Active defense debate o_Ô

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Rupert

I briefly tried QC based combat in 3e, and then Only The Best Shall Win (from CII). In both cases the main effect I saw was that highly-skilled combatants stopped doing cool stuff like stabbing people through the heart or attacking their hands to disable them, and switched to simple "at the torso" attacks, because the penalties for aimed attacks cut into the margin of success, and thus made the 'miss' chance go up much faster than it does in the standard system.

IOW QC make combat a little faster, but much less interesting. If you want a more abstract system, that's fine, but if you want tactical combat, it's not good.

It seems to me the obvious solution is to base the defense on the unmodified skill roll. You still have to hit normally, but if you do, your attack roll unmodified by such details as hit location, range, darkness, footing, and so on is contested by your opponent's defense skill roll. The GM can apply all the modifiers he wants to the defense roll, if the attacker has better footing than the defender, or if the fight is in gloomy caverns but the attacker can see in the dark, apply those skill modifiers to the opponent's defense roll. If both attacker and defender have the same bad footing, or trouble seeing in the dark, ignore those penalties, they make no difference.

Luke