Musings on Defenses in Psi-Wars

It’s wiki week and the Backers of spoken. It’s gonna be martial arts. Because all I do is martial arts. To be fair, though, they’re pretty popular, and they do a lot to highlight how the setting works, or how fighters might interact. Also, I keep thinking of new ones, a lot of which are mostly created for a single character, and then someone in a game asks to learn it, and I wonder if I should publish a finished version and then I dread the degree of writing it takes (I get why GURPS Martial Arts are originally written that way, because a list of stats is way easier to write than flavor and deep tactical discussion and structure, even if the latter is way more rewarding).

I offered a martial arts update on the wiki because there’s been a lot of discussion of a few specific martial arts and probably because I’ve hinted at my half-finished Combat Breakpoints article from ages ago. Mostly, I think the martial arts are fine as written, but there’s a few niggling things I’d like to fix (so if you’re reading this and you have a complaint or question about a martial art, now is the time to bring it up, because it will have my focus this week). But on top of rewriting some of Maelstrom Form and Fell Form, I’d also like to take this opportunity to start introducing a few concepts I’ve been toying with, and these are the point of today’s article.

Dreaming of Anastasia Siberiana

Undercity Noir 2 features a not entirely serious character in the form of an Assassin Cat Girl Space Princess by the name of Anastasia and her combat design is what I like to call a sniper design. This would doubtless confuse everyone involved, because Anastasia doesn’t have much in the way of ranged combat skills. What I really mean is a hyperspecialized character. If you don’t mind, let me break into a discussion of why these sorts of characters briefly, to illustrate what I’m talking about here.

I want to note, up front, that I’m not picking on Anastasia. She’s not a bad character, her player is not a twink. In fact, she could be much twinkier. She’s a springboard to a discussion about a certain class of character, and the broader implications that has on Psi-Wars, and holes that it reveals in some of the martial arts.

Hyperspecialization in GURPS: the Sniper Design

“I hate broad, shallow characters in GURPS.”

Gentleman Gamer

GURPS is probably the most detail-oriented “mainstream” RPG available on the market (unless we start delving into the fever-dreams of the edges of the indie/homebrew space), and those details are intended to encourage broad and shallow characters. GURPS really doesn’t want you to have a character with two or three level 25 skills, it wants you to have 30+ skill-10 to -15 skills, because the sweet spot in the game is that bell curve around the 10 to 15 space and playing with the +/- 1 to +/- 4 modifier space. Yes, it can absolutely handle staggering penalties, like the character who can snipe through a hurricane at night to hit a target a mile away, but in practice, GURPS would rather you had many skills rather than few. When it’s running on all cylinders, you can have hypercompetent 500 point characters who still have real chances of failure, and plenty to buy, because they broaden their competencies, rather than dive super deep on one. This is not to say they don’t have specializations, because obviously niche matters, but GURPS characters tend to be, as we say in the IT world, a “T-shaped professional” with a few “deep” areas of expertise and lots of “shallow” ones.

GURPS does this by rewarding generalization with discounts. The first couple levels of a skill are cheaper than the last few levels (1/level vs 4/level), and the player can pick up “block discounts” in the form of talents and attributes. Ninjas, for example, tend to buy DX or Craftiness rather than skills. But the nature of its narrow skills does create an unintended consequence: while it’s cheaper per-skill to generalize, it’s still cheaper to specialize if you can find a “killer app” skill. GURPS also encourages players to find ways to exploit their advantages, to focus on tiny, detail oriented edges over broad, sweeping narrative elements. For example, if you have Nightvision, turn off the lights.

