your ally as leverage to pull yourself underneath them faster instead of relying purely on gravity.