OOC and Rules for Hyperspace Duels

This is the place to challenge others to a duel, whether you leave it an open invitation, or would like to challenge someone in particular!

Is your character really ready for a fight, or as ready as you think they are? Find out! Gauge your character's combat prowess, and master the game mechanics, all while having fun!

Just like 'real' combat in the game world, anything you can do in one of those fights, you can do in a duel. Force Powers, Talents, spending Triumph/Despair/Advantage/Threat, etc, it's all part of it.

A few big differences between 'real' combat, in the narrative, and duels:

(1) There will be zero permanent injuries, or death, no matter what critical hits are rolled. Critical hits, however, for the purpose of the duel, will be treated as full critical hits.

---If the critical would cause some permanent, or temporary, damage, it will do so only during the duel (e.g., permanently crippled limbs will be treated as sprains, etc).

---If the critical would be a fatal blow, you can just write it off as the attacking character 'pulling up' at the last second, lightsaber stopping at their opponent's neck, for example, in what would clearly be a finishing strike.

(2) A character's Wound Threshold/Strain Threshold will be considered fully recharged for the start of each and every duel. Naturally, this recharge does not carry over to the 'real' world in the game.

---Obligation and Duty modifiers do not apply; instead, use your character's base stats.

(3) No Destiny token use.

(4) Only one non-attack action may be taken prior to initiative (e.g., to commit a Force dice for a power).

(5) Duels will start at Short range, weapons in hand.

(6) Your Defensive conditionals for abilities like Parry and Reflect will not apply. Instead, claim any Parry or Reflect incidentals you would like to perform.

(7) Everyone has to call their combat actions/maneuvers/incidentals (Attack, Parry, Reflect, Aim, use of Advantage,Threat, etc) in OOC format, in addition to any RP flavor they want to add. Damage totals are to be clarified in OOC fromat as well.

8 Triumph and Despair automatically cancel one another. Also, remember that any remaining Triumph can be converted into 3 Advantage, and a Despair can be converted into 3 Threat.

(9) If your opponent rolls and there is Threat or Despair left in their pool, you get to decide how it is spent, not the GM.

In fact, you won't need me at all for these duels, and assuming you know the combat mechanics, you can carry them on without me, at your leisure. Of course, I will naturally be watching them, and weigh in if need be.


To set up a duel, simply make the challenge in the Hyperspace Duels OOC (this thread!). If two players agree to a duel, either of them can then:

(1) create a new thread, in the cargo hold of their choice (which can be done immediately by the player who accepts, just to speed things up).

(2) the thread creator adds an initiative roll to their first post

(3) then, the other player can then enter, adding an initiative roll to their first post as well.

Once a new thread is opened with an initiative roll, signalling the start of a duel, a failure to show up by the other player will be considered a forfeit.

All new threads, necessary for a new duel, are to be labelled with character names like 'Krosus vs Lexi' with an attached sequel number if needed, such as 'Tajanna vs Hawke: 4'.

Lissewa can, of course, bring BS-10, aka Sebastian, her security droid. This includes a special rule wherein Sebastian must be defeated prior to attacking Lissewa, in a simulated two-tier assault for the lightsaber user.

Gambling for credits, naturally, is allowed.

Roleplay as little, or as much, as you like during the duels and enjoy! I know I did!


COMBAT POOLS: ATTACK AND DEFENSE

So, I've decided to officially move this forward for playtesting. As a means of motivating all of you to help playtest the improved combat rules...

I'm going to start awarding XP to those that help playtest the new combat rules: 2 XP for a win, 1 XP for a loss.

I'm giving 2 XP out for wins as a means of motivating you to try your damnedest to win, rather than just show up and bank some XP for simply being in the duel, which would be useless for good playtesting (please, don't do that). Also, please don't use this as a substitute for getting XP in the narrative, as that is still the focus of our game (if I feel you're focusing more on dueling than the narrative, you'll likely find yourself barred from dueling, at least temporarily). You can only be involved in one duel at a time, but beyond that there are no limits to how many duels you can participate in per month.

Worth mentioning is that the playtesting XP awards will not last forever, so get involved while you can.

Also, to make sure everyone can be involved without too much downtime, I'll provide a sparring partner, ensuring you don't have to wait too long for your next duel. For this purpose, I'm opening up a new forum in the Hyperspace Duels called 'Sleeping Quarters: Duels in Dreamland', from which you'll be able to fight a variety of opponents, in your dreams, or your nightmares.

