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Toward more dynamic combat


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Yeah the moving on segments makes sense but slows things down and doesn't add anything to the game.  Aces & Eights, the cowboy game, has a combat system broken down to tenths of a second and you pre-select movements, then run down the clock until your action.  In theory, everything flows constantly and you get a feel of motion and fluid activity.  In practice its hideous, slow, annoying, and takes ages to fight.  Like hero cubed.

 

My fix for the teleporting person was to add zones of control and opportunity strikes to the mix.  If someone moves past you, you can abort to a melee attack on them (no special maneuvers, no martial arts, no haymaker etc) if you want to.  That way people feel less frozen as someone blows past when its not your phase.

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The latter: Movement & Actions apportioned per Segment instead of per Phase. So normally a SPD 3 Character with 16m Running "stands still" on Phases 1, 2 & 3, and then on Phase 4 moves 8m & attacks. Under our system, they'd move 2m on each of Segments 1, 2, 3 & 4, and attack on Phase 4. Two non-movement 1/2 Phase Actions would be spaced out similarly.

 

Even as I type this, a small part of my brain thinks "Yeah, that actually makes sense..." But then the part of my brain kicks in that remembers what an unmitigated pain it was, and how much complexity it added for no discernible benefit... :)

Yeah, I have been in the same space with the same thoughts. Sometimes you forget a game makes compromises with reality simply to make a game more fun.

 

That was not my proposal though. I was suggesting the former. So everyone is effectively SPD12 but action on consecutive actions accumulates penalties in chances to hit, to defend yourself and, possibly long term END.

 

That adds a strategic element of whether you go all out, sacrificing accuracy and care and risk exhausting yourself...

 

SPD in this system would be how many times in a round you can mitigate these penalties and get you back on an even keel.

 

..now the little sensible man in my head is asking whether I really know my players. They will inevitably rabidly attack, using every action available to them....

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Hmm..Never thought of this, but it makes some sense. I would still say that attacking takes a 1/2 Phase action, so your 12m runner could move 3m, attack, and then move 3m more, but they would still normally be limited to 6m of movement. In other words attacking still means they're limited to a 1/2 move, but they can split up that 1/2 move however they like.

 

 

 

That is pretty much what I had in mind, you can make any amount of movement up to a half move (broken up into any number and sort of portions) as well as an attack.

 

I do sometimes let my players take a "Free 5-foot Step" like in D&D if they want to adjust their position a bit while making a Full Phase attack or the like.

 

 

That actually should have made the original list.  I think letting people make a 1m move for free to adjust position is fine - and at any point in the turn.

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Note: I think Hero is quite possibly one the most tactical role playing games there is.  It's why some people hate it.

 

I'm just going to put my $0.02 in, take it or leave it.  Note this is also off the top of my head, so block of salt and all that.

 

General running possibilities: 

1) Get a second GM. -  Sounds strange but I've seen it work.  The villains become much more dynamic, tactical if a lot of clerical work is removed.  The GM's mind get free cycles to work on using the villains to their utmost.  Tactical villains make tactical players.

2) 3-5 levels. - variable levels make the CVs of the villains harder to figure out and gives them more options.

3) Balanced villain teams - one of the few villains the players I had had a hard time defeating was a supergenius who wanted a challenge.  Whats more of a challenge than an opposing team which plays well together after being trained well by the supergenius?  The villains all had primary and secondary combat rolls and knew what to do in case one of them fell.  

4) Damsels in distress, video bloggers in the way, the nut job with a blanket for a cape, and Jimmy Dugan, ace reporter, to report when the PCs fail.

 

House rule ideas: 

1) Give CV modifiers for rear attacks.

2) Attacks of opportunity - give a free attack if a hero doesn't concentrate on their target (dex roll -1/extra attacker -1/previous attack of opportunity -1 per level defender uses to prevent the roll; make roll to perform the free attack of opportunity, fail roll and take no more attacks of opportunity till next phase)

3) Allow someone to abort at anytime to do something STUPIDLY heroic.  This is something I use in my games.  Note the keyword STUPIDLY.  Abort to jump in front of an attack to take it for someone, sure.  Turn on your defenses too, no.

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For me the ideal solution would revolve around having several "best" options instead of just one optimal one.

 

6e (or maybe it was 5e) seems to have expanded what you can use maneuvers with, which is a good start.

