Active defenses as modifiers

[harlandski]

I'm working on a hack to speed up combat and reduce the number of rolls. I'm inspired by what happened with Chronicles of Darkness, where they took a similar algorithm to GURPS (roll to attack, roll to defend, roll for damage, roll for soak) and boiled it down into one roll.

Now one roll might be a bit optimistic, for now I am looking at removing the active defense roll by making it a modifier to the attack.

My overall idea is to leave everything as it is, including the defender choosing the form of defense, or being able to reduce the opponent's defense via feint etc, but the attacker takes the defender's active defense score, divides it by a number, and applies it to their attack roll.

Yesterday I experimented with this number being 3, and rounding down. This seemed to have the desired effect of making combat quicker, but defenses still mattered. For all out defense, I used the sum of two defense scores as a modifier.

I wonder if other people have tried something similar to this, and with what success? I am aware that it causes some issues in the system e.g. actions which happen after a successful parry, but I think these things can be resolved.

I'm also not trying to say this is the way everyone should do it, if you like defense rolls who am I to yuck your yum, but as an experiment I'm trying to see how to speed up GURPS combat while leaving the original framework in place.

In a similar vein, one idea I had for feint was simply to compare the weapon skill of the attacker with the skill, DX etc of the defender and have the attack modifier be the difference between the two, if it is in the attacker's favour.