Hi guys!

Was thinking about melee in Genesys. What we have atm in SW is not enough. System is great for shooting, but melee is dumbed down beyond reason. With fantasy setting for Genesys and many sword fights that comes with it this needs to be adressed. My opinion is to replace forced "2x purple always" rule with something based upon your adversary skill, maybe 1-1, maybe just the number of purple dices equal to number of your oponent's dices. Your thoughts?

My first thought was also to make it an opposed check. If I have 2 yellow and 1 green, then to hit me it is required 2 reds and 1 purple. But I ran some tests with these dice, and if Defense may go up to 4 black dice, I think it would be too difficult to hit.

I think it should be kept at 2 purple, but with talents to influence or modify it.

Maybe a "focused defense action" may turn one Melee defense into an opposed roll, but all defenses as opposed rolls seem too difficult...

I didn't find the melee combat in "The Haunted City" to be that bad at all.

Keep in mind that it's possible to have characters with 2 and 3 Melee defense thanks to Defensive weapons like swords and shields. So you're not always rolling against 2 purples, it's usually 2 purples and at least 1-2 black dice. Add in Adversary talents on top of that and 2 Red + 3 Black for a buff "black knight" seems about right. Plus some dedicated melee fighters had access to some levels of Parry.

2 minutes ago, Solkar77 said:

Maybe a "focused defense action" may turn one Melee defense into an opposed roll, but all defenses as opposed rolls seem too difficult...

The problem I see is that will really prolong combat. I know you're looking for a cinematic duel, but if you make it an opposed check where the difficulty is an opponent's Melee skill, that's going to be 3-4 dice in difficulty and then adding Melee Defense on top of that. That's going to make it really tough for PCs to hit important enemies, and for NPCs to hit PCs AT ALL. One of the draws I like about this system is that starting threats are still threats later on. That squad of 4 footmen are still going to be a threat after 300 xp because their base attack to hit you is still only 2 purples (before you layer on defensive talents).

It's the idea always proposed that just doesn't work. The ultimate result is no one bothers with melee because mechanically it is so inferior to ranged you're an idiot for bothering. Opposed checks that are going to vary constantly between various opponents, characters, environmental considerations, and critical injuries make it organizationally untenable.

5 minutes ago, DarthGM said:

The problem I see is that will really prolong combat. I know you're looking for a cinematic duel, but if you make it an opposed check where the difficulty is an opponent's Melee skill, that's going to be 3-4 dice in difficulty and then adding Melee Defense on top of that.

Plus. systems with active parry skill checks like 2D20 Conan raise the difficulty for parrying for every parry after your first by one step in the same round (adds up). Honestly, there is just a limited number to actively parry attacks in a couple of seconds the combat round lasts.

I think Parry, as a talent, used to pay strain to prevent damage, covers the cinematic effect of using your weapons to increase your defensive capabilities. My only concern is to know how easy will be to access that talent. On Star Wars you had to careful choose your talent path to get Parry or similar (Dodge), as soon as possible, and that felt wrong to me.

And that was definitively worse when on the cockpit of a fighter. The feeling for the players to go into an Xwing was that they were in the coffin... Too few ways to defense themselves or shrug out damage...

Still, I would like to see something that makes defender skill important while... defending. You know what I mean.

There are multiple Talents a Defender can employ that add to the Difficulty of an attacker's pool.

But it is not the thing. The thing is that your attack's success chance should be always somehow dependant on your oponent's melee skill.

You're divesting Talents from Skills to decide what represents "skill". Talents represent the tricks and techniques learned via the practical application of Skills learned. They both influence the outcome of a dice pool and both play a role in this, and that total 'experience' is a reflection of the overall capability of a combatant. Your concern is a matter of semantics, the mechanics are represented appropriately in the system.

42 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

You're divesting Talents from Skills to decide what represents "skill". Talents represent the tricks and techniques learned via the practical application of Skills learned. They both influence the outcome of a dice pool and both play a role in that and that total 'experience' is a reflection of the overall capability of a combatant. Your concern is a matter of semantics, the mechanics are represented appropriately in the system.

QFT

1 hour ago, didzej said:

But it is not the thing. The thing is that your attack's success chance should be always somehow dependant on your oponent's melee skill.

You can do that if you really want to, but at that point it's no longer part of the NDS combat system and becomes Skill Challenge. GM Chris talked about this, where you and your opponent are dueling and it becomes "the first one to 5/7/10 success" or something like that. In this case net Failures could take away from your running total. First one to the goal wins the duel.