 

What about a carrot approach, with some bonus for creative power use? The rules already sort of have this with the "surprise maneuver" rule, but everyone tends to forget that one.

 

What about initiative order based on how entertaining the player's last action was? (defaulting to boring normal rules if everyone is being boringly normal)

 

"Okay, Combat Thug hits him again"

 

"Sure. Roll damage. Robin?"

 

"I'll grab the mook, roll him up into a ball and dribble him towards the boss!"

 

*laugh* "Okay. Roll damage on that. You get to go first next phase."

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The third is letting people use defensive martial arts maneuvers off their phase at a penalty.  So blocks, dodges, riposte, etc.  This one is probably the most sketchy but I feel that it would make combat more exciting and dynamic if people didn't need to sacrifice a phase to throw in more blocks.  When its your phase, which is better: hitting your foe or blocking them to set up another hit?  Almost never is the second choice tactically useful, but in real combat its almost constant.

That's called "Putting Levels in DCV"

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Putting Levels in a palindromedary

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I was suggesting the former. So everyone is effectively SPD12 but action on consecutive actions accumulates penalties in chances to hit, to defend yourself and, possibly long term END.

 

That adds a strategic element of whether you go all out, sacrificing accuracy and care and risk exhausting yourself...

 

SPD in this system would be how many times in a round you can mitigate these penalties and get you back on an even keel.

I have a vague memory of playing an RPG with a mechanic kindof along those lines. Initiative was kindof a pool (ala END) reflecting how many actions you could take in a Turn, and SPD was almost like REC. I've been racking my brain to try and remember what game it was, but I'm afraid my brain remains rack-less. As I recall I thought it was an interesting idea, but I only played the game once or twice so I never got a really good feel for it.

 

House rule ideas: 

1) Give CV modifiers for rear attacks.

2) Attacks of opportunity - give a free attack if a hero doesn't concentrate on their target (dex roll -1/extra attacker -1/previous attack of opportunity -1 per level defender uses to prevent the roll; make roll to perform the free attack of opportunity, fail roll and take no more attacks of opportunity till next phase)

3) Allow someone to abort at anytime to do something STUPIDLY heroic.  This is something I use in my games.  Note the keyword STUPIDLY.  Abort to jump in front of an attack to take it for someone, sure.  Turn on your defenses too, no.

My $0.02:

 

1) I do this...sometimes. The catch is with the wrong players it can be stupidly abused. Picture two minis facing each other on the tabletop. Munchkin #1 on his Phase moves his PC around behind the villain - presto, rear attack. Then on the villain's turn they do the same thing, and now every attack is from behind. Sounds stupid, but I know people who have literally played that game, and I think it's the main reason Hero doesn't have facing rules. Assuming you have players who aren't complete dickheads, all you have to say is "Look, it's assumed the other character isn't just standing there frozen in place while you move behind him, right? In reality he would be turning with you, right?" And then if you have a situation where a character gets in a legitimate rear attack (because the defender didn't see him coming, or the attacker did something clever) that's really already covered under Surprise Move.

 

2) This sound good in theory, but I find in practice it gets problematic; giving players "free" attacks in Hero creates problems because the system isn't built that way. I do have a house rule that essentially lets players Abort to an offensive action if their opponent is ignoring them - they don't get a free action, but they can take their action early, and may get bonuses. It's really only designed to prevent abuses of the turn sequence like "I run right past this guy because it's not his Phase so he can't do anything about it." It rarely comes up, and is more of a deterrent than anything else. (I once heard another GM say they allow PCs to essentially Push their SPD in similar situations; an interesting approach but I hate changing SPDs in mid-Turn.)

 

3) Abort To Stupid is always allowed in my games! ;) Tho actually the examples you mentioned are both already permitted under RAW. See 6e2 p21:

 

Ordinarily a character can only Abort to protect himself. However, with the GM’s permission, a character can Abort to protect others (for example, to step in front of an attack intended to hit another character, or to use Deflection to save someone from a bullet).

A character may perform more than one defensive Action while Aborting — such as Aborting to Dodge and simultaneously activating a Defense Power — provided they’re not mutually exclusive.

 

 

What about a carrot approach, with some bonus for creative power use? The rules already sort of have this with the "surprise maneuver" rule, but everyone tends to forget that one.

This. Honestly IMX the single easiest way to make combats more dynamic is to be generous with Surprise Move bonuses. It's simple, it's already in RAW, and once your players see someone else get rewarded for creativity you'll be amazed with what they'll come up with just to get a +1!

