Rolling with a punch in a Heroic game

[Yesman]

How do people handle the Roll with Blow manuever in games without knockback? To summarize the manuever, it allows a character to abort to taking 1/2 damage, but the character takes an extra die of knockback...

[Doc Democracy]

I normally use knockback but I have dropped it for games I run for the local kids club.

 

My take was that rolling with the blow took you away from the combat and you had to either half move back in or take range penalties if you had a ranged attack.

 

Thus if a PC rolled with the punch I gave them a -1OCV for the next phase. No-one seemed to mind and it reflected the penalties that would otherwise have accrued.

[Hugh Neilson]

How about ruling the character is off-balance if he rolls with the punch? He's not prone, but just off-balance, and needs to either spend a half phase to regain his bearings or takes a penalty on actions in his next phase.

 

I'd probably impose more than a -1 OCV, maybe -3 penalty would work. It's a bit of a tradeoff. Doc's method leaves the penalty no matter what, but it's a fairly small penalty. This approach imposes a more serious penalty, but you have the choice of taking only a half phase next phase to eliminmate the penalty.

[austenandrews]

I don't have my book in front of me, so I may be forgetting something, but I plan on imposing a DCV penalty and otherwise using it as-is. SPD is usually so low in a heroic game that losing a Phase to it is a fairly major sacrifice, especially if it means you're going to be easier to hit afterward.

 

I haven't playtested it, though. We'll see how it goes. (I'm also going to allow it for EGO combat(!).)

 

-AA

[Blue]

It's never come up.

 

But I'd think you could sacrifice DCV for subtracting dice off of the blow. I'm not sure at what ratio. This is just what leaped to mind.

[Victor]

I would say add 1d6 to the BODY of the attack (on the dice, not the reduced amount) for the purposes of calculating Knockdown.