The ultimate incarnation of this that I’ve come across in many games is the sniper design. That is, a player realizes that Guns is really, really powerful. They find a great rifle, they buy as much Guns (Rifle) as they can, and they try to turn everything into a gun fight where they have the optimum position to exploit their enormous range and accuracy to destroy their opponents. They’re the sort of character that, when the players go to negotiate with the king, they say they’ll take up a position to overlook the court with their sniper rifle, “just in case.” The idea here is to not care about all the other skills or abilities, to only be good at one thing, to only spend on one thing, and then turn all encounters into one thing. Orcs attack? Snipe em. Ninjas coming to assassinate the part? Snipe ’em. Dramatic love triangle? Snipe the romantic rival. Strange moral conundrum about the ethics of sniping everyone you meet? Snipe a philosopher. Murder mystery about a lone gunman murdering random people? Realize it’s about you and snipe the investigators.

GURPS has the tools to defeat this, of course, but the problem with a sniper design is they tend to be brittle and focused. If you let them have their preferred combat arena, they will utterly dominate: a fight where they’re positioned ideally to take out the targets becomes a holding action where the other PCs just need to survive until the sniper has killed everyone. If you remove their core advantage, they tend to die: a single ninja who sneaks up on them will destroy them, because they have no close combat skills. If you put them in a non-threatening situation where they’re not specialized, they disengage (“I clean my gun.”).

This concept is not unique to people with rifles, it’s just an example I’ve seen a lot. The Wizard with Invisibility and Death Touch is similarly specialized; the mad scientist who spends all of his time in a lab, or the hacker who hides in their apartment, have similar deep, narrow focuses.

Balance: It’s About Variety, Not Fairness

This is not to say that specialization is bad (T-shaped, remember?) or that characters who like rifles are bad people and should be ashamed of themselves or play a different character. Well-Rounded snipers are actually really interesting, and you can have some amazing “sniper-fight” mechanics. The problem is more that players who manage to successfully reduce the game down to a question of who has the highest value in a single skill that they’ve specialized ruin the game for everyone else. And this is not a failing of the player but a failing of the system. The GM should have the tools necessary to provide a challenge to the sniper, especially in a way that emphasizes different niches and builds. For example, a tanky player keeps fast-moving opponents tangled up and away from the sniper, a scout watches for infiltrators, the tactician ensures that everyone is ideally positioned, a mad scientist makes sure the gun is fixed and badass, and the face makes sure they have support and money for more bullets, etc.

So the Sniper Design, like most “twink” issues isn’t generally a problem of a bad player (though I tend to find lower skill players gravitate more towards it as it’s an “easy solution” and a way of easing the learning curve a little), it’s a problem we, as GM, should solve. We need to make sure there are plenty of arenas of competence, that a team has value, that we have plenty of room to surprise players with new NPC builds, and that we let the lower skilled players, who may be clinging to a single skill in panic at the sheer scale of the GURPS system, have a chance to ease themselves slowly into the ocean of complexity.

And to do all that, we need to think our way through what those arenas are. Templates help a lot with this, because then the sniper automatically has a few other additional skills (“Oh no, I’ve been ambushed by a ninja! Wait, the GM made me take Karate, huh, I can fight him!”), but there are a few other ways as well.

What Were We Talking About? Oh! Anastasia

Anastasia Siberiana is not a “sniper,” in more than one way. For example, she’s certainly not being played by a low-skill player, and she has a lot more going for her than just “sword.” She’s also not nearly as specialized as I make her out to be, and she’s not overpowering the game. But she’s a pretty good example of another common strategy that I wanted to highlight because I worry it could become a problem: the naked sword-and-board swashbuckler.

So GURPS has a few quirks that line up in a particular way. First, damage is absolutely devastating, and hard to protect yourself from. Your typical dungeon fantasy character or monster has way more damage than the armor available to most characters. There’s a reason players treat All-Out Attack as suicide! On the whole, then, it’s better to not be hit at all and to use armor only as a means to blunt a lucky hit and to give your character a second chance.

Encumbrance is harsh. I tend to use the old 3e rules of -1 per level of encumbrance to various useful traits, like stealth, dodge, Judo or Karate, move, etc, but the new rules tend to make it even worse at -2 for the first level, at least in practice. So all of this armor does little more than blunt an attack, and it has a steep cost. It’s best to have no armor at all, if you can handle it.

