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Old 05-23-2022, 06:56 PM   #11
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

Quote:
Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
The monster made a growly face like he was about to attack. She noticed and changed her maneuver from one where she could aim to one where she could dodge (thus spoiling her aim).
I'd caution against taking dramatic pauses like that literally. Note when she does fire an arrow, the amount of time it takes for the cloud-thing to setup the defense to destroy it is long enough that the speed at which the arrow is seen to be traveling should have been sufficient to hit the cloud-thing before its lightning even reached the mundane clouds above it. And the arrow appears to be extremely slow for an arrow even with that (largely because an arrow traveling at a realistic speed wouldn't be on screen long enough to properly make out what was going on... same with that thing's lightning traveling so slowly).

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Originally Posted by Plane View Post
The only thing about that is people have a variety of different defense scores of various amounts, and what defense you choose to roll against often depends on your perception of what the attack is (like avoiding a bare-handed parry against a Force Sword)
Eh, even if opting for "you don't know for sure if it will hit," I'm fine with letting players "cheat" a little by understanding the nature of the attack beforehand. Trying to work out a way to determine if the character would recognize which defense is the best to use in a given situation would be too much of a headache IMO - just let the player make that decision.

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Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Knowing the attack will hit often determines whether you bother with it at all (important if it's something like a Warp Dodge or w/ Unbalanced weapons where a parry will unready it so you can't attack)
Well, yes, but my suggestion presupposes that you don't want the player to know before choosing to defend or not if the attack will even hit. That's how you end up with someone's Aim getting spoiled by an attack that an Ally blocks for you (or someone to commit their weapon to defense without needing to, or wasting a Retreat/Warp, etc, which are all things that make sense as something that could happen).

Unless you're wanting to go with one of the "She actually abandoned her Aiming attempt to use All Out Defense," but that doesn't seem to match the narrative the makers look to be going for, or what it sounds like you're looking for.
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Old 05-24-2022, 12:01 AM   #12
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
my suggestion presupposes that you don't want the player to know before choosing to defend or not if the attack will even hit. That's how you end up with someone's Aim getting spoiled by an attack that an Ally blocks for you (or someone to commit their weapon to defense without needing to, or wasting a Retreat/Warp, etc, which are all things that make sense as something that could happen).
Yeah that's the idea. Basically there's a phase of awareness of "you think the attack could possibly hit" (you perceive it's targeting your hex, even if it would pass through your hex and miss you)

If that's the case though, even if someone else sharing your hex was targeted (like an enemy grappled in close combat) them getting targeted should probably trigger wasted active defenses too.
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Old 05-24-2022, 05:28 AM   #13
kenclary
 
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Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

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Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Ah like a Concentrate maneuver? If some amount of perception is a free action then dedicating a maneuver to it should get a bonus.
Tactical Shooting even has a "situational awareness" rule for this (spending a round getting the lay of the land, basically). If you're in a game where "shouldn't she not know if the attack is hitting or missing?" is a sticking point, the TS rules are your friend.

Quote:
Even though we can explain it that way, I still like the idea of reacting to an attack yet committing to a defense before it becomes determined the defense is acutally necessary. People could do this (ditching their Aim bonus) maybe to defend better than if they waited until the last second to spoil the aim for a defense (like after knowing it will hit, and your ally didn't stop it)
I highly recommend only applying this sort of play to ranged attacks / dodges (thus using the TS rules), when it matters. It'll bog down play (and have players micromanaging their defenses too much) if you use preemptive defenses houserules for other things.

Also, from a game balance perspective, it turns every missed melee attack into a feint (not a GURPS Feint, but a wasted defense). That's too much. Make players use Rapid Strikes, Feints, Deceptive Attacks, swarming, and flanking to overwhelm their opponents' defenses deliberately.