 

Conversely, I'll very occasionally assess a -1 "predictability penalty" if a character keeps doing the exact same attack several times in a row; you don't want to use that one too often, but doing it even once gets the point across.

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"Look, it's assumed the other character isn't just standing there frozen in place while you move behind him, right? In reality he would be turning with you, right?" And then if you have a situation where a character gets in a legitimate rear attack (because the defender didn't see him coming, or the attacker did something clever) that's really already covered under Surprise Move.

 

 

 

Right, simply moving your figure on the map doesn't mean the victim is unable to turn.  Teleporting behind them for an attack?  OK probably.  But running, they simply rotate as you go.  If you want your character to speedster around behind targets buy them a couple OCV levels and maybe a couple dice of "backstab" damage or something.

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Right, simply moving your figure on the map doesn't mean the victim is unable to turn.  Teleporting behind them for an attack?  OK probably.  But running, they simply rotate as you go.  If you want your character to speedster around behind targets buy them a couple OCV levels and maybe a couple dice of "backstab" damage or something.

Exactly. As long as your players accept that this is an RPG, not a wargame, and that the intermittent turn sequence is an artificiality, not a Law Of Nature, it's all good. Sadly, it only takes that one bozo to screw it up for everyone.

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Silver Age Flash levels of burst hyper-speed can be bought as Teleportation; Must Pass Through Intervening Space (-1/4), maybe with Destination must be a Surface. If the character has a Desolid power, they may not even really need the limitation, or it could be linked to that. That would be sufficiently fast to allow surprise attack bonus, especially vs mooks. I'd also thought Indirect might be appropriate to allow for running around obstacles, but that's only allowed on Attack powers.

 

Mind you, speedsters usually have more than enough tricks up their sleeve to get Surprise Attack bonuses other than from sucker punches. Grabbing a pistol, unloading the bullets and putting it back in the mook's hand... tying shoelaces together... going desolid and letting the sucker take a swing. And there's always "Ha! You missed!" "Oh, did I?" followed by something falling on the target, or their gun falling apart. 

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The problem with allowing movement after the attack is you forget that in real fights I don't do all my moves and attacks and then you get to do yours in turns.  In real fights combatants defend and attack together.

 

So what happens if a fast character Speedy the Mouse with say 60m of running decides to move 10m in, attack Slow Poke the brick then run 10m back and 5m downstairs and into another room 5m to the left   Technically this is a half move and attack.  Slow Poke with 20m running has no chance to attack back. But in real life Slow Poke if he sees Speedy is going to swing at him when Speedy tries to get under his reach.

 

In your system the attack cannot be made, Slow Poke cannot strike him.  The reason a character stops after an attack is to best mimic the simultaneity of battle without the chaos of trying to  account for simultaneity.  Speedy ends his turn when he attacks, next phase slowpoke gets his retaliatory strike and next turn Speedy can go hide.

 

You could adopt d20's AOO (attack of opportunity) rules but I know those are not the most popular of rules for that game.  Plus Hero System works differently.

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The only thing I don't think I'd lean toward using is penalizing a character for using the same thing over and over. For some things, that might work, but you quickly could face some difficulty, since many of these things can be used to cover groups of actions that really have the same effect, so it could easily turn into penalizing the build when the actual effect is presumed to vary.

 

For example, Atom, a boxer, is basically using strike a lot. Now, I'm sure one could make or use builds for jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts, but, in a way, making them do the build that way is making them pay for some things that one could interpret as being, in game terms, the same effect. Penalizing more striking would be less realistic, not more.

 

Likewise, in fantasy, if you don't picture your berserker sword fighter as disarming people, he or she is stuck with cutting and thrusting. In an unarmored duel, our would be swashbuckler, if we want to go with realism, is going to thrust a lot, but now he can't. I know that there are builds in martial arts to approximate all sorts of things, but when it comes down to it, if dueling with a thrusting sword, one is probably going to thrust more often than not.

 

Motivation to change up one's combat should come from the logic of the fight, imo, and it needs to be taken into account that most builds are actually an array of narrative uses that just happen to share the exact same game effect, so penalizing repeated use may just encourage making more builds to get around a penalty, builds that aren't actually adding any narrative quality that the single power wasn't entirely able to do on its own in the first place.