A way you handle it is by having as high an Active Defense as you can. You collect every single defense bonus you can. Typically, this is done through extreme skill (the core reason to have Sword-30 is not to hit a pixie’s eye in a hurricane, though that’s a nice perk, but to have parry 18-19). It can also be done through Enhanced Defense, but these are expensive, and fortunately, there are lots of free ways to get more defense: Feverish Defense, retreat, Acrobatics, and, of course, shields.

Taken together, we get the somewhat brittle character who must be naked or have minimum armor (never more than No Encumbrance), and has so much defense through any source they can, they are practically untouchable, and ideally done in such a way that they can get around most anti-defense measures too. But, like the sniper, they’re brittle. If you do find a way to get past those defenses (A superluck swordsman who dictates a critical success), they have no armor and so instantly die. It’s a hyperspecialized design.

Is this bad? Yes, of course, but not in the sense that Anastasia or characters like her need to change (in fact, as naked sword-and-board swashbucklers go, she’s rather well-rounded. She actually does have armor, for one thing). As with the sniper, the point of this discussion isn’t to blame players who play this sort of character, it’s to be able to challenge them anyway, to communicate what those challenges might look like, to quietly encourage some broadening of character in ways that don’t violate the core premise, and to grant interesting niches to other characters. For example, Anastasia has already been floored by one NPC and lives in dread of another, so Anastasia’s player isn’t some twink that’s breaking my game. I’m singling Anastasia out because she inspired a deep dive into defense mechanics that helped me reach some conclusions about martial arts and what I might do to fix some of them. I’m highlighting the problem with excessive defenses, and using her as an example.

Shoring up the Gaps

Peter Dell’Orto has wonderful articles on “defense gaps” in Dungeon Fantasy, points of vulnerability that players need to concern themselves with, and find ways to defend against. Nobody will ever have all the gaps defended perfectly, but it’s important to not allow the game to devolve into defending a single gap, such as “it’s all about active defense.” It’s useful, then, to articulate these. In fact, one of the reasons the Active Defense gambit is so popular is its universality. You don’t need to know anything about a setting to be pretty functional with it. But the setting should have means to bypass active defenses via other contests.

Psi-Wars certainly has several of these opened gaps. Anastasia learned one. For example, Malediction is extremely common in Psi-Wars as it’s a game that features a lot of Psi. Anastasia has picked up a mind shield, though that particular defense gap, while improved, is still pretty weak. I’ve introduced a few others, such as Unarmed Combat Etiquette, which forces players to have at least some unarmed combat skills. The nature of Ultra Tech settings means that DR can and does outstrip damage. While it’s always possible to defeat an opponent, not everyone has a shaped-charge nuke in their pocket, so someone in enough power-armor can shrug off lighter attacks, and players need to be aware of this, that in some situations, All-Out Attack is an option, because that can really change the dynamics of the fight.

The idea here is to encourage players to broaden out and not just focus on a single skill, on a single strategy.

A Catalog of Defense

But this isn’t to say that high Active Defense is wrong. It’s not. Lightly armored characters battling one another with swords with irrepressible annihilation energy blades is totally in genre for Psi-Wars. That absolutely encourages high active defense, and thus we need ways to get around that active defense, ideally at the disposable of duelist swordsman, while not also encouraging them to “just buy more Sword.” We need to have a variety of ways that characters can be successful space knights, rather than just the Anastasia way. Mind you, I think we do, but I think it can also be better, and discussing the thought process behind a lot of choices might help your own games.

So, let’s catalogue all possible ways characters can acquire defense in Psi-Wars.

Dodge

More Basic Speed or Enhanced Dodge, which tend to be very expensive. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with a Basic Speed of 8. The highest I see is is 7 with a bit of a fraction after. Enhanced Dodge comes up rarely, usually with a bunch of limitations (such as Enhanced Dodge (Dive for Cover). So, including Combat Reflexes, I rarely see a Dodge higher than 12. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. So I suspect 13 is probably your practical cap.

Dodge tends to be very good, as it doesn’t suffer penalties from multiple uses, it can almost always be used, and it gets Retreat bonuses and Acrobatics bonuses.