From a realism, in-my-actual-experience perspective, of course you can tell when a melee attack is a miss --- it's part of knowing how to parry. Every-miss-is-a-feint only works on absolute novices, and probably only in training. There are better GURPS models for that, like novices always taking AOD...
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Old 05-24-2022, 06:32 AM   #14
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Yeah that's the idea. Basically there's a phase of awareness of "you think the attack could possibly hit" (you perceive it's targeting your hex, even if it would pass through your hex and miss you)

If that's the case though, even if someone else sharing your hex was targeted (like an enemy grappled in close combat) them getting targeted should probably trigger wasted active defenses too.
Arguably, anyone within a certain arc of the attacker should be at risk of wasting a defense, although that can get rather complicated. It may be better to call for a defense for any character who could be hit, using the guidelines for Hitting the Wrong Target (which, honestly, should be an arc rather than a straight line, but I digress). If there's no check to see if that character would be hit (because it hits someone/something else first), treat it as a miss by 3 (so the character only wastes a defense on MoS 0 or a failed defense). That can get rather tedious when a character is shooting into a target-rich environment, however. Note an interesting side effect of all this is that suppression fire may be more effective at actually suppressing an area, as those within the beaten area are automatically called upon to attempt a defense (as it stands, a character can Aim just fine while within a beaten zone, and only needs to spoil his/her aim to Dodge if a bullet is actually going to hit). The players can opt not to Dodge, in hopes they won't actually be hit, but there's more risk involved than the default.

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Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
Also, from a game balance perspective, it turns every missed melee attack into a feint (not a GURPS Feint, but a wasted defense). That's too much. Make players use Rapid Strikes, Feints, Deceptive Attacks, swarming, and flanking to overwhelm their opponents' defenses deliberately.
This is a big part of why I suggested sufficient MoS (plus MoF on the part of the attacker) would prevent the defense from being "used up."

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Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
From a realism, in-my-actual-experience perspective, of course you can tell when a melee attack is a miss --- it's part of knowing how to parry. Every-miss-is-a-feint only works on absolute novices, and probably only in training. There are better GURPS models for that, like novices always taking AOD...
Back when I did taekwondo, my favorite kick was the hook kick - specifically, I'd purposefully miss with what looked like a side kick, front snap kick, or side/front rising kick (most often a side rising kick, as that put me in position and was easier to build off of than a snapping kick), then immediately turn that into a hook kick to strike my opponent. I was often able to score a point even on black belts using this, as they typically assumed I, being a relative novice, had simply missed with my attack. If they opted to Parry my kick anyway, I never even got a chance to turn it into a hook kick.

The moral of that story is, just ignoring an "obvious miss" is a good way to get yourself hit by a Deceptive Attack. As for how to represent novices being more likely to waste defenses, my suggestion does that readily (the higher your skill, the more likely you are to have sufficient MoS to recognize the attack really is a miss and not waste a defense) and actually has the novice reacting to an attack, rather than happening to have done All Out Defense this round.
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Old 05-24-2022, 07:02 AM   #15
kenclary
 
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Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
The moral of that story is, just ignoring an "obvious miss" is a good way to get yourself hit by a Deceptive Attack. As for how to represent novices being more likely to waste defenses, my suggestion does that readily (the higher your skill, the more likely you are to have sufficient MoS to recognize the attack really is a miss and not waste a defense) and actually has the novice reacting to an attack, rather than happening to have done All Out Defense this round.
The moral of that story is you were doing a deceptive attack. (in a sport situation, yadda yadda...). That's not an argument for pre-emptive defenses at all. They failed their active defense roll.

The "only AOD" option I mentioned is actually a reference to the "Untrained Fighters" box on MA 113 (specifically, the "'Coin Toss' Option"), which is a bit more complicated, but gets the point across. "Combat Art or Sport Fighters" may also apply to your anecdote.
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Old 05-24-2022, 07:38 AM   #16
Varyon
 
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Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

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Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
The moral of that story is you were doing a deceptive attack. (in a sport situation, yadda yadda...). That's not an argument for pre-emptive defenses at all. They failed their active defense roll.
In GURPS terms, yes, that's a Deceptive Attack. My point is that, from a Watsonian (in-setting) perspective, the difference between a miss and the setup for a Deceptive Attack is the same. You were saying that trained fighters can automatically tell the difference between a miss and a hit - my example showed how a trained fighter who relies on that can end up getting hit. If a trained fighter can mess up and fail to defend against something that looks like a miss but is actually a deceptive attack, it follows that a trained fighter can mess up and use a defense against an actual miss (in fact, particularly shortly after getting hit by one of my hook kicks, those same black belts would often Parry instances where I actually missed) - "trained fighter" doesn't mean "omniscient."