But to keep melee combat balanced, melee combat is a set base difficulty. Otherwise, why not have Athletics, Resilience, or Coordination be the "dodge skill" and the difficulty for ranged attacks? (and I'm in no way advocating that, I like the system as-is)

21 hours ago, didzej said:

But it is not the thing. The thing is that your attack's success chance should be always somehow dependant on your oponent's melee skill.

(rolls dice) Count Rugen lunges at you, his rapier flashing as he pushes you back on your heels. You parry furiously, and his blade never finds its mark, but you have little chance for a counterattack. Or, in mechanical terms, you got lucky, as the purple and black dice rolled a lot of Failures, and he rolled few Successes, despite throwing a lot of yellow dice. However, he did roll a **** of a lot of Advantage and a Triumph! I'm going to use the Triumph to upgrade your difficulty, two Advantage to toss a Setback at you, and another two advantage to give him a free maneuver. He takes a Defensive Stance, which will add another Setback to any Melee attacks.

And that is how you use your Melee skill defensively.

On 9/7/2017 at 7:29 AM, DarthGM said:

I didn't find the melee combat in "The Haunted City" to be that bad at all.

Keep in mind that it's possible to have characters with 2 and 3 Melee defense thanks to Defensive weapons like swords and shields. So you're not always rolling against 2 purples, it's usually 2 purples and at least 1-2 black dice. Add in Adversary talents on top of that and 2 Red + 3 Black for a buff "black knight" seems about right. Plus some dedicated melee fighters had access to some levels of Parry.

The problem I see is that will really prolong combat. I know you're looking for a cinematic duel, but if you make it an opposed check where the difficulty is an opponent's Melee skill, that's going to be 3-4 dice in difficulty and then adding Melee Defense on top of that. That's going to make it really tough for PCs to hit important enemies, and for NPCs to hit PCs AT ALL. One of the draws I like about this system is that starting threats are still threats later on. That squad of 4 footmen are still going to be a threat after 300 xp because their base attack to hit you is still only 2 purples (before you layer on defensive talents).

I've played around with this concept as well and if you take it one step farther it actually speeds things up quite a bit. You make the opposed roll as usual but that roll represents the back and forth of fighting that enemy /so/ failures aren't just failures they are actually damage. Succeed and you do damage to the enemy, fail and that is the damage you take. I don't know if the time scale is as large in Genesys (come to think of it that is one question that I haven't seen come up) but in SW one round was supposed to represent lots of battle time so that is potentially a quick way to run through combat. Bonus, the gm doesn't have to roll any bad guy dice.

Full disclosure I haven't had a chance to test this heavily but it does address the issue of slowing down combat by using 'opposed' roll mechanics.

2 hours ago, Darksyde said:

I've played around with this concept as well and if you take it one step farther it actually speeds things up quite a bit. You make the opposed roll as usual but that roll represents the back and forth of fighting that enemy /so/ failures aren't just failures they are actually damage. Succeed and you do damage to the enemy, fail and that is the damage you take. I don't know if the time scale is as large in Genesys (come to think of it that is one question that I haven't seen come up) but in SW one round was supposed to represent lots of battle time so that is potentially a quick way to run through combat. Bonus, the gm doesn't have to roll any bad guy dice.

Full disclosure I haven't had a chance to test this heavily but it does address the issue of slowing down combat by using 'opposed' roll mechanics.

The issue with that is that the positive and negative dice aren't equal. For example, the Ability dice have a total of 5 successes and 5 advantages, while the Difficulty dice have 4 failures and 6 threats. You'd have to do it as a Competitive check instead, where both parties roll a regular check and see who gets the most successes.

On ‎8‎/‎09‎/‎2017 at 0:29 AM, DarthGM said:

Keep in mind that it's possible to have characters with 2 and 3 Melee defense thanks to Defensive weapons like swords and shields. So you're not always rolling against 2 purples, it's usually 2 purples and at least 1-2 black dice. Add in Adversary talents on top of that and 2 Red + 3 Black for a buff "black knight" seems about right. Plus some dedicated melee fighters had access to some levels of Parry.