Parry

Parry is probably the most important defense skill, especially for Space Knights. It’s capped by skill. The Martial Arts I’ve designed tend to cap out at 20 if you follow all the rules, suggesting your “maximum” Parry is 14. Parry requires special bonuses to defeat ranged attacks, it suffers from repeated use penalties, and it cannot be used after a committed or unbalanced attack. So it’s better, but has more drawbacks.

But this is deceptive, because people regularly break that 20 “cap.” Anastasia has a 22 at Adept rather than Master, and so could hit 24 easily. She’s Asrathi (+1 DX), and she’s an Assassin using a style balanced for Space Knights, giving her a +3 DX edge. Even if we set all of that aside, masters of several styles will have a skill higher than 20, and Psi-Wars encourages masters of multiple styles, so 24 isn’t crazy. THere’s also lots of ways in Psi-Wars to get +1d DX (Heroic Feats, Blue Stiletto, DX potions, etc). I think if I had to put a “true” cap, it would be at skill 30. That puts our defense limit at a staggering 19!

Of course, Parry tends to be self-balancing thanks to deceptive attack. A skill 30 force swordsman has Parry 19, certainly, but his skill 30 opponent can apply a -18 deceptive attack penalty to apply a -9 defense penalty, reducing it to a Skill 12 vs 10 contest, which is what always happens with two equal opponents, and balancing this out requires some special sacrifices from the defender, which means the defender is always at a slight disadvantage (giving ground, spending fatigue, making risky rolls, etc).

Psi-Wars embraces Chambara rules too, so parry-focused characters get to enjoy a mess of options normally reserved for dodge characters.

Block

Block can be a footnote here. Some people use it, but most people I’ve seen with shields apply the DB to their Dodge or Parry. Generally, I see a single point spent on it, unless the character wants to aggressively make use of their shield in combat, such as Knightly Force-Swordsmanship with its signature shield charge. It’s interesting with a committed attack, as you can defend with the shield, but what I generally see with naked swashbucklers is to dodge and use the DB bonus, rather than rely on Block. It might be worth finding ways to improve the value of block.

Free Defense Bonuses

Those are the defenses you pay for. What are the defenses you can get “for free”? These are the real problem, because a fight is typically balanced between two equal swordsmen, and its the “Free” bonuses that turn it into the defender’s favor.

• Retreat: This is worth a +1 defense except to Dodge (+3), or parry with a Chambara fighter. Let’s count on it being +3, because anyone who’s anyone will have Weapon Master or TBAM.
• Feverish Defense: This is +2 to a single defense. Ranathim and some other characters can spend a second point, for a +4. That concept might be worth revisiting (It’s quite powerful and throws off a lot of values, but it’s also expensive).
• Acrobatics: This is worth +2 to dodge, or Parry if you’ve activated Chambara, so count on it. It also requires a skill, and on a failed roll, applies a -2. People generally don’t fail, though.
• Shield: This offers +1 to +3 depending on the size of the shield. In practice, it’s always +3, because force bucklers are awesome and there’s no reason to have anything else.
• Combat Sense: This is an edge case. It’s a defense you pay for, and I’ve wavered on what it’s price should be; last time, I think I reduced the cost, but I think after my findings, I might raise it again. So here’s how you milk Combat Sense: you take the first level of it, you have Will 16 to 18, and you God-like Extra Effort it for +1 to +3 to all defenses. So you already had +1 (for ~25 points), and now you have a total of +4 defense, and this lasts for a full minute.
• Bullet Proof Nudity: Sexy, sexy Ranathim go shirtless for a reason. This is a “silly rule” but it fits the bare-chested barbarian and the sexy assassin so well, and both are archetypes that definitely belong in the Psi-Wars galaxy (mostly in the Umbral Rim and Sylvan Spiral). So it’s present, though toned down. It represents a trade off of no armor and the danger of contact agents in a setting where there’s no reason not to have a permanent vacc suit on at all times, to gain a bonus to defense. I’ve limited the bonus to a maximum of +2 (no +3 for total nudity, because then it veers out of “reasonable and interesting mechanic” to silliness. Plus mom disapproves).
• Defensive Grip: A rare option, but this grants a +1 to Defense, though it will usually preclude a shield
• Defensive Attack: An underrated option, especially with a force sword where the damage penalty is pretty irrelevant; also good for +1.

