Total Defense: One More Time From The Top
Alan:
Interesting. I guess I've assumed (based on the "proactive action text" you mentioned above) that a defensive response can't generate carryover dice, only a defense. Hm.
angelfromanotherpin:
Quote from: Alan on March 10, 2009, 03:36:00 PM
Oh! I finally got it. In the rare case where you are being attacked by more than one person your existing roll may have failed against one but succeed against the other. In this case, would you have the option of sucking up the one to guarantee success on the other?
Not quite. As I understand it, any penalties you incurred as the result of the first attack would become bonus dice added on the second attack (rolled and added to the dice on the table), so the defense would not be guaranteed.
Alan:
This may be splitting hairs, but I thought penalties and bonuses only apply to the next roll. Since the defense dice are already rolled, penalty dice can't be applied to them.
Ron Edwards:
Hey folks,
It's going to take me at least one uninterrupted hour to sort out all the points and issues in this thread as it stands so far. Can you hold off from adding more to it until I find that hour?
Many thanks, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Hi everyone,
All right, this part applies strictly to Jesse's first post.
1. Staying only with your descriptions of the rolls for the first couple of paragraphs, and not even getting near your question about that line in the text, you've already created a big hassle. There is no attack on Alice. She does not get the 1-die-or-abort choice because that applies to defense. Since no attack is coming in at her, none of that is relevant. The only rolling is that described by Bob.
Fictionally, if Bob's roll (with his +2 dice) is higher than hers, then she shot and missed. Case closed, move onto the next round. You're making that side of things about ninety times harder than it is.
You are correct that if Bob's original roll was less than Alice's, then he has the 1-die-or-abort choice to fall back on. This is the especially nice thing about the full defense option.
2. Now for the phrase in the text. At least for some of the time during the PDF-to-book transition, I didn't understand all the implications of the basic system and didn't trust certain things, or didn't know that such things could be trusted via system use. I was still getting accustomed to the idea that "hold action" was obsolete, for instance. Anyway, I could go into exactly what I thought when I included it, but enough is enough, and the best thing to do with that phrase is to ignore it.
3. I'm pretty sure that nullifies your Alice-Carl-Bob idea, and thank God for that. Never mind beginners' versions either.
OK, now for Alan - Alan, Jesse's posts to you are correct, but I think I should reinforce it by looking at the fiction. A stated full defense means that the character is really going for full evasion or blocking or whatever as his or her primary action, and it must be an action, something they do. An abort-to-defense, on the other hand, is desperate and by definition means that the character is dropping whatever was initially launched; the defense in question is best understood as utterly simple (whether a freeze, a sprawl, a wild flurry, whatever).
This means that when Alice stabs Bob, and Bob steps to the side ... OK, Alice's roll wins and her knife-strike is fast as a cobra. Bob's sneeringly-casual step has failed and must be narrated as such. But he still has the option to defend in a far less scientific or cool way. So he aborts the step - i.e., never completes it - and then he can go down in a heap, leap back going "Whoaaa!", or freeze in place, or any other damn thing which gets translated in game terms to his none-bonus, Stamina-only defense roll.
4. Alan, penalizing an already-rolled set of dice is easy - just give the relevant number of bonuses to the defense roll, which by definition is not yet rolled.
Best, Ron
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