If you like, you can even create a future, higher level version of your character with more XP (remember, there's no 10 XP tax anymore for buying Specializations outside of your Career), then use it yourself in a Dreamland fight. If you're planning on doing this, it's probably a good idea to announce the XP value of this character's build, allowing someone else to create a build of equal value for that duel, if it will be needed.

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The official rules on how the new combat system will work
The following rules apply for both Melee and Ranged attacks, no exceptions.
---'Melee' within the context of the below rules will refer to the following skills: Brawl, Melee, and Lighstaber.
---'Ranged' within the context of the below rules will refer to the following skills: Ranged-Light and Ranged-Heavy.
---'RaW' refers to Rules as Written.

(1) The rules will be universally applied to both Melee and Ranged Combatants:

---Against Melee combatants, we'll assume upgrading defense is the character's effort to dodge, focus on defensive positioning/movement, maintaining separation, non-Strain inducing Parry/Reflect (the many swings/thrusts of weapons you see in the movies), etc. In this respect, I've always imagined that Reflect, and especially Parry, only used strain against the strongest attacks, as I envision that there are more slashes/thrusts/parries/etc than the dice rolls and the mechanics presented anyway.

---Against Ranged combatants, we'll assume upgrading defense is some combination of making better use of cover, moving evasively/fast, or the character's ability to make themselves 'small' when it comes to getting shot at, crouching down to an extent, etc.

---In any case, Melee vs Melee, Melee vs Ranged, Ranged vs Ranged, Ranged vs Melee, the rules will be universal. Every type of character will be able to take full advantage of these rules.

(2) The Engaged range attack difficulty will continue to be 1 Purple Difficulty for Ranged combatants (using RaW), but will also be changed to 1 Purple Difficulty for Melee combatants.
---Using RaW (F&D p.217), Ranged-Light combatants will add 1 to their difficulty against both Engaged Ranged and Melee opponents, whereas Ranged-Heavy combatants will add 2 to their attack difficulty in such cases. As it should, using Ranged weapons against Engaged combatants should be difficult.
---This change (dropping one of the Purple Difficulty for Melee combatants) is to reflect that part of the Melee combatant's efforts should, to some extent, be focused on defending themselves, depending on their actual interest in doing so. Whether your character prefers to build walls of defense, attack like a frenzied berserker, or switch up tactics depending on the situation and the opponent, it's up to you. Be the kind of combatant you want to be, and develop your own personalized fighting style.
---This change will also even things out a bit, making it a little harder to stack defense, while allowing a slightly wider range of offensive/defensive behavior for Melee combatants (e.g., going 'all out' on the offensive will be balanced against characters who are likewise going 'all out' on defense).

(3) Prior to attacking on any turn, the player may convert any number of dice* from the appropriate combat skill, depending on their equipped weapon(s) (Lightsaber, Melee, Ranged), into a defensive dice pool, increasing the difficulty of their opponent's attacks, using the conversion methods below.
---Yellow Attack dice can be converted into Purple Difficulty dice, which are added to their opponent's attack difficulty.
---Green Attack dice can be converted into Black Setback dice, which are added to their opponent's attack difficulty.
---These pools will be referred to as 'attack' (Yellow/Green) and 'defense' (Purple/Black) pools.
---Any adjustments made to a character's attack/defense pools carries over from round to round, until the player makes another adjustment, prior to attacking on any turn. Adjustments can, of course, be made without a followup attack.
---Dice are downgraded when converting from Attack to Defense due to the fact that all attacks start with at least one Purple Difficulty, in addition to preventing abuse of the new Defense pool mechanic. Also, this will ensure that defensive Talents that upgrade dice (Dodge, Defensive Stance, Side Step, etc) will continue to have value. We're going for balance here, and downgrading Attack Dice to Defense dice seems like a good fit.

(4) Characters will have a default setting for both Attack and Defense pools, recorded on their character sheet, which will be used to start combat for situations in which their character is not surprised/ambushed (meaning initiative was rolled with Cool).
---Otherwise, when surprised/ambushed, characters must wait for their first turn to adjust their combat pools, which means, except for the Engaged range Difficulty change above for Melee combatants, that combat will ultimately be played out using RaW, until your character gets a turn). I'm also a big fan of this because it lends more value to getting the drop on someone for an easy kill.

*Initially, I considered requiring a Maneuver to convert Attack dice to Defense dice, but didn't want to interfere with combat movement and some of the Talents that require a Maneuver to use (Defensive Stance, Center of Being, Saber Swarm, Side Step, etc). I'm still considering making it cost a Maneuver, as part of an effort to stop players from stacking Aim or Guarded Stance with dice pool conversions, also keeping in mind that players can spend 2 Strain on any turn to give their characters a 2nd Maneuver.

