[UA] Comeback: Hand to hand combat and a bit of 2nd ed stuff

[Ville Halonen]

Been idling for a few months; not lurking, as I haven't had proper and regular access to the Net and thus not having been able to read one single message from the list...Now the situation's changed and I intend to read it more often.

In the mean time, I decided to finally post the kazillion messages I have stored on my computer for all this time. I think I've updated most of them, but there may be a few signs of them being written sometime in February or March...

Here goes:

-snip-

Reading the damn-near flame war about the swords last July and the knife fighting stuff sometime this year I decided to tweak the melee weapon damages a little. I thought of tripling everything, but the chances of just cutting a little with a knife were greatly reduced. You hit with either minimum of 11 points or you don't hit at all. Now is this fair? 

What do you think about weapon-related shifts? This would not only keep the minimum damage low, but also raise the maximum damage and the chance of those nasty matches. You could also think of toying around with minimum results, so certain weapons would do damage a little like if you're targeting the head or other vital parts: hitting is harder, but the damage potentiality goes way up. 

I don't think the shifts would do much harm with guns, either. Maybe I'm just brainwashed by bad RPGs, but I've always lived under the impression that certain guns are more accurate than others...Of course, it'd be a lot of work if it were done in great detail, but I think at least rifles (especially snipers) should be granted a shift.

How do you DESCRIBE your HTH combat situations? I've always done the error of describing along the lines of "well, you hit him, but you feel you've done better". (Hey, I haven't run games that long...Maybe six or seven games for real, and three or four times that if you count the brainless slaughter fests my less-intelligent players wanted and still want to do. "No, I don't think roleplaying games give a chance to portray someone else. I think roleplaying games give me a chance to do everything I can't do in the real world, so I wanna slice that guy up GOOD. Shut up about the character, willya, and describe to me very graphically what happens when I run my machete through his guts"). One of the things about ShadowRun that I like best are the melee rules, or at least how they've explained it in the rulebook. 

They make it clear that melee combat isn't a situation where I hit you, then I wait while you hit me, and then it's my turn again. It's a series of punches, kicks, headbutts and perhaps most importantly, feigns and dodges et cetera, and that's why when two people engage in melee in SR they both roll their Melee skill, comparing their results and determining WHO took the damage and how much. It's perfectly possible that in a combat between Woody Allen and Jet Li every melee attack declared by Woody (read: a situation where the aforementioned characters are fighting it out and rolling dice out of Woody's initiative) is turned against him, so that his ass gets beaten pretty fast, EVEN ON HIS OWN TURN.

Now, what I'm gonna do is that I'll try to remember to describe the melee fights more imaginatively and realistically, but in the meantime, do any of you see a reason to take the UA melee combat into a ShadowRunnish direction, and if you do, are any of you more experienced rules tweakers willing to help me out here?

And yes, by the way, when Greg mentioned that the 2nd edition might be on its way, a pretty please, with sugar on top...Don't change the graphic design, please. I hate it when the books of the same product line *don't look similar* (at least thematically) on the shelf. The UA books fit nicely together, and I don't want it ruined by a jolly-fun looking Unknown Armies 2nd Edition (Now in Colors of the Spring with Singing Little Birds) next to a dead cold Greg Stolze on a table.

Besides, John's work on the books is amazing. Actually it was one of the things that drew me to the game in the first place. But more on that in the next posting...

-V
Finds himself tweaking rules, makes self check


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