 

If there is no reason in the callibre of enemy they are fighting to see a different technique as more useful in a segment than what was used before, I tend to ask myself if the enemies are truly providing any challenge to the players.

 

Also, if the movement rules are done as stated, then it will be much harder to actually repeat one's action segment after segment, as the other pieces on the table are not as trapped in a particular melee as before, and so some segments may be giving chase.

 

Granted, as stated, this would add value to movement powers, but it would also incentivize area effect purchases for exactly that reason. I'm not sure what the result would be.

 

As an aside, Nolgroth's abort as part of a multiple attack is awesome.

 

My thoughts on the problem of combat lasting longer, endless chains of dodges(or shield use) or such:

I think this is not insurmountable, but it changes the narrative structure of fighting, which can be good. If we assume every fight to be a contest between two groups or individuals until one is 'vanquished', and run the game this way, then this will mean fights will too often be long, protracted issues where defense and escape are so readily available due to being able to move more freely and abort more freely, and so to get the nice clean feeling of total vanquishosity will require a lot of slogging and lot of chasing.

 

If we alter this, to view each confrontation as a less easily defined thing, we could change this. When the enemies are evil or have no compunctions about leaving behind a few of their own, a confrontation might start out looking like it might last a while, but quickly finish as this enemy opts out of a bad situation, then another, and the few who remain get stuck very quickly being outnumbered by the heroes. And the sheer power of movement will make escape more possible. If your knight with sword and shield is fighting his evil counterpart in the context of a larger confrontation, he might very well be trying to hold the other at bay until the rest of the party is freed up to help. In fact, he might be purposefully taking on more than he can chew, knowing that he can probably last a little while before getting overwhelmed by a more experienced and brutal knight. Yes, every battle will not measure as high on the vanquishosity scale, but when it actually does happen that foes are so thoroughly vanquished, through a little luck and some good planning by the party, the value of the victory will be worth it.

 

So, the main effect I would expect to see is: more people escaping combat, longer battles if going to completion, greater ability for lower powered people to tie up higher powered people, more area of effects.

 

Oh, and if you track Endurance or somehow determine this, I think that SHOULD play a big role. In which case, some fights will be won by the fighter who tires last.

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BigDamnHero: "I do have a house rule that essentially lets players Abort to an offensive action if their opponent is ignoring them - they don't get a free action, but they can take their action early, and may get bonuses. It's really only designed to prevent abuses of the turn sequence like "I run right past this guy because it's not his Phase so he can't do anything about it." It rarely comes up, and is more of a deterrent than anything else."

 

OK, this looks awesome.

Clearly it is abusable, or it would be RAW ("I punch him, then abort to punch him again"; "I abort" "Well, I abort first with higher DEX").

You are clearly a master GM whose players are happy to take your ruling as Law, but if someone was going to introduce this, are there any tips on how to explain it to players so that they don't misunderstand and either a) feel conned or B) take the mickey?

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The problem with allowing movement after the attack is you forget that in real fights I don't do all my moves and attacks and then you get to do yours in turns.  In real fights combatants defend and attack together.

 

So what happens if a fast character Speedy the Mouse with say 60m of running decides to move 10m in, attack Slow Poke the brick then run 10m back and 5m downstairs and into another room 5m to the left   Technically this is a half move and attack.  Slow Poke with 20m running has no chance to attack back. But in real life Slow Poke if he sees Speedy is going to swing at him when Speedy tries to get under his reach.

 

In your system the attack cannot be made, Slow Poke cannot strike him.  The reason a character stops after an attack is to best mimic the simultaneity of battle without the chaos of trying to  account for simultaneity.  Speedy ends his turn when he attacks, next phase slowpoke gets his retaliatory strike and next turn Speedy can go hide.

OK, first, in a "real fight", can't Slow Poke attack attack when Speedy gets within reach, whether or not Speedy plans to move back out of reach after making his attack? You can't do that in Hero System now (or can you? see below). Second, don't many boxers and martial artists in real life move forward, attack and move back, avoiding counterattack? "He can't lay a glove on The Champ!"

 

* I suggest Slow Poke being ready to attack when Speedy moves in simply means Slow Poke held an action to do just that. Speedy comes rushing back from downstairs, and Slow Poke clobbers him as soon as he gets in range, since Slow Poke has just been watching the stairwell out of the corner of his eye, waiting for Speedy to pop back up (or he used his half move to move 10 m right up to the stairwell, and Speedy also gets knocked back down the stairs when Slow Poke uses his reserved half phase).

