The Gaming Den

Yeah, vanilla AoOs are a lot less important to positioning than people often realize at first. Basically, it's pretty rare that something is simultaneously a low enough priority target you'd want to run around it to go kill someone else but is also so dangerous that it can change the course of battle with one freebie swing.

I've been toying with the idea of expanding AS's combat by introducing elements from martial arts for its melee-range game. This was from my attempts to develop "complications" for a potential fantasy heartbreaker modification to AS.

Specifically, the RPS mechanic is based off of the four major elements of martial arts:

[*]Strikes (probably defeats posture; deals damage)
[*]Blocks (probably defeats strikes; initiates 'alternative' actions (disarm, automatic feint), should expend some sort of attacker fatige(?) based on hits against a threshold of the creatures, you can't punch King Kong down, unless your strikes can cut through that Health 35/4: (8.7)9 soak each time, also, no extra rolling wherever the fuck possible, the RoW "set DCs" method of streamlining grapple was so efficient, [Tome] grappling was one of the best improvements to 3.X ).
[*]Posture (probably defeats grapples; allows for a subsequent turn: charge, or escape, to follow)
[*]Grapple (probably defeats blocks; initiates the AS grapple mechanics, should probably also allow natural weapons, bites, submissions with increasing lead)

Weapons, I'm not so certain, I'm actually fine with weapons being the "uber" combat apps, because that's how it is in real life; a moderately skilled weapon user will be a threat even for skilled unarmed combatants:

[*]Heavy (SBPG + Health/2 (round UP, min 1) + Edge)
[*]Light (SBPG + Nerve/2 (round UP, min 1) + Edge)
[I actually don't know which bonus of physical attribute + edge works best; maybe it's just Edge, maybe it's 1/3 of the Attribute, maybe it's 1/2 of Edge + Attribute; for Luminaries it means they get about an success even if they only have 1's in their physical stats]

Other change that this hinges upon however are:
-Slight modification to Attribute names in order clarify for people who never played WoD (Strength, Nerve; Sense, Mind; Charm, Will)

-Creation of four "Derived" Attribues from averages of fours sets of combinations of the three types of primary attributes:
Cooperation (N+M+C/3; round UP)
Imagination (N+S+W/3; round UP)
Determination (H+M+W/3; round UP)
Exploration (H+S+C/3; round UP)

-Hard codification of which Attributes apply to which skills; done using the "Derived" Attributes
Cooperation: Bureaucracy, Medicine, Intimidate, Stealth, Animal Ken
Imagination: Empathy, Larceny, Operation, Persuasion, Artisan
Determination: Athletics, Research, Sabotage, Tactics, Jury Rig (replaces Rigging)
Exploration: Handling (replaces Drive), Expression, Technology (replaces Electronics), Survival, Observation

-The removal of the Combat skill
-Introducing Strike, Block, Posture, Grapple; Heavy & Light as "Combat Backgrounds" in which they are expected to have different values/specializations/weaknesses

-Size of weapons allows for them to attack greater than Adjacent range (a telephone pole is worthless within 2m-, but probably great around 8-12m) [Haven't actually done anything to figure out how this might work]

-Combat in hand-to-hand involves people secretly bidding their Simple Action with a d6 (to represent the action taken, e.g. Strike = 1; Grapple = 4, Light = 6)

-Not sure how order of operations will work, or if it needs to be changed from AS

-Players in opposition roll their dicepools if they simply don't align with each other (e.g. block vs posture, strike vs grapple) to see who developed a "lead"; if one action "defeats" the other the "defeated" creature instead rolls their dicepool against a threshold of their opponents relevant combat background (so, a skilled blocker could oppose a grapple)

[more tentative, borrowing from the AS Chase mechanics to use "leads" in combat to shorten combat to 2-3 turns
-The winner of a melee combat test develops a lead

-If have enough of a lead they win the combat based on their final action

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Have you tested out if these changes slow down combat significantly, or if they interact oddly with powers?

It varies. Survival actions like Block and Posture help defensive PCs; whereas most antagonists and aggressive PCs don't bother. It also helps to break up having to Feint in order to actually hit a creature on-par/better than your attack pool.

It also makes combat feel like it's a bit more cinematic; with characters deciding to spam a pair of abilities to attempt to get a lead, but it's not like "deal 4 wound levels" suddenly comes off the table as a viable means to one-round an enemy whose inferior at combat.

Most of what this does is keeps combat between peers play out a bit longer, while between unevenly skilled fighters they can be 1-round actions (a kaiju is just a dumb creature, so it doesn't understand the concepts of blocks/posture; meaning a PC with Celerity (or high Athletics) can hit them and they aren't immune to supernatural creatures).

Also, larger reach on polearms means that humans with sharpened wooden poles don't have retroactive explaining to do as to why they're scary to vampires, Frankensteins, zombie & ghosts. They have reach, so a phalanx can annihilate a small enough zombi-pack before being at risk themselves. Ideally, minimum reach should also be accounted for; if not there's no reach-based reason to carry a katar, or a halberd. One idea I could take from Dominions is that short weapons tend to have high defence/attack values, while long ones have larger reach.

I haven't gotten all of the kinks out.

Instead of blocking being self defense I could see it as defending a certain space like a doorway so grappling has a bonus against it as they’d have to leave the space they’re guarding to avoid a guy tackling them m.

Posturing can then be the self defending mechanic as you’re moving out of the way of an attack. So you’re attacking, defending a space, defending yourself at the expense of holding space, and moving into enemy space.

These principles also apply to melee weaponry