That's exactly what they're saying. However on the counterattack, if you staged down the damage from S to L maybe you did trip, or twisted your ankle, or were inside their reach so they only banged you on the side of the head with the hilt, whatever. Because the system is abstract, the GM has the right to do say what ever he/she/it wants to say in order to get the damage across.

I personally agree with you in that I probably wouldn't have people trip over themselves on a failed attack roll, I would prefer to say that the defender was able to cause damage like Cain's block/punch example above. But, I can also see the concept that Cain and BitBasher are saying.

I'm too liberal. Stupid debate club makes me always fight both sides of an issue.

Edit: Yeah, what the Herald said.

The simple fact is that it is a counterattack. It's not a reflexive waving of the hands, it's not sidestepping, it's not tricking your opponent into falling on your sword, and it's not a supernatural form of luck. It's you attacking your opponent at the same time he's attacking you. There's only one difference, and that's that ties go to the attacker (which you can find in other opposed tests in the rules, too, not just melee).

That's all I'm saying. Nothing in those rules or the associated flavor text even hint that it's anything other than what it is.

Point to consider, a counterattack by a skilled attacker IS By definition pretty much a "Reflexive waving of the hands". It definitely can be sidestepping, it can be causing my opponent to fall on my sword, That is how it works.

Typically on defense the entire idea is to be using the opponent's mass and momentum against himself, and to your advantage. Defensive attacks are as a consequence far better in conservation of momentum than offensive attacks, as far less actual motion is required. On defense, I dont have so step in and then set my body for a swing, as the opponent brings his body to me and imparts upon himself momentum I can use. He's doing a significant part of the work for me.

Saying "It's you attacking your opponent at the same time he's attacking you." is wholly false. Defending is not remotely the same mechanically as attacking. If you were both doing the same thing then you were both attacking offensively. Attacking defensively and offensively are different and requre totally different motions.

If you're going to keep quoting your beloved "logical fallacies," at least have the decency to not be a hypocrite about them. Particularly numbers three and four, and especially the last.

I have actually not quoted one yet except when I repeated one that you brought up! feel free to read back and check!

By "quoting" I meant "using it in your signature, especially the last sentence." But good job at continuing along the hypocritical road.

Tell you what, how about you stop making a personal attack by calling me a hypocrite, I wont repond to those attacks, and then we won't both be (still) violating the board's guidelines for behavior. Okay?

Anyway... back on topic.

Combat is an abstract in SR, we all know this. If you are even holding a weapon you get a damage boost regardless of the attack. This does not necessarily mean you hit with a weapon or not. That's why it's abstract. It's not specific.

In reality the person that is faster does have significant advantages over the slower person, but if he chooses to give up the extra options he posses, and avenues of action, then he chooses to give up his advantages by blindly swinging instead of exercising strategic options. The faster person also has a statistical advantage via ties win.

I'll quote myself for you. Emphasis added, and do please read the referenced page before replying, too.

Exactly! Fantastic quote, the exact things we are talking about are the

Well yes, because it specifically says in the same paragraph "over several seconds", which is the entire combat turn, which represents both characters attacking and defending at least once. It is not referring to a single action. Even if each character only got one pass in the turn, then in that several seconds each attacked once and defended once.

It doesn't change a single thing. There is no difference between an attack and a counterattack beyond the artificial designation of "attacker" and "defender," and a "ties go to the attacker" rule. The attacker is making just as many counters as the defender is making attacks, and vice versa.

In other words, you two need to come up with a better rationalization because your current one is a complete and total sham.

No matter what you want to tell yourself to convince yourself that it all makes sense, it doesn't. There's no logical reason why someone designated the "defender" should be able to make a dozen full-fledged attacks simply because he's being attacked by four or more individuals, especially since he could only do the exact same thing only once or twice if he were the one designated "attacker."

It's not about giving the augmented character a boon. It's about NOT giving the unaugmented character a boon.

I'm going to try and clarify, though not being deeply involved in this debate, I may misunderstand both sides.

I think what it's really coming down to is that the abstraction of the melee rules creates a significant divide: on one side, you can argue that melee is a very broad abstraction— and, at least to this degree, that is incontrovertible— and that melee damage is not a representation purely of weapon (or fist or what have you) damage but a rough representation of the combatant's overall damage potential in melee.

Lime's looking at it as a specific representation of weapon damage, and in a lot of ways, the rules equivocate as to which approach is accurate, hence confusion. Furthermore, he definitely has a point: damage potential is equal for offensive and defensive combatants (with the exception of ties, which while not practically impossible, are not a significant balancing factor in my experience) regardless of how many times that defender, who may have an initiative of 1, has had to defend this combat turn. And if he has whirling and is taking on three completely jacked samurai running hot in the 32 initiative range, he can effectively be getting in 13 very devastating attacks in 3 seconds when he could only achieve one if his opponents weren't attacking him (and I should point out that he can be landing this devastating attacks with only a difference of 1 in skill between him and his attackers). There is no way to rationalize this as balanced, and it doesn't take an extreme example like Lime's 4,000,000 initative example to show that the system does not take this into account. There's no way to claim that the system is abstract enough to cover up this fairly gaping hole. Personally, I think applying reach modifiers for differences in initiative may actually fix the situation.

The thing is, I have never seen an initiative 1 kung fu master fight twenty MBW4-equipped melee combatants. This kind of departure from reality has simply never been noticable my game at all, so I have no need to fix it.

I imagine that the same thing is true for most games. This problem is really only visible on an academic level, IMO.

