Returning to the ebb and flow of combat: All-Out Whatevers

The discussion of All-Out Attack led fairly naturally to one about All-Out Defense. A while ago, I pondered, after a nudge from +Jeffro Johnson about the ebb and flow of combat, and how one mirrors the flow of initiative, back and forth, often seen in combat. In the old game Legends of the Ancient World, if you defended, you gave up your next attack.
As I’d noted in that post, I’d written The Last Gasp to partially deal with that. But ultimately, The Last Gasp and the Action Point rules it lays down doesn’t necessarily encourage pressing an advantage so much as it encourages shepherding resources.

So, moving back to the thread in question, a +Zé Manel Cunha posited an alternate concept for All-Out Defense. As others pointed out, it’s totally against how the rules work – but it is interesting, and ties in with my #11 option from my “Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive” look at attack and defense options that I made a while back.

What that option says is “I get a bonus to my defense on my turn, and it impacts my ability to attack next turn.” In this case, Ze’Manel is, I think, saying that “All-Out” becomes a Defense Option instead of a maneuver (I’ll call this Concentrated Defense from here out, to distinguish from Rules-As-Written).. In exchange for losing the ability to attack on your next turn, you get +2 to your current defense. On your following turn, you may not attack, but you may defend or All-Out Defend as you like.

If you want that +2 and want to retain your defenses as well, go ahead: that’ll cost you one Fatigue Point and is on p. B357 as Feverish Defense.


The thing that I find interesting about this is that I think the emergent behavior of the actions involved are potentially pretty cool. It’s pretty easy to see how you’d wind up in a string of defense-only moves, and have to leverage a real change in the fight to transition back to attack mode.

All Turtle, All The Time


So if All-Out Defense is now a Defensive Option, is there still room for an entire maneuver, decided in advance, that gives up an attack on your current turn for extra defenses now?

Sure. Leave it as-is, and maybe just increase the bonus to +3 or +4. Might even require a retreat.

I’d originally though to stack the +2 it with Concentrated Defense, above, but that runs into oddness. I do All-Out Defense, and then I “give up my next attack” to stack up a +4 total bonus. Then, next turn . . . I do AoD again, but I’d already given up my attack, so can I claim the +2 for Concentrated? Or All-Out? Meh, just disallow it.

Make it hard


Another way to go if you hate defending, or want to really force the trade off, is to just slam a -2 on all defenses (make them 1+Skill/2, or 1+Move) and then all of a sudden, just to have parity on the usual GURPS way of doing things, you have to give up your next attack.

Alternately, instead of “you lose your next attack completely,” make it some gigantic penalty, like -8 or something. The only problem with that is that it’s not that hard to have a DF character with Skill-18 or Skill-24 who can absorb that -8 and still have Skill-10 or Skill-16 remaining. That would nerf a lot of his capability to do Deceptive Attacks to targeted locations and whatnot, so maybe it’s not totally fatally flawed.

Parting Shot

GURPS‘ defense rules, and the All-Out versions of both attack and defense, work fine as-is. They’re not go-to options all the time, but both have their place. The above though experiment is exactly that: if you mixed it up a bit, what kind of fights would that engender?