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Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
The "only AOD" option I mentioned is actually a reference to the "Untrained Fighters" box on MA 113 (specifically, the "'Coin Toss' Option"), which is a bit more complicated, but gets the point across. "Combat Art or Sport Fighters" may also apply to your anecdote.
I'm familiar with that, and that's where "just so happened to be doing AoD" comes into play - the novice isn't reacting to the foe at all, but rather just randomly switching between, IIRC, AoA and AoD. The Art/Sport/Combat division doesn't really apply to my anecdote - those black belts were competent at Karate Sport (in GURPS terms; they were also competent in Karate Art, of course, but probably would have defaulted off those for Karate if they found themselves in an actual fight... although honestly they'd be more likely to use Judo for that), and I was sparring in a manner consistent with tournament combat (hook kicks are tournament legal, at least in taekwondo - one of our better black belts actually got knocked out by a hook kick to the head during a tournament; he was the one who my hook kick was least likely to actually score a point on).
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Old 05-24-2022, 08:38 AM   #17
kenclary
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
In GURPS terms, yes, that's a Deceptive Attack. My point is that, from a Watsonian (in-setting) perspective, the difference between a miss and the setup for a Deceptive Attack is the same. You were saying that trained fighters can automatically tell the difference between a miss and a hit - my example showed how a trained fighter who relies on that can end up getting hit.
You're misreading me. Trained fighters, reflexively (and often not consciously, in a "can not make real-time risk assessments about it" sense) can tell where an attack is going. The most common "implementation" of a Deceptive Attack is something that looks like it's going one place (dead air, in your example) but changes up at the last moment, thus giving them less (and less) reaction time to adjust (thus, a harder defense).

(I find that the basic neuroscience behind reflexes and the stress of real combat is best explained by this webcomic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/conscious)

It's basically irrational to assume that they consciously chose to not block. Their reflexes were too slow to react to your trickery. People will narrate whatever fits what happens to themselves, after the fact, to "fill in" their memory of what happened under stress, all the time.


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The Art/Sport/Combat division doesn't really apply to my anecdote - those black belts were competent at Karate Sport (in GURPS terms; they were also competent in Karate Art, of course, but probably would have defaulted off those for Karate if they found themselves in an actual fight... although honestly they'd be more likely to use Judo for that)
My point (rather, an aside; I don't know your training or their's) was that "[t]hose who know only Combat Art or Sport skills might count as 'untrained'" might apply. The box gives the math for (optionally) determining this.
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Old 05-24-2022, 04:23 PM   #18
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

Quote:
Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
from a game balance perspective, it turns every missed melee attack into a feint (not a GURPS Feint, but a wasted defense)
A miss would only need to qualify as a feint on some kind of failed Per-based fighting check (like w/ detecting feints) which is successful enough to perceive it will enter your hex, but with insufficient MoS to determine it will narrowly miss you and hit some other part of your hex (thin air, an adjacent ally or opponent, your scabbard instead of your leg, etc)

Quote:
Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
From a realism, in-my-actual-experience perspective, of course you can tell when a melee attack is a miss --- it's part of knowing how to parry.
Since parry tends to come from skill in combat, using Per-based combat skill checks (the highest, like when resisting feints) should probably account for that correlation.

I guess the key is to design this so that intentional misses (Feints) are in general more distracting than accidental misses (failed hit rolls)

Quote:
Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
Every-miss-is-a-feint only works on absolute novices, and probably only in training.
There are better GURPS models for that, like novices always taking AOD...
Novices would have lower Per and/or lower combat skills to resist intentional feints and accidental ones.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Arguably, anyone within a certain arc of the attacker should be at risk of wasting a defense, although that can get rather complicated.
Maybe use B388's arc map? Even for ranged weapons, even though B389 lets them attach through a wider arc than melee.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
This is a big part of why I suggested sufficient MoS (plus MoF on the part of the attacker) would prevent the defense from being "used up."
Sufficient MoF on attacker might reflect being more hexes off-target with ranged weapons (like with the scatter rules) per your suggestion of Hitting the Wrong Target being an arc.

