Evaluate as Feint
+Jason Packer posted a worthy GURPS 301 post about one of our favorite topics, the Evaluate maneuver.
Obviously, in The Last Gasp I tried to give it some legs by making it a recovery option. But Jason threw down an idea that occurred to me as well in passing when I was reading a thread on the Forums, though I don’t remember which one.
Evaluate using Feint Mechanics
I’ll give Jason the credit here, since he fleshed it out, but using the normal Quick Contest mechanics in place of the fixed-bonus Evaluate maneuver makes a ton of sense.
The attacker might roll Per-based weapon skill; the defender uses their DX-based roll. I’d add double the DB of any cloaks or shields to this, since it should obscure and deny angles of attack. If the defender took All-Out Defense, I’d probably go ahead and give double bonus to the QC as well (+4 in this case).
I see no reason why the Evaluator can’t use Committed and All-Out Evaluate, as well. I’m going to stare at you so hard I won’t defend myself makes little sense in a one-on-one combat in many situations, but it certainly does make sense for the assassin hiding in the shadows and waiting for the foe to expose something important.
As usual, you get the margin of victory on the Quick Contest as a penalty to the foe’s defenses, just like a Feint.
I’d give a +2 to each consecutive attempt to a normal maximum of +6.
Parting Shot
Why do I like it? It explains a lot of the oddities about Feints that occasionally bug people – how a Feint with a two-handed weapon does not unready the weapon, but somehow makes the foe open themselves up enough to suffer a huge penalty to defend, potentially.
It also makes Evaluate skill-dependent in a useful way. A novice can look and look and he just won’t see the openings in his foe’s defenses. An expert can take a quick glance (Defensive Evaluate!) and see five openings in a novice.
It will, of course suffer the same “issues” as Feint has currently, though being Per-based, it gives a good way for stalking monsters with high Per to leverage their cunning. Combined with the purely physical Setup Attack, it makes a good IQ-based counter.
This actually gives me yet another idea, but I have to talk to +Peter V. Dell’Orto about it first.
I consider the way the skill dependency works to be a bad thing for feint, and thus also a bad thing for evaluate — I would prefer setup maneuvers to be most useful for inferior skill.
I actually like Evaluate as Wait: you Wait for a specific trigger event by your chosen target (typically
'he moves within reach'), and if it does not occur by your next turn, you get a +1.
I definitely think that does a nice job of making Wait even more valuable, but it still leaves Evaluate as used when you're already engaged out in the cold compared to attacking at every opportunity.
I agree that it needs to be beneficial to the middling fighter, but could be unnecessary or even counterproductive (in terms of net damage dealing) to the experienced fighter.
My experience is that the way you do 'pause to evaluate' while in combat is that you do *not* do it while engaged — you disengage first, and rather than re-engaging, you pause.
Seems valid. How do you model that, and as an effective choice with mechanical benefit, in GURPS?
I put the idea up on my blog a few months ago, just throwing it out there. Maybe I should have explored it more.
Evaluate as a Per-based Feint? I think the idea has merit.