Clarification about Reeling status

[awesomenessofme1]

Originally Posted by Farmer

And I think that reeling should be worse than stunned. Stunned is a mental effect, reeling is physical.

Actually, it can be either. Physical and mental stun both exist. The most common mundane stun is physical.

Originally Posted by Farmer

I don't think that's what it's saying. Work out your dodge as normal based on whatever bonuses or penalties you want to apply (retreat, acrobatic, etc.) and then halve it, rounding up.

You still aren't understanding what he's saying. His point is, regardless of what effect it has on stunning, reeling has absolutely no penalty toward your Parry and Block scores, and he finds that questionable.

[Farmer]

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

Actually, it can be either. Physical and mental stun both exist. The most common mundane stun is physical.

Not really. When you are stunned (not by psionics etc., but due to a physical shock) the root of the stun is a mental effect, regardless of how it appears (can't physically move). Your muscles, their available energy, etc., aren't reduced as they are when you're reeling so your ability to act is hampered by your cognitive ability to react, not your physical ability to do so. As such, I don't see it as debilitating as reeling.

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

You still aren't understanding what he's saying. His point is, regardless of what effect it has on stunning, reeling has absolutely no penalty toward your Parry and Block scores, and he finds that questionable.

OK - I did miss that and it's very valid - thanks. I play it as all the same. Reeling halves any of those defences in the same way as it does for dodge. Only completely passive or automated defences (a force shield, a dancing shield) would be unaffected.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Farmer

Not really. When you are stunned (not by psionics etc., but due to a physical shock) the root of the stun is a mental effect, regardless of how it appears (can't physically move). Your muscles, their available energy, etc., aren't reduced as they are when you're reeling so your ability to act is hampered by your cognitive ability to react, not your physical ability to do so. As such, I don't see it as debilitating as reeling.

If it were a mental effect, recovery would involve rolling against IQ or Will - but it's a physical effect, calling for rolling against HT. I think it's meant to represent things like having the wind knocked out of you and similar. Arguably, physical stunning due to head blows could be called "mental," as they involve trauma to the brain, but I'd still consider those physical - it's not that your processor is getting hung up on a resource-intensive application like pain.exe, but rather that your processor is physically damaged. Still, if you prefer Reeling to be more debilitating to defenses than being Stunned, you can certainly do that.

Originally Posted by Farmer

OK - I did miss that and it's very valid - thanks. I play it as all the same. Reeling halves any of those defences in the same way as it does for dodge. Only completely passive or automated defences (a force shield, a dancing shield) would be unaffected.

Yeah, I feel that Reeling impacting all defenses is more appropriate than it only impacting Dodge. I prefer a straight penalty over halving it, as most penalties in GURPS are like the former rather than the latter, but that largely comes down to personal taste (it also simplifies things a bit, IMO).

[Rupert]

I must prefer halving Dodge to having a flat penalty.

A flat penalty that wrecks your average person's Dodge (-4) still leaves a retreating high-Dodge character at something like 10-. Halving Dodge hoses Mr. Average the same (8/2 = 4), but also stomps on Mr. Dodge (14/2 = 7). As high-Dodge characters can be really annoying to pin down and hit, finally getting one down to reeling should, in my opinion, be highly rewarded.

As a secondary benefit, halving and then halving again for double reeling is almost always going to be less awful than having two penalties subtracted from it unless the reeling penalty is quite small. I think that's fair - being injured and fatigued should be bad, but not super, super bad.

I don't really care that reeling doesn't affect other defences. Dodge is the one that's really annoying in ranged combat, and the one that takes large mobs to overcome in melee (by completely surrounding the victim so they can't see some attacks coming), so it being the one that goes away when you get roughed up seems fair. Blocks are quite limited, and Parry can be reduced or completely negated by moving out of melee (easy once the victim is reeling) and using ranged attacks on them.

Essentially, Dodge is a really strong defence, and making other defences weaker by applying reeling to them just makes Dodge (relatively) even stronger. Fixing this requires yet more house-rules, most likely with their own unintended consequences.