Being more hexes off target should be more obvious (an easier perception check) to discern. If you don't think it's coming at your hex, you won't choose to defend, unless you perceive it targeting an ally's hex in which case you might opt to try sacrificial parry.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
Back when I did taekwondo, my favorite kick was the hook kick - specifically, I'd purposefully miss with what looked like a side kick, front snap kick, or side/front rising kick (most often a side rising kick, as that put me in position and was easier to build off of than a snapping kick), then immediately turn that into a hook kick to strike my opponent. I was often able to score a point even on black belts using this, as they typically assumed I, being a relative novice, had simply missed with my attack. If they opted to Parry my kick anyway, I never even got a chance to turn it into a hook kick.
Yeah I always wondered about adapting the 'return strike' for chain weapons to kicks.

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Originally Posted by Varyon View Post
The moral of that story is, just ignoring an "obvious miss" is a good way to get yourself hit by a Deceptive Attack. As for how to represent novices being more likely to waste defenses, my suggestion does that readily (the higher your skill, the more likely you are to have sufficient MoS to recognize the attack really is a miss and not waste a defense) and actually has the novice reacting to an attack, rather than happening to have done All Out Defense this round.
Yeah I just figured to have it a separate roll (based on Per not DX) to perceive, it could either be your highest combat skill, or maybe something like "your skill in whichever weapon is attacking you". Although at some point I don't think whether you're a rifleman or pistoleer would matter much in figuring out where a barrel is aimed.

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Originally Posted by kenclary View Post
You're misreading me. Trained fighters, reflexively (and often not consciously, in a "can not make real-time risk assessments about it" sense) can tell where an attack is going.
Yeah although that seems to me like a <1sec per check at -10.

If I wasn't watching someone's hand closely I probably wouldn't even notice if they were punching me or stabbing me with a concealed dagger just "arm is moving toward me" if they were moving fast enough.
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Old 05-24-2022, 08:02 PM   #19
Lovewyrm
 
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Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

Maybe it doesn't have to be a mechanical rule but can make the GM give you an extra charpoint after the session for roleplaying a stressful battle in a more natural way?

If this were done deliberately then it might just be a mental disadvantage: Lack of trust in defenses or something.
Which could in theory be worth a few points.

Make a self control roll to believe in your allies trying to protect you.
Or something.

And since disads are there fore 'roleplay flavor', you might as well just sidestep that and reward more humane, so to speak, battling with one CP or something, too.

Could be the easiest solution (and I like easy solutions :P )

Like a very very slowly drip fed combination of post combat shakes and other such things.
Only not limited to them directly. As in, you're not shaking, but every now and then you roleplay a bit of panic, and the GM goes: man that was cool, have a CP, etc.
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Old 05-25-2022, 02:36 AM   #20
Plane
 
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Default Re: should it be possible for an attack on you that your ally parries to spoil your A

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Originally Posted by Lovewyrm View Post
Maybe it doesn't have to be a mechanical rule but can make the GM give you an extra charpoint after the session for roleplaying a stressful battle in a more natural way?

If this were done deliberately then it might just be a mental disadvantage: Lack of trust in defenses or something.
Which could in theory be worth a few points.

Make a self control roll to believe in your allies trying to protect you.
Or something.

And since disads are there fore 'roleplay flavor', you might as well just sidestep that and reward more humane, so to speak, battling with one CP or something, too.

Could be the easiest solution (and I like easy solutions :P )

Like a very very slowly drip fed combination of post combat shakes and other such things.

Only not limited to them directly. As in, you're not shaking, but every now and then you roleplay a bit of panic, and the GM goes: man that was cool, have a CP, etc.
This seems like panic with a purpose though, because it probably is of some benefit to cover your face w/ limbs when you can't dodge or deflect an incoming energy blast.
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