Melee Combat

[David Johansen]

Have we considered a Rolemaster style parry? I find it hard to imagine that I haven't at some point.

Consider 2d under skill + attribute - your defence - their defence.

This puts in another choice and could require too much book keeping in a big fight. It also works best if the defence has to be allocated before you know who strikes first. There's also the matter of multiple opponents. I'd suggest defence must be allocated per opponent. Being outnumbered is tough. Scores over twelve can be too powerful against lesser foes but at least there's a ten point spread.

 

[pendragonman]

You are right - C+S>12 as a Melee number would be pointless in my schema and I was arguing that for the sake of playability we put up with some odd results and some limits such as this.

But, gee, that's a good counter-example; even though Fighter-8 would be unusual (Chuck Norris is unusual!), those characters would be out there and a champion fighter should beat a street thug nearly every time. That 'lucky weird' result should be more like 1 in 10,000 than 1 in 36.

That's something to think about.

Wally Martel, my Marine in Magnus's play by post (at the bottom of the forum) has 9 Strength, Fighter 6 and Unarmed 2 for a 17. Easy for Shooters to get big skill levels

In fact, it is darn hard not to get them if you stay in the Marines/Army 5-6 terms.

 

[OjnoTheRed]

Wally Martel, my Marine in Magnus's play by post (at the bottom of the forum) has 9 Strength, Fighter 6 and Unarmed 2 for a 17. Easy for Shooters to get big skill levels

In fact, it is darn hard not to get them if you stay in the Marines/Army 5-6 terms.

I'm beginning to understand your POV better as I digest the Chuck Norris counter-example.

I haven't played with the character generation system enough, it seems. When we rolled up characters for The Traveller Adventure, the players were all keen to get on with the game, and although I had a bit of a pep talk about generating a few characters, they just rolled up what they had and made sure they could run a Starship; I inserted a hired NPC for the Engineer. Astrogation-2 is plenty for a Jump-1 ship, and only one PC actually has 2 levels in Fighting.

 

[robject]

Have we considered a Rolemaster style parry? I find it hard to imagine that I haven't at some point.

Consider 2d under skill + attribute - your defence - their defence.

[...]Being outnumbered is tough. [...]

I wrote up a simple parry rule in my "3 Page Wanderer" PDF that was something like that.

 

[robject]

As a referee, I would just look at those numbers and rule that Chuck wipes the floor with one average street thug.

Chuck Norris: Str C, Fighter 8, Unarmed 2, = 22
vs.
Street Thug: Str A, Fighter 2 = 12

Chuck Norris *could* be taken into account as being able to fight multiple targets at the same time (e.g. by dividing skill).

Chuck Norris
vs.
Street Thug A
Street Thug B
Street Thug C
Street Thug D
Street Thug E

Chuck splits his skill five ways (10/5 = 2), for an asset of 14 against each.

 

[Original_Carl]

I took the "combat as abstract" thing pretty far in my own game and I allow people to make multiple attacks by adding a die of difficultly to each subsequent roll. First target: 2D, second target: 3D, etc. Those difficulty dice stay with you from round to round, but you can remove them according to your skill in the specific task at the top of each new round.

In the scenario above, Chuck would make opposed checks against each thug, adding a difficulty die to each attack after the first. He's allowed to drop those one of those dice from his pool at the top of each subsequent round, plus a number equal to his Fighting-Unarmed score. In Chuck's case, he could remove three dice at the top of the round in a fist fight.

If it were gun combat, he could drop dice at a rate equal to his Fighting-Slug Thrower or Beams or whatever. The idea being that the more skilled you are at the specific thing you're doing, the faster you can recover from committing multiple attacks.