The Rules Discarded Along the Way

[unclevlad]

By the rules of football, the effective condition was that your forward progress was stopped...specifically to prevent stunts like this, and similar.  There's also safety concerns if the runner's held in place and controlled.  If the play is allowed to continue, then another defender might come in and hammer the helpless ball carrier, for example trying to force a fumble.

 

Football doesn't care about "tackles" per se;  it's when the ball carrier is down, out of bounds, or has forward progress stopped.  HOW any of those happen, especially in college and high school, is irrelevant.

[Duke Bushido]

On 3/17/2023 at 4:51 PM, unclevlad said:

 

Football doesn't care about "tackles" per se;  it's when the ball carrier is down, out of bounds, or has forward progress stopped.  HOW any of those happen, especially in college and high school, is irrelevant.

 

Yep.  What he said.  As an anecdote, we had a visiting receiver make a dive for a bad pass.  One of our guys slid knees down _under_ him aa he caught the ball then caught the receiver like he was carrying away his new bride.

 

Refs downed yhe play right there. Even though the guy wasn't tackled or even being restrained.  He just could not keep his feet and move forward.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Duke Bushido

[Joe Walsh]

Continuing my Espionage! project, I noticed that under "Hand-to-Hand Combat" in Espionage (p 31) and Pulp Hero (p 58), the third paragraph reads:

 

Quote

Some of these Combat Maneuvers allow the character to do other things besides cause damage, such as grabbing something or tripping someone. Whenever a character is trying to perform an action not specifically listed, the GM should try to fit the action into one of the Combat Maneuvers already listed. The GM should apply different OCV and/or DCV modifiers based on the exact situation.

 

(Emphasis mine.)

 

Unlike grabbing, unfortunately there is no further mention of tripping anywhere in either text.

 

Given that the combat maneuvers are Punch, Killing Blow, Block, Dodge, Hold, Disarm, Grab, and Flying Tackle, my reading of the bolded sentence above is that the HERO crew used Grab for tripping, since they are saying that tripping is already covered by the existing combat maneuvers.

 

Then they must have decided to revisit the idea in Fantasy HERO 1e when, despite still having the separate Hold and Grab maneuvers, they decided to add a Trip maneuver. And then decided against it for Danger International, published just 5 months later.

 

And then we didn't see Trip again until 6e.

 

I just found it interesting and thought I'd mention it in case anyone has any thoughts or insight to share.

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by GM Joe

[Duke Bushido]

Sure; I'll bite!

 

This thread is now four pages long.  This is in large part because all od the active participants in this thread have very diggerenr opinions not just about how named, defined, official maneuvers are to be interpreted and which ones are  important and which are not.

 

5e was the first edition of this game- from core rules to supplements and genre conventions to adventures to-    to whatever-  to be written _almost entirely_ by one man.  He isnt going to  have a lot of disagreement with himself.  (To rectify this, I have generously volunteered to do all the disagreeing with him: one on one just kind of simplifies this, and,having already spent a couple of decades really not liking the original Dark Champions, I was already practiced.  Path of Least Resistance amd all that.  It has been a thankless job, but you are all welcome anyway.   )

 

The same,can be said of 6e, where an even larger percentage of the material was written by one guy (which made my job harder: do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain disagreement when you are in total awe at the volume of output?!  Wow!)

 

Look at the earlier examples that you cite.  Sure, a,lot we're written by L Douglas G, but not all,of them.  And even of the ones that were, going through contributing names and, where available, editors, you will find each of these books had different creative teams

  We all know that persuasion qmd debate are an important part of deviding what goes into these books (unless you are just going to show off and write almost an entire product line by yourself.  Twice.  Like some kind of show off.  Or cyborg.      ), amd we,know that diggerent people are foinf to have different ideas, etc, etc.

 

There is also the chance with a recurring author or lead writer of editorial team that after having spent time with his previous rules, he found something lacking or superfluous, and took this new opportunity to make what he felt to be a much-needed correction this time around.  Given a third opportunity, he may devise that it was better the first time.

 

 

Now keep in mind that I have absolutely no facts to suggest that this was the case in the instances you  cite, but I am willing to bet that it has a large degree of accuracy.

 

 

 

 

[Ninja-Bear]

GM joe, I might be misremembering but when Trip was reintroduced (or to me introduced) and the argument was why do I need to upgrade to 6th, a point was made that you could already Trip, its just a renamed Throw.

[Joe Walsh]

On 4/17/2023 at 8:39 PM, Duke Bushido said:

There is also the chance with a recurring author or lead writer of editorial team that after having spent time with his previous rules, he found something lacking or superfluous, and took this new opportunity to make what he felt to be a much-needed correction this time around.  Given a third opportunity, he may devise that it was better the first time.

 

Now keep in mind that I have absolutely no facts to suggest that this was the case in the instances you  cite, but I am willing to bet that it has a large degree of accuracy.

 

You're right -- Who knows at this point what was going on with specific rules changes during 2e and 3e?

 

We know up until Justice Inc, the game design and development as expressed in the core rulebooks was by MacDonald and Peterson, with MacDonald taking lead on design and development, Peterson taking lead on writing, but both doing some of each. So we can be pretty sure who was making decisions about rules and how they were expressed up through Espionage!

 

But then we add Allston and Stackpole once we get to the very next game released (Justice Inc). It credits MacDonald and Peterson as well, and although it clearly uses their Espionage! rules as its basis, we don't know which of the four authors proposed each of the changes in that volume, which of them really thought deeply about each one before agreeing, etc.

 

Still, in this specific instance, we have two games in a row (Espionage! and Justice Inc) with exactly the same wording for exactly the same set of Combat Maneuvers. Both refer to 'tripping' being covered by the existing Combat Maneuvers. But none of the Combat Maneuver descriptions mention tripping. So we're left to wonder how they were using those maneuvers and which one they felt covered tripping.

 

But I'm guessing in whatever discussions they had, Peterson was less convinced, given that he added a specific Trip maneuver for FH 1e. And then when the reins were handed back to someone else, that went away, so I'm guessing it either didn't work out as expected or the change didn't convince the other principals of its necessity. But it's just a guess since that's about all we can do at this point.

 

 

On 4/18/2023 at 4:25 AM, Ninja-Bear said:

GM joe, I might be misremembering but when Trip was reintroduced (or to me introduced) and the argument was why do I need to upgrade to 6th, a point was made that you could already Trip, its just a renamed Throw.

 

Interesting! Especially since Espionage's only Throw maneuver is Martial Throw. It would make sense if that's what they were referring to. I wish MacDonald and Peterson had been a bit more rigorous about things like that, but oh well! It's only interesting to us Hero grognards, who increasingly resemble medieval monks poring over ancient manuscripts.

 

Edited April 19, 2023 by GM Joe