For now, let's start with conversion being free, although I'm still looking for some insight on this one. What do you guys think? Free dice pool conversion, or Maneuver cost for conversion? I'm leaning heavily toward free, simply because, like I said, I don't want to discourage the use of Talents, or characters moving around the battlefield; discouraging Talent use seems far worse than allowing players to continue to use Aim/Guarded Stance. However, I'm open to being talked out of it, so if you disagree with me, I'd like to hear it.

Ok, here goes nothing.

Hawke! Tajanna challenges you to a glowstick duel! En garde!

That's the spirit!

Challenge accepted.

As I issued the challenge, I'll allow you the choice of cargo hold. Large or small, what'll it be?

Lets make this interesting: small

Ok, I'll make the first post before I head off to work tonight.

For the Hyperspace Lightsaber Duels, to level the playing field a bit, and allow Lissewa to get in on the action...

Lissewa can, of course, bring BS-10, aka Sebastian, her security droid. This includes a special rule wherein Sebastian must be defeated prior to attacking Lissewa, in a simulated two-tier assault for the lightsaber user.

I have been tinkering with the idea of opening up combat a little by giving the players the option to use their abilities to create defense, as a way of adding some realism, tactical depth, and personality to the game.

It's really simple, actually. When attacking, the player can choose how many of their dice they would like to use for the attack. The remaining dice are added to a pool for defending against attacks directed at them, until the start of their next turn, reflecting the character focusing a portion of their efforts on defense.

For example, say Hawke wants to shore up his melee defense this round. From his total Lightsaber pool of 3 Yellow/1Green, he might use his three yellow dice to attack, leaving one green in the pool. That one green, when Tajanna attacks, would be converted into a purple, added to the base melee attack difficulty of two purple, totaling a difficulty of 3 purple for the attack. Yellows would be converted to Purples, as I'd want to avoid trying to use these defensive methods as a means of artificially generating Despair for the opponent.

This would even allow players the choice to invest all of their dice to defense, completely foregoing any attack whatsoever, in an effort to simply survive until help arrives, or as a means of waiting for an opening (e.g., the attacker generates 6 Threat, which the defender could then convert into 3 Boosts as a counter attack on their next turn).

For ranged weapon characters, I think I would only allow this if they had cover to use, in which case their skill would reflect their character being able to line up shots in less time, or by exposing less of themselves.

Also, it seems that it might be more sensible, using this method, to reduce the standard difficulty of melee attacks to one purple, so that defense is weighted too favorably.

For melee, it wouldn't provide additional defense against ranged attacks. However, it would definitely add a little more of a mind game to melee duels, with the potential to generate Threat, as a result of too few dice on any attack, and the potential to create additional Threat for an attacker, by adding dice on your own defense. The best part is that, RP wise, characters would literally be able to have their own fighting style, beyond standard Melee, Lightsaber techniques (Ataru, Soresu, etc), Talents, and Skill Ranks, allowing them to put another stamp on the character's personality to make it all their own.

What do you guys think? It makes sense to me that a character should be able to decide how focused on the attack they want to be, or how long they want to expose themselves for a good shot (in this case, the Ranged skill also reflects their experience with using cover well). We could even play test it in the Duels Thread, and I think it has the potential to make combat in the SW game more dramatic, with more control over your characters actions (how aggressive they're being, how much they're using cover, etc).

Tefmon, it's been a couple days and you haven't continued the duel. I'm waiting on you to determine how Hawke's Disadvantage turned out.

Sorry, I've been a bit busy with work the past couple weeks. I'll try to get a post in today.

Either way, it's Tajanna's turn, whatever she does with that Disadvantage. Really though, the only thing to do with that 1 Disadvantage is to give Hawke 1 strain, or cancel out a Maneuver like Guarded Stance.

I was assuming that 'Disarm' would make the weapon land at least a few metres away (requiring a Maneuver to move to, and leaving yourself outside of Engaged range of your target), and in the case of a lightsaber, de-ignite (which I believe also requires a Maneuver to re-ignite, although I could very well be wrong there). Just having the weapon fall on the floor, ready to use, directly in front of its former wielder seems a bit silly.

I personally think the proposed 'Saving Throw' mechanic adds more "paperwork" than necessary to resolve what is essentially a single action (the attack causing the disarmament), especially since the targeted character's attempts at defending him/herself are already factored into the attack, through that character's defensive dice pool. If disarming occurs much more often than we deem reasonable, I think increasing its Advantage cost by one (to 4 total, or 3 with Sum Djem) would be a simpler solution, although FFG dice mechanics aren't really my specialty, so I'm not sure exactly how much an increase of 1 Advantage in cost will affect the odds of disarming occurring (3+ Advantage already seems like a fairly uncommon occurrence to me, but I've only fought in two combats so far).