So what’s the damage? If we take our Dodge 12, Skill 30, Parry 19 character and max out their defense bonuses with an Acrobatic Feverish Retreating defense while using a shield with buffed combat sense, while wearing skimpy combat lingerie and after making a defensive attack, what defense to get get? We get +13, plus whatever the combat sense bonuses we get; say, another +3 for +16. So we’re now at a Dodge of 28 and a Parry of 35. How can you possibly beat that.

First, you don’t. It’s okay if not every attack doesn’t connect. If a character is sacrificing this much to defend, it’s reasonable you can’t hit. It’s not sustainable. Eventually they’ll run out of ground and they’ll run out of fatigue. You should be more worried about structural bonuses, like the +3 from the shield and the +2 from BPN (Bullet Proof Nudity).

Second, you can use non-applicability. Unarmed attacks might bypass the parry, and area blasts will bypass all except possibly the dodge, and many of those defense bonuses won’t apply. Malediction doesn’t care about any of that, of course. And you can get lucky: a critical success will bypass those defenses, and a roll of 17+ always fails. So even a character with parry 35 is hardly immune.

But we want cool swordfights, so we want to beat parry with neat sword options, rather than blasting them with a flame thrower shouting “Parry this you filthy space wizard!” What options can we use to defeat that defense?

A Catalog of Offense

Alright, we’ve got lots of defense options. How do we beat them? The point, as with defense, is to look for free options, things that you don’t have to pay special points for, but rather generic combat options. Of course, we can improve those options, which will ultimately be the point of this post, but we want to look at what options people can take out of the box. We also want to focus on what we can do as martial artists to win a sword fight. Sure, we can just maledict our opponent, and that’s a valid tactic (it’s basically the core of Maelstrom form), but I’m more concerned with how we can use combat tactics to defeat the combat tactics of our opponent.

• Deceptive Attack: This is frankly the golden standard of offensive options. It balances perfectly with the parry structure of skills. We can measure everything against this.
• Feint: We’ll talk about feint in its own section.
• Stun: Stun applies a -4 to defense. The problem is it requires hitting our foe, and if we can hit our foe, we don’t need to a defense penalty. It’s most interesting when you can attack via routes your opponent cannot easily defense (unarmed attacks to stun, or malediction stuns). This can apply to other Afflictions as well. This forbids retreats.
• Prone: Being prone applies a -3 to defense. You can’t rely on your opponent lying down, though, so this likely involves sweeps, knockback or take-downs, all of which require you to hit your opponent, which makes it a “win more” option like Stun. This probably forbids retreat (can you run away while lying down?)
• Runaround: Attacking your opponent from the side or from behind (if they’re Chamabara, otherwise they get no defense) applies a -2 to their defense.
• Dual Weapon Attack: DWA applies a -1 to defense, and it’s two attacks at once, and when you run the math, it compares pretty nicely to a shield because the second attack can stiffly penalize defense. You inflict a -5 to a normal parry, or -3 to a weapon master’s parry, and you have two weapons for Committed Attacks (attack with one, parry with the other). It’s a little more expensive than a shield, but it’s a valid approach.
• Rapid Strike: This applies no strict defense penalty, but each parry after the first suffers a -4 (-2 for Chambara characters); this makes it better than a deceptive attack: -6 for two attacks translates to -4 defense (rather than -3), or -3 vs -2 (for two chambara characters). Of course, there are lots of situations where it won’t work well: what if your opponent has a second weapon, or a high dodge, or is using a staff-like weapon? But when you combine it with Flurry of Blows, there’s some interesting options.
• Close Combat: GURPS Basic says only weapons with C can parry; MA clarifies this to give a -2 per reach, which is great! The trick is keeping them in C, and it’s kind of terrible. On the turn the character moves into C, you can defend normally, and then retreat, getting out of C. You have to start the fight in C for it to count, which makes it practically impossible to count on.
• Invisible Attacks: Attacks the character cannot see apply a -4 and a block or parry requires a Hearing -2 roll (not sure how that interacts with soundless attacks, like TK Grab)
• Stop Hit: The Martial Arts version applies a -1 to the defense.