To be fair, the low 30s are reachable by Wired 2 and Boosted Reflexes 3 or Synaptic Accelerator 2, Boosted Reflexes 3, and Reaction Enhancer 6. Those combinations are pretty much guaranteed to come up. Four sets of MBW4 would actually force 19 melee combat phases in 3 seconds, which is a fair measure of magnitude worse.

In any case, I think it really starts to break down even with one guy toting Wired 2 and Boosted Reflexes 3 into melee with a Physad who didn't take Enhanced Reflexes 2. That Physad with one more point of melee skill will beat the ever loving shit out of that jacked soldier, and he'll have exactly the same damage potential as if he were attacking 5 times in a row of his own volition. This is very not right.

Part of the reasoning for it is the absurdity of it, though. I don't know of many combat-oriented characters that a player's designed that didn't have at least some reflex enhancements simply because it is an intrical part of the game even if it doesn't amount to much in melee situations.

Unless I'm playing a sheltered decker or a rigger who never leaves his vehcle or RCD, I'd feel uncomfortable about designing a character without any reflex enhancements whatsoever if they had even a remote possibility of having to encounter things on a semi-regular basis. Being stuck with 3+1D6 just blows, not because it's "munchkiny" or leaves you in any real disadvantage in melee. It blows because it leaves you, the player, sitting there while everyone else gets to do things. Sure, it's not as bad as it was in previous editions, but it still blows on the gaming level.

But that's all another discussion.

Arethusa pretty much got what I'm trying to say. Yes, both sides of the fight are wailing on each other and performing all kinds of different actions. Thus yes, when performing a "counterattack," you *are* doing the *exact* same actions you do while "attacking." There is no difference beyond a very minor semantic. But none of that matters because that's not where the problem lies. The problem lies with the fact that a designated "defender" (who, by the rules, is only called that for simplicity's sake) gains the reflexive boosts of each and every one of his opponents. And this *only* occurs in a melee situation, and *only* when you're designated as a defender. If you had four guys just standing there but who weren't fighting back (let's say they were all using Evasion), you wouldn't be able to perform anywhere near the same speed since you would have to wait until you were designated the "attacker" to do anything. Yet if your positions were reversed, bam, you're suddenly moving like a mo'fo... even though *all* of your actions would be *exactly* the same since, again, there's no functional difference between being an "attacker" or a "defender" beyond the rules burp.

It's just absurd.

I have no problem whatsoever with a character being able to defend themselves against several opponents at once. That's completely believable. I just find it silly that you can spontaneously explode into a flurry of offensive fist and steel simply because you have a bunch of characters attacking you.

Whoa! This topic still going? I'm amazed.

Mr Woo would like to thank you all, he's had another birthday he's now 83.

It's been a two-person argument off-and-on, breaks when us 'other people' decide to place 2c on the table. Just hoping I don't catch any flame spillover.

I should perhaps interject that real-life experience might not be the end-all and be-all of this argument when dealing with people who are acting and reacting two to four times as quickly as any normal human is even capable of.

I think a lot of people confuse a high Reaction with a high speed. Remember, a character with a Reaction of 18 and a Quickness of 6 moves at the same movement rate as a character with a Reaction of 5 and a Quickness of 6. Also remember that if you have an initiative of 35 and the other person has an initiative of 3, you still only get to go once against this person you supposedly outclass so much, before they get their action. I think hair-trigger reactions, if anything, would make you worse off against a martial arts master, who could make you move to block or dodge the slightest feints, leaving you wide open to his counterattack.

That's not completely right, though. A character with reaction 42 can reload his gun fully 5 times in 3 seconds. That's pretty fast.

That's really efficiency of motion, not raw speed.

You've got to be joking. Fully reloading a weapon in 0.6 seconds is speed.

IMHO, the core rules for melee strike a reasonable balance between game balance, game efficiency and the reality of this concept. Unfortunately, it is nigh impossible to simulate reality perfectly with a set of rules as simple as Shadowrun's.

I don't really consider extremely fast reloading for a completely jacked samurai to be broken. Honestly, that's the entire point of cybernetic speed enhancement. Is the 10 rounds per phase rule retarded? You bet. But it's easily houserulable. Just take the weapon's 3 second rate of fire and divide it by the number of phases that combatants going to get.

I somehow managed to miss this thread so I just read through it (that's a half hour of my life gone).

My tuppence - the rules are OK as they are...

However, what I'd like to consider is how a character with reasonably high init can best take advantage of the current rules. The guy in question is a starting Sammie with WR2 giving a reaction of roughly 10 with 3d6 init dice (nothing too munchie).

I'm looking at which martial art to give him along with which maneouvers in order to best take advantage of his speed. Oddly, I'm looking at Aikido (well, actually Jujitsu, but the rules are the same), which fits in with the concept. Obviously the primary factor in that MA is that you lose one die as the attacker BUT using something like disorient with a good amount of CP dice should then mean that the next attack goes to him and he should eventually win out - likewise sweep I think is probably a good move as he can then disengage without penalty.

Am I also reading the rules correctly that maneouvers can be used with no penalty as the defender? ie, my counterattack can be a sweep, throw or disorient?

What other ways are there to take advantage of the rules instead of whining about them?

Karate/Kenpo, Full Offense, Distance Strike, Killing Hands:S.

For a non-melee character, go with a high brawling and evasion and close combat. Don't worry about close combat, just survive long enough to shoot your opponent with a fragging gun and leave the kung-fu to the physads