'Next Allied Character' is refers to any other character.

After Hawke's next turn we're going to make a subtle change to the Disarm rules.

I've got to do something about disarming characters. I don't know what the game designers were thinking, but it's way, way, way too easy to disarm someone in this game (those of you who've been playing long enough know what I'm talking about). Also, really, a disarm isn't that great unless you're fighting somewhere that the disarmed character's weapon could fall out of reach (on a rock formation over a lake of lava, for example) due to the fact that the disarmed character can use a simple Maneuver to pick up the weapon, and still attack that turn. So, really, unless the weapon can be lost or fall completely out of reach, Disarm just cancels the opponent's next Maneuver.

What this means is that, instead of getting Hawke to drop his saber, Tajanna could have simply converted the 4 Advantage into 2 Setback dice for Hawke's attack. Of course, that depends on what you want to do. Stopping Hawke from a maneuver guarantees he won't get any Aim benefits, whereas adding two Setback to Hawke's attack creates the potential to cancel out even more Success or Advantage. A little risk/reward there, but the Disarm is more reliable.

What makes all of this worse is the fact that multiple specializations have the Sum Djem Talent, wherein a Disarm only requires 2 Advantage, and things really start getting silly, with combat being a showcase of fumbling fools. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that only one Specialization (Makashi Duelist) has the Resist Disarm Talent (which really makes that Spec start to feel like a requirement to be any kind of decent combatant who's not a total bumbling klutz, allowing the user to suffer 2 Strain to cancel a Disarm attempt).

And it gets even worse, as you can easily just destroy someone' weapon by rolling two Triumph. Again, after you've played this game awhile, and you get characters that are bringing 3, 4, 5 Yellow dice to the battle, this starts to become common. Now, that's fine when your badass character is mauling peons. When it doesn't work is when you have to highly skilled combatants facing off. It just becomes unbelievable how often a fight ends with a destroyed weapon.

What I'm thinking, in an effort to keep Disarm/Destroy as an option, but to get rid of the circus style combat, is this simple change:

We allow any character, except Minions, to Resist Disarm, allowing them to spend 3 Strain to prevent dropping their weapon, or having it destroyed. This still ensures that the Makashi Duelist's Resist Disarm has value (as theirs only costs 2 Strain to use, and 1 Strain can make a world of difference), especially since the Makashi's Resist Disarm Talent isn't a high-tier Talent at only 5 XP, and has to be taken anyway, starting at the top, if they want to get anywhere in that tree.

A great side-effect of this is that it allows the attacker to force Strain on the target, via their efforts to Disarm or Destroy. This in turn adds depth to the combat, creating those decisions wherein the player must decide how to spend Advantage: add Setbacks to the opponent, Boosts to themselves for the next turn, Disarms, Strain recovery, etc.

Deleted the old post about fixing Disarm, to avoid any confusion or wasted time.
I was changing it right after I posted it, to keep it in line with the simplicity of the Makashi Disarm, which fits. Also, even though I've changed it, there are simply times when RPG's need to be a little complicated, otherwise things get stupid (like Jedi Masters and Sith Lords dropping sabers everywhere). Sometimes, there's no way around crunch.
Trust me, as someone who has GM'd high level characters, I know it happens WAY too much (I mean, in the duel I had on GP a week ago, I rolled 8 Advantage, with only 1 Yellow, 3 Green!). You can get to the point where you're packing 6 Yellow dice, if you truly want to master any skill (the Advantage will fall like rain then). The new method wherein players can Resist Disarm with some Strain will work much better, while making combats more intense, and satisfying., rather than Three Stooges.

Also, igniting the saber is an incidental (button press, flick of a switch). Like all weapons, equipping it is a Maneuver.

You're right, too, it would have landed a few meters away, at Short Range. So two Maneuvers #1 to get to it, then #2 (with Strain) to pick it up. Now that person is at short range from your character, however, and Tajanna would need to spend a Maneuver to Engage... unless she wants to wait for Hawke to close in again (which he couldn't do that turn, do to the fact that he already used two maneuvers).

Of course, a lightsaber throw would work wonders for Tajanna then, if she had one, although those can be mitigated with Reflect ;)

Anyway, this is what the playtesting is for. SW combat needs some help, not a ton, but some fine-tuning to make any sense, but still keep the drama.