Optional Rule: Feint and Attack

[tbone]

A small thing I've table-tested a little:

If the attacker succeeds on the feint roll but the Feint itself fails, let the action count as Evaluate.

The idea is to give the thwarted attacker a small "consolation prize" for probing defenses. Your Feint may have failed (because your roll succeeded but the defender's succeeded by more), but your probing counts as a second of studying the foe (i.e., Evaluate).

(Another idea comes to mind just now, which I haven't played: Do the above even if the Feint succeeds. That is, a successful Feint hands the target a defense penalty and hands the attacker a second of Evaluate.)

The freebie Evaluate isn't a huge benefit, but it boosts Feint a bit without any new mechanics. Also, to me it feels like a realistic way to run Evaluate itself: an unskilled fighter will cautiously use normal Evaluate (no skill roll needed), while a skilled fighter will Evaluate by actively probing and faking (i.e., in the form of a Feint).

It's an easy idea to try out at the table, should anyone find it interesting –

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by tbone

If the attacker succeeds on the feint roll but the Feint itself fails, let the action count as Evaluate.

I've never been very fond of the Evaluate Maneuver, but this merging of Feint and Evaluate manages to simultaneously elevate both of them. I think I'd go with the variant where any successful Feint counts as an Evaluate, just so we can avoid odd situations where you turn out to have been better off if the foe had succeeded well enough to eliminate the defense penalty (while this shouldn't happen with the bonus to hit - -1 to the foe's defense is generally worth more than +1 to hit, at least so long as the foe doesn't opt for an All Out Attack or similar - the bonus against hostile Feints and Deceptive Attacks could well make a significant different.

However, one of my (unstated) objectives in this thread is to incentivize doing the Feint and the Attack during the same Maneuver, to avoid all the oddities that crop up from them occurring on separate turns, and gaining the benefits of Evaluate does the opposite. Well, unless you allow a character who Feints and Attacks in the same Maneuver to gain the benefits of an Evaluate (the attack bonus only to later Attacks in this Maneuver, but the defensive bonuses until the start of the character's next turn), but that feels... off.