There are some other offense options, but let’s start with these. They certainly do a lot to cut down on our defense options. If we attack the parry 35/dodge 28 character with a skill 30 character making a Deceptive, Dual Weapon attack into Close Combat as a runaround attack, we apply -17 to all defenses (Dodge drop to 11, parry to 18), and the second parry drops to 14. That doesn’t sound that great, and we’ll need to get into things we can do to improve the options, but not that this is structural: the character can do this every turn, or close to, and force the other character to waste their resources.

The astute Psi-Wars fan may notice that several martial are actually built around these various options. Destructive relies on Stuns, Graceful on Runaround, Swift on Feint (and rapid strikes and dual weapon attack), Fell on Close Combat and dual weapon attack, Maelstrom on invisible attacks or malediction, Serenity on Stop Hits (or attacking before the opponent even has their weapon) and so on. But it’s also obvious that some of these are better options than others. Let’s look into that.

A More Dangerous Psi-Wars

So I think we may have stacked the deck a bit too heavily towards defense. Not necessarily too much; I think we’ve established that the defense monkey remains vulnerable. But they could be a little more vulnerable. We need to be careful here, though, because the sort of character who swaggers around with a +15 to defense is a weird player who is in a very extreme situation. We might expect more modest arrangements: an acrobatic, shield-using, half-naked character with a structual +7 to defense and the occasional +5 from retreat and feverish defense is probably the worst we might regularly expect to encounter from a player. This is roughly the quivalent to a +14 to +24 skill difference we have to compensate for. What are some options we can use?

In particular, I want to spread out the skill investments characters make. Obviously, we can just buy more Sword, but we want to avoid this, as it leads to sniper characters. What other skills and tactics can we encourage our players to invest in?

A Love/Hate Relationship with Feint

I’ve struggled with Feint since very early in Psi-Wars, and before (back in CBR, even). Feint is a strange trick in that it tends to be the most useful in circumstances with huge skill disparity, in which you rarely need it; in situations with a close skill match you’ll rarely see it makes a difference, which is where you need it the most. And once you bring the technique into the mix, it’s suddenly “too good” because Feint both covers Feint and defends against Feint, for quite cheap. Finally, it’s weird that you can apply some massive, arbitrary penalty to someone’s defense with Feint, while Stun or invisible attacks cap at -4. How is a feint even better than being so slow to respond or to defending against an invisible attack? It’s also too broad: one technique covers Feints, Beats and Ruses.

Dell’Orto created an interesting rule where a Feint. Rather than apply a the margin of victory against your opponent as a penalty to defense, apply a flat -4 if you win the contest. I love this because it tackles so many problems at once. It makes it more useful against high skill opponents, it prevents “win more” from getting out of hand, and it puts Feint roughly on par with Stun and Invisible Attack, and doesn’t make it epic compared to runaround attacks or other tricks. It balanced things nicely.

So I implemented a first draft version of that house rule to see how people felt about it, where I still used margin, but capped it at -4. They hated it! When I suggested the full house rule, they still hated it. Why?

Well, in retrospect, it’s obvious, and it’s something I ran into in Cherry Blossom Rain, and it speaks directly to the concern we have about excess “free” defense bonuses. Feint is best when there’s a huge skill difference and huge defenses, which is exactly the sort of situation we find ourselves in. A character with +10 defense from various bonuses has effectively +20 skill, at least using the math of Deceptive Attack or Parry, but only for the purposes of defense. So, for example, a character with Force Sword 10, Combat Reflexes, Shield (+3), BPN (+2), Acrobatics (+2), and Retreats (+3), they have a defense of 19, which is the same as a skill 30 character with combat reflexes except if the skill 30 character feints the skill 20 character, the skill 30 character applies an average of -20 defense. This resolves the excess defense bonus perfectly. Feint must be uncapped.

