Buckle up. This is going to be fun.

First, homework

Che Webster of Roleplay Rescue posted some thoughts on eschewing a hit roll entirely, and only making folks roll defenses while playing GURPS. Go read Defense Roll Reversal to ensure that you understand what I’m paraphrasing.

Next, this isn’t the first time such things have been chatted about. Look at TBone’s DECIDE rules for one modification, though it still has an attack and a defense roll, the declaration of said defense happens before knowing if that roll would hit. It solves some problems, causes others. Overall, I like it.

What is DECIDE? In short,

“If you roll TH openly, simply have the defender state his action before you roll TH. The attacker states what he’s doing, the defender states his response, and then you roll TH (and if necessary, defense).

If you roll TH “secretly” (which is pretty common behavior for GM rolls), you can roll TH before or after the defender states his action, as you like. All that matters is that you ask the defender “What do you do?” before revealing the TH result.”

A huge discussion by me on different flavors of roll, in exhaustive (exhausting?) detail is here: Violent Resolution – Mechanical Advantage. In this post, it goes through what agency is gained and lost.

A Word on Agency

I’m increasingly of the opinion that player agency – where agency is generally understood as the player makes a decision for their paper person with meaning and consequence – is just about the most important thing in a game. The critiques of “railroading” usually have more to do with player agency than anything else. Folks want to make meaningful choices, though the extent of those choices can vary. One can have tremendous fun on a linear series of exciting exposure to a known series of events. It’s called a roller coaster and experiencing/surviving the known challenges can still be fun; the joy is in experiencing it and overcoming or indulging in your fear and excitement.

Feeling like no matter what you do, what your paper man does, you’re not impacting or influencing the world, either locally or globally, can be maddening. I’ve seen more folks leave games over denial of agency than anything else. Of course, the number one killer of entire game groups tends to be expectations mismatch (GM wanted to run X, players wanted Y…or M, N, P, Q, and R).

Point is: having your decisions nullified or meaningless is frustrating. Not being able to act in the face of new information is also frustrating. It’s that feeling – “Wait, what? I HIT him, but now I didn’t?” that I think is drawing the ire of Che’s players.

Also: In this post on Twitter, Che writes:

“Personally, I like GURPS combat as written. The post was a suggestion, actually tested in two sessions with a fair bit of combat, in which the players seemed to feel it answered the “whiff” claim adequately. As ever, ignore my ramblings if your mileage varies.”

So, while his post Defense Roll Reversal was an exploration of alternate rules, he does like the ones presented in the book.

So, with that in mind…

Defense Roll Reversal in Brief

As presented, it’s quite basic:

The attacker declares the action and the defender immediately attempts the active defense. If they succeed in avoiding the attack, the player making said attack knows they need to score a Critical Success or let the dodge, parry, or block stand. Simple.

Simple…but while it is said to work in play, it runs into a few questions right away.

The first is quite simply that there are some choices that the attacker has to make that this seems to glide over. I think it might resolve itself in the actual play, but as it stands, it’s unclear if the attacker gets to choose any of the myriad options that GURPS offers up.

So, this could be

“I attack.”
“I throw up a parry; Success!”
“Darn. OK, turn over!”

But it could also be:

“I try and stab him in the vitals, attacking with a Deceptive attack with -2 to the foe’s defense!”
“OK…I better retreat from the stab to my chest, and I’ll throw up a block as well. +1 for the retreat, +1 due to my Buckler’s DB, -2 from Deceptive attack . . . that’s even-up on my Block roll. Success!”

Both of these run into issues with options.

Firstly, in vanilla GURPS, you only need to do an active defense if the attack was going to hit you. As I posted about in “The occasional silliness of dodging lasers” and amplified in Pyr 3/57 in my article “Dodge This!” regardless of how you retroactively explain this, it can feel downright odd to only defend against successful attacks. It can also be quite believable: some attacks are so clumsy that you needn’t even bother to respond. More importantly from a mechanics perspective, each defense you attempt within a turn accrues penalties. In the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, lacking special cases, you may block only ONE attack per turn, and parries beyond the first (per hand) suffer -4 to each one…and because of defense rolls’ calculation basis, that’s the equivalent of -8 to skill! So each time you parry, the one time you block, can be a big deal.

You can still choose under the Reversal method to not defend, trusting your foe to be bad or unlucky. But you’ll be doing it based on probability, not certainty.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing! TBone’s DECIDE shows a similar issue: you might be “wasting” defenses. In a crowded melee, this can be pretty fatal. In a 1-v-1 duel, meh.

The other version in the Reversal proposal can also be head scratchy.

“I intend to attack!”

“I defend…dangit! I biffed my parry.”

“Hah! I . . . also miss. Dangit.”

About That Second One

I do note that while it seems weird, it is closer to the feeling that I get when I actually fight with weapons. I present my defense (usually my shield), and so long as it’s effectively presented, it’s not just that an attack can be intercepted…in many cases there’s no attack thrown at all. The shield covers something like half my body when I’m standing tall, and more like 70% of it when I’m standing properly. You typically have to force an opening through movement or action: a shield bind, a feint, a change in angle. Lacking that, you’re attacking into a wall (metaphorically and physically) and simply opening yourself up.

Sure, it’s possible to attack around the shield…but it can be very challenging. And as noted: every attack also exposes you more.

So attacking into a failed defense has a bit of verisimilitude.

Can we build off of that? Maybe…maybe. But I’m going to think about that more and leave it for another post.

Parting Shot

The trick to critiquing Che’s playtest of the “whiff prevention” mechanic is how it plays out at the table. Are the attackers enjoying as much of the flexibility and choice that GURPS provides that they want to? (Important point here: if every attack is just a plain-old shot to the torso, “lack of agency” only matters inasmuch as making sure skill higher than 16 gets a deceptive attack auto-applied to it to bring skill down to 16 so you crit on a 6 or less).

If that’s the case, then little is apparently lost (the players at his table reported enjoying the faster flow of the game) by simply checking for defenses first. It certainly has at least the potential to speed play.

From an agency perspective, having the combination of “player rolls first when attacked” and “don’t waste players’ time when a defense will nullify their excitement” seemed to work out for that group.

I even think there could be some fun gains here, for both options, verisimilitude, and options for not spamming the “ATTACK!” button constantly as best answer to everything…but I want to think about some of that. I’ve got some ideas that don’t muck with GURPS normal flow of things too much. And anything that enables a more measured pace of attack and defense timing without invoking things like The Last Gasp is of interest to me.