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I don't know that most of the proposed rule changes in this thread will actually give you what you want, which is players using different maneuvers instead of the same thing over and over again.  Whichever changes you make, it'll take a little while, but eventually your players will figure out what the most effective tactic is under the new system and they'll just spam that instead.

 

I'd suggest building villains that have tactical options that force the heroes out of their comfort zone.  Team tactics, unusual powers, and the occasional dirty trick can go a long way towards throwing heroes off their game.

 

Let's say your heroes are fighting a villain team that are clear stand-ins for the Fantastic Four.  You'd think each of the 4 villains would have an easily defined role.  Rocky punches people, Hothead shoots them with fire, Stretcho uses entangles and big inflatable fists, while Invisa-chick uses her force fields to support her teammates.  But let's go a little outside the box.  How about this:

 

--Invisa-chick has an extra slot in her multipower.  She's got Images, only for making things appear to be not there.  So when your blaster, Captain Fallout, always shoots at the first target he sees?  He sees the bad guys, he opens fire, but what he doesn't know is that there's a wall in the way.  The good Captain nukes a hole in the wall and now Hothead (with a held action) gets the drop on him.

--Stretcho has martial arts (including martial throw) and a high Speed.  He holds his actions a lot and uses Missile Deflection (grabbing an object that is over there and then blocking with it) and martial throws to disrupt people who use predictable actions over and over again.

--Hothead has great movement and flies around causing trouble.  He'll set buildings on fire (never right where the heroes are, always over there where you have to spend some actions going), threaten civilians, stuff like that.  His role is to use one or two actions to make the heroes spend four or five to deal with the mess he made.  He'll do that at least once in the opening turn.

--Rocky has a few brick tricks, like a megascale throw and a shockwave stomp, that he can use a few times a day to try and scatter the hero team.  Maybe he's also got a higher Speed than you let on at first.  He acts like he's got a 4, but he's really got a 5 and he's just holding actions to make himself appear slower.  That gets people to let their guard down.  As soon as they see him not act on segment 5, they think "oh he's a 4 Spd".  Then he can catch them totally off guard on segment 8 or 10, when they think he can't act yet..

 

The point of this is not to piss off your players, or to make overpowered villains who can just trounce them.  It's to get the players out of the tactical rut that they've been in so far.  Make them think, use other combat options, things like that.  And it all depends on what things your players are doing over and over again.  If they're just standing there and punching, or standing there and shooting, you'll want a different response than if they're use passing strike every single phase.

 

 

 

Another thing you can do is use the environment.  Give good bonuses for things like that.  Let your villains do it a couple of times, to show the players you're okay with it, and then they'll get as creative as they can to try and get the same bonuses themselves.  Segment 5, Captain Lightning "misses" the hero and shoots a stack of copy paper in an office building fight.  The paper bursts into flames.  By segment 8, the smoke from the paper has triggered the sprinklers, getting everybody drenched.  Captain Lightning laughs, and enjoys the free Explosion advantage that he gets on his attacks now that the whole place is soaked.  Now he can hit multiple heroes with each attack.

 

Too often, GMs are worried about handing out "free stuff" that people didn't pay points for.  "Oh no, you can't get any extra D6 for picking up that bulldozer and using it as a club, you still only do your normal 12D6."  Screw that.  Give extra dice.  Give out bonuses like candy as long as players can provide a dynamic and exciting explanation.  Don't let them do the same thing over and over again each time ("Sorry, Captain Lightning, you don't see any big stacks of flammable stuff here in this warehouse today"), make them use their imagination.

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So what happens if a fast character Speedy the Mouse with say 60m of running decides to move 10m in, attack Slow Poke the brick then run 10m back and 5m downstairs and into another room 5m to the left   Technically this is a half move and attack.  Slow Poke with 20m running has no chance to attack back. But in real life Slow Poke if he sees Speedy is going to swing at him when Speedy tries to get under his reach.

That is the example always given for not allowing attack-and-move. And yet it has literally never come up once in any game I've run or played where attack-and-move was allowed. Not once.

 

The phrase I use with my players is "I allow attack-and-move as long as it's not abused." If someone tries to munchkin it, then I either don't allow it or invoke the Attacks of Opportunity rule I posted above. But then I'm fortunate to have players who aren't jerks and are more interested in playing a fun game than in exploiting rules loopholes.

