Feint combat maneuver with margin of success of zero (foe fails)

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

I always thought it'd be more interesting to use Margin of Victory instead, that way you can have a margin based purely on their failure, and narrow-ly missed feint defenses would be lesser penalties than big losses.

If you want to do it that way, I'd suggest using half the MoV, otherwise Feint may become too powerful. Then again, from my understanding it's fairly rare that Feinting and then Attacking is actually better than just Attacking twice, so maybe using MoV would give Feint the boost it needs to become more competitive. After all, in just about any case where the foe actually fails to resist a Feint, that same roll on a defense would have been a Failure, and thus if you'd actually tried to hit them, you would have done so. So giving Feint a boost in that sort of situation might not be a bad idea (the utility of a Feint in that case is that you can potentially leverage that defense penalty into making it easier to target a high-value hit location).

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Plane

I always thought it'd be more interesting to use Margin of Victory instead, that way you can have a margin based purely on their failure, and narrow-ly missed feint defenses would be lesser penalties than big losses.

I love MoV much more than MoS on basically everything, but I haven't checked to see how unbalancing it is yet personally. I really should check it here, Feints are just not quite good enough for players to really want to use it even 1 in 3 fights.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I love MoV much more than MoS on basically everything, but I haven't checked to see how unbalancing it is yet personally. I really should check it here, Feints are just not quite good enough for players to really want to use it even 1 in 3 fights.

If your skill 16+ feint is good, random but good. Especially if enemy skill 14 or lower. (Ok, it's worthless if enemy defense is 10 or lower). Or for low skill character fighting high defense character (because random, not the best option, but can be useful).
Yes, not a strategy for every encounter, but that's kinda good, more interesting that way.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

If your skill 16+ feint is good, random but good. Especially if enemy skill 14 or lower. (Ok, it's worthless if enemy defense is 10 or lower). Or for low skill character fighting high defense character (because random, not the best option, but can be useful).
Yes, not a strategy for every encounter, but that's kinda good, more interesting that way.

So you can basically either Feint and Attack, or do two Attacks. If you're a big fan of crits, in each case you'll want to keep your Attack at the full 16; if instead you just want the highest chance of actually landing a hit, you'll want to use Deceptive Attack to drop skill down to 14 (as a general rule of thumb, using effective skill 13-14 gives the highest overall probability of actually landing a hit, due to the way Telegraphic and Deceptive Attacks work).

In a 16 vs 14 case, on average you're looking at a Margin of Victory of 2. Certainly, you can get lucky (particularly if using MoV rather than MoS when the foe fails), but that's the average. So, on average, the Feint+Attack option means you will likely (~98.5%) hit and give either a -2 to the foe's defense (no DA) or a -3 to the foe's defense (DA down to 14). Meanwhile, the Attack+Attack option means you'll likely hit twice (90.7% each, or ~82% together) with the foe defending at either +0 or -1.

The foe has a base Parry of 10. In an extreme situation, this could go as high as 14 (Combat Reflexes and Large Shield), but that's unlikely. We'll say Parry 12 here (either CR and a Small Shield, or just a Medium Shield). In the first case, this gets dropped down to either 10 or 9, for 50% and 37.5% chance of defending. That's pretty solid. In the second case, this either stays at 12 or gets dropped down to 11, but the target has to defend twice. That's a 74% or 62.5% chance each - if the target has to defend twice (which happens more than 4 out of 5 times), their chance of succeeding both times is either around 55% or around 39%. Note this is only a slightly better chance than the Feint+Attack, plus you have the benefit that there's a chance (roughly 1 in 4 or 1 in 3, respectively) that your first attack will hit, likely preventing you from being at risk of harm between your first action and second one.

Ultimately, Feint is a gamble - and as is the nature of gambling, the house always wins (that is, the player is at a disadvantage when gambling). But if you're feeling lucky, you can certainly go for it. You can also boost your chances by investing in the Feint Technique, which makes it less of a toss-up (although note that same investment in the base skill will give you a general +1 to skill with [1] left over). However, do keep in mind that, absent extreme cases where the foe's Defense is comparable (or even exceeds) their skill, a lot of the time exchanges where you get a large MoV are cases where, if you'd made an attack and the same rolls occurred, you would have hit then and there, rather than needing to wait a round and hope your foe is still in reach and you're still in a condition to pull off an attack.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The foe has a base Parry of 10. In an extreme situation, this could go as high as 14 (Combat Reflexes and Large Shield), but that's unlikely. We'll say Parry 12 here (either CR and a Small Shield, or just a Medium Shield). In the first case, this gets dropped down to either 10 or 9, for 50% and 37.5% chance of defending. That's pretty solid. In the second case, this either stays at 12 or gets dropped down to 11, but the target has to defend twice. That's a 74% or 62.5% chance each - if the target has to defend twice (which happens more than 4 out of 5 times), their chance of succeeding both times is either around 55% or around 39%. Note this is only a slightly better chance than the Feint+Attack, plus you have the benefit that there's a chance (roughly 1 in 4 or 1 in 3, respectively) that your first attack will hit, likely preventing you from being at risk of harm between your first action and second one.

Parry 10 is skill level 14, without CR (or 12 with CR) and it's 50/50. Not a reliable defense at all.
Normal human with CR is 9 dodge, 12 on retreat. And this is without shield bonuses, extra efforts, defensive attacks
Even with parry 10 it can be defensive grip, retreat or fencing retreat.
I'm not saying anything about +4DB shield spells.