Whew. Fine. I repent! It’s a mistake! We must have uncapped, epic feints to deal with her uncapped, epic defense bonuses. But all the other complaints remain valid. But perhaps there’s a better way to resolve them!

The Feinting Floor

The first problem I dislike is the fact that two equally skilled characters can easily waste a turn on feinting even if they win, because they will usually win by 1 or 2 points at most. The -4 was great for breaking an equal skill match. But we don’t want go buff feint, as it’s already very good when we have big skill disparity. What to do? This sounds like a job for a perk, and I think most people will agree this is both reasonably balanced, and very useful.

Feinting Floor: If the character makes a Feint and ties their opponent in the Quick Contest, they apply a -1 defense penalty as though they had succeeded with a margin of one. This is a leveled perk; each level increases this “penalty floor.” At level 2, if the character ties or better, they always apply a minimum of -2 penalty; at level 3, this minimum penalty increases to -3, and at 4 levels it increases to -4. The maximum “floor” is -4. The character must specialize by skill. 1 point.

This lets us return to our -4 penalty minimum, but we have to invest 4 points to get there. It makes a feint much less of a gamble; while there’s still the chance of losing the contest outright, we can always count on a solid defense penalty, instead of wasting a turn to get a -1 or -2.

It’s possible this needs to be buffed. The other option would be to upgrade the floor to a full -4 (removing the tie bonus) for a single point, but that might be too good.

Non-DX Feints

Even if we start to lean on Feints, they don’t actually fix the Naked Sword-and-Board Swashbuckler. Sure, she’s easier to hit, but she’s going to invest like crazy in her sword skill and likely take the Feint perk for precisely this reason. What we need to do is force the character to broaden. Can we do that with Feints, somehow?

Well, we have Beats and Ruses. Now, the core purpose of them in GURPS Martial Arts is to spread the Feint love. If you’re ST 18 and DX 12 with Broadsword at DX+6, you’d rather feint with ST than DX, hence Beats, and the same applies with Ruses and IQ. But they’re all defended in the same way: with DX, and they’re all covered by the same technique.

I’ve already resolved this with Beats and I’m quite satisfied with Beats. Beats now require that you defend against them with ST-based weapon skill. This “floats” Beats from DX to ST, and forces a different contest. Of course, Beats can be beaten in other ways: they only apply to the beaten weapon, and require parrying or being parried, so there’s counterplay here even for weak characters who would be destroyed by a stronger character with beats.

Can we do the same with Ruses? I’m leery. Ruses don’t have a special set-up requirements, so I’m nervous about removing the DX component. I’ll think on it.

But I will note that while Power-Ups 2: Perks doesn’t follow this suggestion, the Sidebar on non-Combat Feints in Martial Arts (page 101) suggests an HT-based Sex Appeal roll vs Will-based combat skill. So we might be able to justify it with a perk. And we’ll revisit some of these non-combat feints soon, because they will do a lot of “spread character skill.”

Dazzling Draw and Free Feints

Dazzling Draw inspired a flurry of creativity once I understood it. It improved Serenity Form (and has already been integrated) and offered a way to fix other styles. Dazzling Draw allows a free feint as part of fast-draw. This means there’s a set-up component: the character must have a sheathed blade and draw it to get a feint, which means in practice, they need to spend a turn putting their weapon away to get a “free feint” again. So if we can require the character to perform arbitrary, turn-length things to gain a free feint, we get some interesting options, and we might reasonably float the idea to similarly “costly” requirements. Here’s one example I used in Dhim.