 

The only thing I don't think I'd lean toward using is penalizing a character for using the same thing over and over. For some things, that might work, but you quickly could face some difficulty, since many of these things can be used to cover groups of actions that really have the same effect, so it could easily turn into penalizing the build when the actual effect is presumed to vary.

 

For example, Atom, a boxer, is basically using strike a lot. Now, I'm sure one could make or use builds for jabs, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts, but, in a way, making them do the build that way is making them pay for some things that one could interpret as being, in game terms, the same effect. Penalizing more striking would be less realistic, not more.

Sure, if a character only has one effective attack, then it's not fair to penalize them for using it over and over again. But most competent boxers (at least in my games) usually have a few different maneuvers they can use to mix things up. Even without martial maneuvers, you can still slip a Block or a Grab into the mix. Or use PRE to feint and throw the guy off his defense. Or turn and punch Thug #2 suddenly instead of continuing to pound on Thug #1 for the 4th Phase in a row. Heck, even moving your CSLs around so you're not on ALL OFFENSE! all the time, or even narrating your attack differently can count.

 

As I said it's a rule I invoke very sparingly. But it's useful for helping players get out of a rut. Especially for That One Dude who wants to throw Offensive Strike every single time because more damage bro!

 

If we alter this, to view each confrontation as a less easily defined thing, we could change this. When the enemies are evil or have no compunctions about leaving behind a few of their own, a confrontation might start out looking like it might last a while, but quickly finish as this enemy opts out of a bad situation, then another, and the few who remain get stuck very quickly being outnumbered by the heroes. And the sheer power of movement will make escape more possible. If your knight with sword and shield is fighting his evil counterpart in the context of a larger confrontation, he might very well be trying to hold the other at bay until the rest of the party is freed up to help. In fact, he might be purposefully taking on more than he can chew, knowing that he can probably last a little while before getting overwhelmed by a more experienced and brutal knight. Yes, every battle will not measure as high on the vanquishosity scale, but when it actually does happen that foes are so thoroughly vanquished, through a little luck and some good planning by the party, the value of the victory will be worth it.

So much this. I make this mistake too, but not every opponent has to fight to the death every single time.

 

OK, this looks awesome.

Clearly it is abusable, or it would be RAW ("I punch him, then abort to punch him again"; "I abort" "Well, I abort first with higher DEX").

You are clearly a master GM whose players are happy to take your ruling as Law, but if someone was going to introduce this, are there any tips on how to explain it to players so that they don't misunderstand and either a) feel conned or B) take the mickey?

Heh, I don't know about "Master GM" but I'm lucky to have really good players. And yeah with the wrong players it's definitely open to abuse. The key is to define the purpose of the rule, and the circumstances in which it's allowed. Here's the text from the Campaign Guidelines doc for my current campaign.

 

Attacks Of Opportunity: Normally Hero only lets you Abort to take defensive actions. This can sometimes make it artificially easy to ignore characters, such as running past an armed and ready opponent just because it’s not their Phase yet. This rule is intended to provide a disincentive to that sort of thing.

  • A character may Abort their next Phase to attack an opponent that is moving past or away from them (not towards them) within reach of a readied melee attack.
  • Requires spending 1 Hero Point.
  • Normal rules for Aborting apply, such as you can’t Abort if you’ve already acted this Phase.
  • A moving character can spend a ½ action to “tactically” withdraw from an opponent without exposing themselves to an attack of opportunity, and afterwards may make a ½-move or other action normally.
  • Notwithstanding the above, a character with a Held Action could take their action normally without having to spend a Hero Point.

Again, it really doesn't get used that often, it's mostly just there as a deterrent to gaming the turn sequence. In fact it actually came up in last night's game, the first time in awhile:

 

Player: [starts to move his mini past a ready opponent to get at a 2nd character, pauses] "Crap, that's going to invoke an Attack of Opportunity, isn't it?"

GM: "It could, yes."

Player: "Yeah, ok." [movies his mini back to attack the first opponent]

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Too often, GMs are worried about handing out "free stuff" that people didn't pay points for.  "Oh no, you can't get any extra D6 for picking up that bulldozer and using it as a club, you still only do your normal 12D6."  Screw that.  Give extra dice.  Give out bonuses like candy as long as players can provide a dynamic and exciting explanation.

Also this. If you want your players to be creative, you need to be willing to reward that creativity.

