Active defenses as modifiers

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I came into the hobby in the late 70s with a _lot_ of combat in Chivalry & Sorcery 1e which worked a lot like this. It was nice when you were the more skilled fighter that it was more difficult to be parried or dodged.

I found Gurps with its' "flat" defenses to be somewhat annoying. Some of this may have been before I appreciated the ability of crits on attacks to be always successful.

Runequest 2 may have had some of this "A successful defense always beats a successful attack" problem.

In Runequest 2 at least a successful attack could damage the parrying weapon or possibly smash through a shield.

Rolemaster also works like the OP is looking at. One of the potential issues with doing this in GURPS is that it makes anything that reduces your hit chance very bad. It also makes deceptive attacks worse than useless, but this might no be of concern if skills aren't expected to get over twenty or so.

By the way, this also applies to doing quick contests - anything that might reduce your margin of success has to return huge dividends, so wise players will make very few targeted attacks, etc.