The problem I see is that will really prolong combat. I know you're looking for a cinematic duel, but if you make it an opposed check where the difficulty is an opponent's Melee skill, that's going to be 3-4 dice in difficulty and then adding Melee Defense on top of that. That's going to make it really tough for PCs to hit important enemies, and for NPCs to hit PCs AT ALL. One of the draws I like about this system is that starting threats are still threats later on. That squad of 4 footmen are still going to be a threat after 300 xp because their base attack to hit you is still only 2 purples (before you layer on defensive talents).

Right; and that is a nice way of doing things other than "I killed 400 goblins, my hitpoints have gone up as has my AC so you cannot hit me CR1 monster!" Experience in this system seems to lend itself towards the idea of being wiser, not able to take more hits before going down.

The main thing I assumed would also happen, and it wasn't really covered in the last Order 66 postshow (Not that I would know, it's not something I listen to), is that as players get more XP they get more cash and/or more patronage from nobles etc, which means better armour. And if full plate mail is giving a Brawn 3 character a soak of 6 or 7, they're better able to shrug off damage because they're literally encased in metal. It doesn't mean the footmen are missing more attacks; it means their weapons are ineffectual against the armour.

I think a really good example of a cinematic duel using the narrative dice system (factoring in what the Grand Falloon described) would be when Lancelot and Arthur duel in Excalibur .

Lancelot unhorses the King, which to me would be an example of a lot of advantage but not enough damage to beat soak. Later, Lancelot gets a crit on Arthur, who upgrades a response attack and rolls a triumph and a despair, breaking Excalibur after winning the fight. 2 flipped destiny points later, he gets the sword back, but that whole time, bugger all of their rolls actually did damage. It was the advantages that did it all.

The entire question of melee combat in Genesys might revolve entirely around shredding legacy d20 expectations (and some Skyrim -esque ones). Especially where heavy armour is concerned.

On 9/8/2017 at 2:41 PM, Dacke said:

The issue with that is that the positive and negative dice aren't equal. For example, the Ability dice have a total of 5 successes and 5 advantages, while the Difficulty dice have 4 failures and 6 threats. You'd have to do it as a Competitive check instead, where both parties roll a regular check and see who gets the most successes.

Not really. The disparity just means that your players are more likely (by a little) to damage the bad guys than your bad guys are to damage them. They are more likely to run in to threat complications (by a little) however. Which I'm totally fine with. I'd rather success be in favor of my players.

^ That. Especially given the idea of failing forwards is so inherent to Star Wars. Success with threat is actually an incredibly satisfying answer to roleplay out.

On 7.9.2017 at 9:20 PM, didzej said:

But it is not the thing. The thing is that your attack's success chance should be always somehow dependant on your oponent's melee skill.

Why?

Personally I see skill level as active/offensive quality of skill, and talents as passive/defensive quality of skill. So if character doesn't take defensive talents he doesn't give attention to defense. Just being good attacker doesn't mean you are hard to hit.

But, as I have many times said, if you don't like it, then change it. Make house rules, which suite you and your gaming group. After all, rules are just a framework for you to have fun with your friends. Others have spoken about options, and their drawbacks. I don't believe Genesys will offer huge change when compared to SW RPG, and personally I think that's good. I prefer simple fast paced and flexible systems over complex ones.

For the CoC campaign we're running, defence works like this:

Base defence is based off two attributes for ranged and melee. For ranged some form of cover is needed to take full advantage. Also the option of negating defence from cover for the round (3x advantage / triumph) negates base defence.

Since we have all the CoC skills, there is a Dodge skill, which works like a defensive talent against melee and ranged. One strain to upgrade once, a number of times up to your dodge skill. For melee, using a weapon skill in place of Dodge to upgrade is allowed.

Aiming Can be done twice, like in SW, but each aiming costs 1 strain regardless of the free maneuver used for the first one.

statistics.

two identical fighters. 4 in the attributes, 3 in the skills.

with double aiming, fully upgraded defence; the chance to land a hit is: 49.6%

two identidal fighters, 5 in stats and skills.

With double aiming, fully upgraded defence the chance to land a hit is: 48.9%

two identical fighters, 2 in attributes, 3 in skills.

with double aiming, fully upgraded defence, the chance to land a hit is: 45.8%

it's the closest I've gotten to having near 50/50 chance across experience levels for two identical fighters.

That said, defence is more taxing on strain than aiming, so you will have to use all advantages to regain strain if outnumbered. It does work very well however in terms of getting a good balance, without using competitive checks.

We also changed aiming though, so each maneuver spent aiming grants +1 vicious for the attack.