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I don't know that most of the proposed rule changes in this thread will actually give you what you want, which is players using different maneuvers instead of the same thing over and over again.

 

I think people misunderstood my post.  I don't sit around like a dullard with a blank sheet and throw bad guys at the PCs marching in a line without any tactics or creativity.  I mean, you're giving good advice for mixing up things, but that's not the problem.  I have fights on top of speeding trains, in falling buildings, in a flooding sewer, during earthquakes, have something odd happen in the middle of the fight (a sinkhole opens, the weather changes so its muddy, etc), and so on.

 

The problem is not that players have nothing to change things up, its that no matter what you do, players aren't dumb and they will uncork their best power regularly to drop a target fast and efficiently, and like Massey said, 

 

eventually your players will figure out what the most effective tactic is under the new system and they'll just spam that instead.

 

And that's true when you change the environment, make the bad guys use unusual abilities and tactics, etc.  The idea isn't to negate the possibility that people get into patterns, but to give more options and encourage them to do so less.

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I would further say that, if movement is more dynamic, then what is the best move to use will be less likely to remain the same from turn to turn. As it stands, if your best move is hth or ranged, with the movement rules as they stand, that presents a picture of where you want to be every single fight, and makes it much much simpler to just use your power move every time.

 

If the combat is more fluid, if your opponents and you have a greater capacity to reasonably use cover, then it is less likely that as often you will be in the position to use your power move, and will have to adjust.

 

It is important to keep in mind that this alteration to the movement rule does, in fact, represent more dynamic movement. I would also say the target of opportunity rule is essential, or, conversely, I would imagine that some powers would get built that mimic this, like a triggered area of effect(not sure if that's strictly legal, but something along those lines) that only takes effect if someone is making a move through that passes close to your character while your character is not otherwise occupied. This basic premise is a common rule in many games to avoid exactly the problems associated with making movement more free. It is not a fix, per se, as reasonably representing combat. In fact, hit or miss, if they pass too close to someone who can stop their charge, their charge is effectively ended at that point in many games.

 

Since the alteration is so clearly an increase in dynamics as far as movement goes, it is considerably difficult to argue that it will then lead to less dynamic decision-making in what power or maneuvers will be used. If your opponent can more easily break from you, this will reduce the overall opportunities to use the same hth power in successive phases. If they can more readily obtain cover, this will more readily make using a ranged blast in successive rounds less likely. If they can more readily interpose themselves between a charging attacker and their target, this will reduce the ability to take advantage of every target of opportunity.

 

I still hold that the motivation to block or punch should be based on the situation demanding it, whether the situation is tactical or role play related(block? I'm overconfident, blocking is for fools! as an example of the latter). However, I agree that more dynamic situations should lead to more situations in which the fallback power or maneuver simply has no place in the moment.

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What would happen if aborting to a defense when you don't have a segment was made contingent on a perception roll?

 

Properly speaking all aborts to take defensive action need GM approval, and this might be something they would already require in some cases. Needing a PER roll shouldn't be required for aborting to block an opponent you're already fighting face to face, or diving for cover against a haymaker that you were aware of. Or aborting to turn on your force field after Doc Destroyer pressed a big red button at the end of his soliloquy. 

 

But aborting to Dodge VIPER Agent #3 over there switching targets from Absorbo The RKE Absorbing Man to your character? Makes sense to require a roll to notice that. So yeah. A point worth mentioning, but I'd not make it a regular rule. Might be something to enforce in the more realistic settings, though.

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Properly speaking all aborts to take defensive action need GM approval, and this might be something they would already require in some cases. Needing a PER roll shouldn't be required for aborting to block an opponent you're already fighting face to face, or diving for cover against a haymaker that you were aware of. Or aborting to turn on your force field after Doc Destroyer pressed a big red button at the end of his soliloquy. 

 

But aborting to Dodge VIPER Agent #3 over there switching targets from Absorbo The RKE Absorbing Man to your character? Makes sense to require a roll to notice that. So yeah. A point worth mentioning, but I'd not make it a regular rule. Might be something to enforce in the more realistic settings, though.

 

I guess I was thinking in terms of some of the ideas being thrown around in which abort was, essentially, no longer tied to an action in the future. Opportunity of attack comes to mind in this. Having a rule that applies to all seems fairer to me than GM caveat having to deal with all such cases. It also would effectively get rid of gaming the speed chart, which is a good thing. No one would have reason to assume any unoccupied opponent was unable to mess with them.

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