So active defences can get pretty high. With low skill.

And I'm not talking about situation when you need to target chinks in armor, where deceptive attack isn't really an option.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

So active defences can get pretty high. With low skill.

And I'm not talking about situation when you need to target chinks in armor, where deceptive attack isn't really an option.

I've seen players use Riposte far more than Feints for setting up attacks (especially where Deceptive Attacks aren't reliable), I wonder where the math lines up with that in situations where you can easily stack Defense Bonuses and thus lose little to lowering their defenses.

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

I've seen players use Riposte far more than Feints for setting up attacks (especially where Deceptive Attacks aren't reliable), I wonder where the math lines up with that in situations where you can easily stack Defense Bonuses and thus lose little to lowering their defenses.

Rarely seen riposte. Most of the time it require AoD or evaluate (to reduce defense penalty), require parry (I would say yes to block and dodge ripostes, but it's not RAW) reduce only one defense fully (and if enemy attacks with unbalanced weapon it's kinda bad). And other big problem... No deceptive attack for some reason (I still probably would let to use both, but I don't know, because it's rare in our games.

It's interesting how different games can be in small details

And another interesting thing... I kinda hate feints, they are too random for my liking. I use setup attacks from 3/52 pyramid... But I don't like the idea of decreasing penalty on success of enemy roll. So I just ditched it, it was the only way my players would use it (or me for that matter) because you don't need to decrease defense that much if you can reliably hit, you need it when you can't hit at all.
I hope it makes sense.

Edit: and I'm sorry, I hope it's okay I'm making all this comments. Because I kinda moved from OP question. Don't want to be disrespectful or annoying.

[Anthony]

The main use case for feint (vs deceptive attack) is when you're significantly higher skill than your opponent, and you want to make an attack with a fairly significant penalty. For example, if you have a skill of 24 and your opponent has a skill of 20, +2 for a shield, and +1 for combat reflexes (total 16), you can make a deceptive attack at -12 (to reduce that defense to 10) and have a final hit chance of 38%. If instead you were to feint and attack, win the feint by 4, and still deceptive attack at -8, the final result is 16 vs 8, which is a 75% chance (since you spent two attacks, this is essentially no gain). However, if you were trying to attack a weak spot at -8, your choices are crit fishing (16 vs 16, about 10% to hit) and feint plus deceptive attack (12 vs 10, 38% to hit).

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Flowergarden

Rarely seen riposte. Most of the time it require AoD or evaluate (to reduce defense penalty), require parry (I would say yes to block and dodge ripostes, but it's not RAW) reduce only one defense fully (and if enemy attacks with unbalanced weapon it's kinda bad). And other big problem... No deceptive attack for some reason (I still probably would let to use both, but I don't know, because it's rare in our games.

It's interesting how different games can be in small details

I do still also rarely see Riposte. Both are generally reserved for duels since otherwise there's far too much going on to look at even regular rules for determining actions (why Attack when you can Ready to drop a metal gate on someone?). And it's very important because Duels are plagued by defensive bonuses so it comes down to a game of "how do I hit more often than I can crit?".

As for lowering only one defense, I find both as a player and GM that enemies with high defenses either only have one high defense (their primary weapon skill usually) or have so much DX (and possibly HT) that it becomes quickly obvious this fight was a bad idea and 'playing by the game's rules' is how you lose.

I definitely would not let Deceptive Attack and Riposte stack. I remember someone on these forums doing the math years ago and it was clear that once you hit something like 22 skill that you can undermine defenses real fast if you know how to properly stack them. And I like giving my players a chance at living XD Riposte lets you essentially trade DA in for Targeted Attacks and other optional penalties so you can make sure your hit definitely brings your foe down if it hits.

On the other hand, I'd actually recommend making the change so that players will try doing these, then undoing the houserule once they like DA and Riposte so they get used to how they work and you can point out how it's too strong and you made a silly houserule ;)

[Flowergarden]

Originally Posted by kirbwarrior

As for lowering only one defense, I find both as a player and GM that enemies with high defenses either only have one high defense (their primary weapon skill usually) or have so much DX (and possibly HT) that it becomes quickly obvious this fight was a bad idea and 'playing by the game's rules' is how you lose.

I definitely would not let Deceptive Attack and Riposte stack. I remember someone on these forums doing the math years ago and it was clear that once you hit something like 22 skill that you can undermine defenses real fast if you know how to properly stack them. And I like giving my players a chance at living XD Riposte lets you essentially trade DA in for Targeted Attacks and other optional penalties so you can make sure your hit definitely brings your foe down if it hits.

Most.of the time penalty would go on parry(because you attack with a weapon), some enemies have shields, some have two weapons, and some have more basic speed(it's adaptation to the amount of "ogres with clubs" type enemies and aoe attacks(I should say we use a little chambara for dodging AoE)).

As for stacking... That's the problem, with half the penalty rule it's not that big of a deal, as far as I see (I have astigmatism). But I don't know, rarely seen it in action. (Supposedly it was something like an enemy doing riposte, one player said "hey, I want to try too", gets hit, never do that again)

Another stacking thing. You can use feint for stacking with any of them. How is it different. Maybe because you can stack all 3. And riposte is risky.

As I said, everyone's game is different in details. So maybe what works for your, doesn't work for ours and other way around.
Or maybe It's really is a silly rule.
*Puts require testing tag*