Tactical Ruse: If the character gains rerolls from Abtstract Tactics (MA page 60), if they are following the tactical plan well enough to qualify for a reroll, they may instead spend 1 reroll to gain a Ruse against a target as a free action. This assumes the plan involves some trickery, or the character is able to use some aspect of the plan to make it easier to bypass his opponent’s defenses (“Fight with the sun at your back! It’ll make it harder for them to see your attacks!”). 1 point.

There’s lots of fertile design space!

Boosted by Feints

I object to the fact that the preferred tactics of other styles suck compared to Feint. For example, Graceful Form focuses on Run Around attacks as a primary anti-defense mechanic, in contrast to the Swift Form’s Feint. At “reasonable” skill levels, this is fine: a runaround applies a -2 to defense and repositioning yourself on the far side of your opponent so they cannot use their shield can eliminate the shield’s Defense Bonus. That’s handy! Of course, Timed Defense or Peripheral Vision can defeat this, but there’s still some value to it. By contrast, at normal skill levels, we might expect a feint to apply a -1 to -4, so it’s debatable as to which approach is better. One takes a whole turn, the other requires a Heroic Charge, etc.

But when we get to these stupid defense values where characters are slinging around +10 or more defense, the a little -2 is not nearly enough. We need something like a feint. Feint and Deceptive attack are uncapped, while Run Around Attack, Stop Hits, Stuns, Invisible Attacks are capped, which limits their utility.

So, if the solution isn’t to cap Feint, why not uncap these tricks? But how? Well, we can bring in those free feints. Perhaps there’s a way to convert a Runaround Attack or a Stop Hit into a more lethal contest. I think we need to be careful of turning it into a flat bonus, as we’re probably looking at a perk here, but if we did something like convert Stop Hit into something similar to a Dazzlng Draw and maybe gave it some more drawbacks (like failure can cause you more problems, as Stop Hit is already a gamble), it might balance out okay. If Graceful Form has a perk that gives Runarounds a free Acrobatic Feint, it creates even more emphasis and reason for a Graceful Form character to buff their Acrobatics to high levels.

Close Combat

Close Combat is another broken element. The original game is terrified of a knife fighter stepping into a spearman’s reach and curbstomping him because he has no parry. MA already fixed this by offering the Reach 1+ combatant more options to resolve the problem, but still the old rules remain. There are two tools we can use to fix this.

The first problem is there are no CC penalties when you step into close combat, only when you start in close combat. Okay, let’s perk it.

Rush Close: If you step into Close Combat, contrary to the rules in the FAQ, you still apply a Close Combat penalty to your opponents defenses, but halve the value; your opponent suffers a -1 per reach of his weapon to defend against your attacks this turn. 1 point.

Okay, but how do we stay in close combat when they can just retreat? We need one more step. This is rather easy to do, and Pit Fighting has Aggressive Footwork, a move that gives Move only for the purposes of taking a second step, and only remain in close combat. This still comes to 4-5 points, depending on your base move, but we can handle that with prereqs, no problem.

If we combine both, we get someone who hits a force swordsman with -1 to defense on the first turn, then when they retreat, they step to remain close in, and begin to apply the -2. This isn’t “Uncapped” but it has a lot of advantages, because they struggle to attack too, and it heavily advantages unarmed combat (hence why Pitfighters get it).

Stunlock?

Okay, that just leaves Stuns…. and I’ll ponder that later. This post is already HUGE, and Pitfighting already has some interesting options.

A Worthy Opponent

So, as we can see, high DB characters like Anastasia don’t have to be a problem. Anastasia (and other characters like her) merely highlight issues with capped defense penalties in a highly cinematic world. If we begin to expand the offensive options in some subtle ways, we can even out the battlefield a little and make other sorts of characters more viable. Though, it should be said that there are actually quite a few different builds that work well (Axton Kain could definitely go toe to toe with Anastasia, for example; Guardian Form in the hands of a cyborg knight is powerful).

What matters, though is this gives us some tools to improve some of the less Feint-heavy, less laser-focused martial arts with more tools to beat the twinked out defense monkeys, which also makes the twinked out defense monkey more interesting because it becomes one strategy among many, rather than an approach the GM tries to suppress.