Re: (TFT) Making Defending more useful - Damage after armor is 1/3.. .

[Christopher Fuhrman <fuhrman8or@yahoo.com>]

Ok, more out of the box thinking (thanks to Jay for the inspiration?)...

----- Original Message ----
> From: John J Hyland <johnnyboytmm@juno.com>
> One of the things I really like about the Dark City Games folk is
> their
> 
 take on initiative and defending.  The guy who attacks first
> has
> 
 initiative (usually choice driven, but could be rolled), after that,
> he
> 
 keeps it as long as he attacks every round.  After his attack roll
> the
> 
 defender decides wether to counter (attack back) or defend (roll to
> parry
> 
 the attack).  

Neat. This seems to imply a forced dynamic of Hollywood swordplay (or Wirefu fighting style), where one side goes on the offensive and the other side blocks the blows until a certain time. Sounds cool, but it gets me thinking about intentions of such rules.

I used to be very passionate about the lore of WWI dogfighting, made famous in Hollywood films and the Ace of Aces game books (not quite as old as the '77 nostalgia, probably). In reality, most WWI aces (and probably other aerial wars) got most of their kills by attacking out of the blue with a vicious attack and moving on before the enemy could respond. Dogfights were dangerous. That must have been very un-hollywood like. 

Olympic fencing bouts go very quickly; there's no Erol Flynn style stuff that I've seen. It can seem almost boringly fast! (But not as boringly slow as curling... just kidding - I won't speak too much of either sport because I have limited knowledge.) 

I have seen some recent history channel program that dispelled some of the myths about Gladiator combat, especially that combat to the death may have been possibly rare because good fighters were hard to come by. All this makes me wonder about how much use defending really would have in a true battle to the death. Jay seems to have stated that in an earlier response about the best defense being an offense (or at least that is how I understood it). Probably that is true in real battles, as defending just is giving your opponent time to get in another blow that could kill/cripple you.

When you read the basic Melee intro scenario, about Flavius and Wulf, it is pretty exciting (I remember being seduced by it when I first picked up the rules). Flavius dodges, and later defends. They seem like good options in that scenario. It's a fictional account, prepared to make the intro sexy and to showcase the complexity of the dynamics of Melee. Those may or may not have been good moves in a real combat, but maybe we don't care.

The problem with the rules of most games is that the requirements for which the rules exist are implicit or vague. Is combat supposed to be hollywoodesque for the fun-factor? Is it supposed to be more realistic? I think it's always supposed to be simple to be playable, and that has been mentioned many times on this group. 

It's a general problem that designers (in any field) need to make the requirements explicit and to document their decisions in terms of the requirements (traceable to the requirements). A rule should exist to support some requirement, and the rules should be consistent. We have found lots of inconsistencies in Melee basic rules, and they seemed to get discussed more during the autumn on this group (!). For example, my email to Steve Jackson late last year, asking a specific, nagging question about HTH rules was happily answered by the man himself. But he was unable to answer the question because his memory has failed him as to the reason for the rule... It was 30 years ago and how many games has he designed since? Had he documented the design decision, things would be less mysterious and we could possibly better understand the intentions of the existing rules.

So, I'd venture that from now on, anyone proposing a new or tweaked rule should say what requirement it is supposed to support (we probably need to reverse-engineer a bunch of requirements now)... 

It's all your fault, Jay :-)

Cris




       
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