Parrying against ganging up

[Legomc]

Just a quick question: If you are attacked by multiple units, and you parry successfully, but the unit you were parrying failed their skill roll, does your parry still remove damage?

[Gungnir]

How exactly do you mean?
Do you mean the parry somehow heals the defender? Because that wouldn't make any sense.
Parrying a failed attack wouldn't reduce the amount of damage because no damage would be done in the first place.

[Legomc]

I'll restate it. One minifig, minfig A, is attacked by two other minifigs in a combined attack, minifig B and minifig C. Minifig A parries minifig B. Minifig B fails, but minifig A and Minifig C succeed. My question is if minifig A's parry reduces the damage from the entire attack, or just from the attack it was parrying against, in this case a fail attack?

[stubby]

Just the attack he was parrying against. I'm trying to imagine any kind of real-life situation where parrying against one attack would reduce damage from another unrelated one, but not really coming up with anything.

[Legomc]

Okay. I never said it was logical; Brikwars can be that way occasionally

[Gungnir]

Yeah, but it should be illogical in ways that are funny and awesome. Not in ways that are munchkiny and rules-lawyery.

[Bragallot]

I tend to make the defending fig roll against the attacker who gets the highest attack roll - which makes parrying hard (which I suppose it would be if you're being attacked from all sides) but also avoids situations where you're parrying against a guy who misses. You generally don't attempt to parry blows that would miss you anyway, unless you're doing a fight scene for Helen of Troy or something.

[Legomc]

Yeah, but it should be illogical in ways that are funny and awesome. Not in ways that are munchkiny and rules-lawyery.

True.

[stubby]

I actually has some time to pour a bunch of text into chapter 11 over the last week while I was traveling (again), so this is getting closer. (I wanted to spend the time doing the CC damage dice -> skill dice update, but I haven't finished working out the details.)

Right now, squad close combat is going to be similar to 2005, but I really need to explain it better because oh my god. It's not going to be quite so restrictive as before in some ways.

6. Two squads enter close combat. The attacker declares which of his dudes are attacking. The defender declares which of his dudes are parrying.

7. Everyone in the attacking squad who's making a CC attack makes their attack roll. Groups of squaddies who are attacking with the same weapon type can make all their attack rolls at once. Save the die rolls from the successful attacks, keeping the weapon types separate (e.g., three hits with hand weapons, two hits from heavy weapons).

8. The defender takes the dice from the successful attacks and distributes hits as evenly as he can among his squad members. (No minifig can be hit more than three times, though; extra hits are wasted.) Each of the defenders that declared an intention to parry now does so, one by one, rolling against the number on the attacker's die, and then each defender's final damage is rolled. Casualties are removed. For the survivors, leave the damage rolls next to them, because any additional damage from a second wave of attacks will be cumulative.

9. The defender declares which of his surviving dudes (with an unused weapon) are counterattacking. The attacker declares which of his dudes (with an unused weapon) are parrying.

10. Continue as before, until everyone has run out of CC weapons to use.

You need a lot of dice to make this version work, obviously. Depending on what I do with Officers and CC damage dice, you might need a whole lot of non-d6 dice, which is unfortunate, because I know lots of people with hundreds of d6es but not so many with hundreds of d8s.

So here are some competing versions.

6. Two squads enter close combat. The attacker declares which of his dudes are attacking. The defender declares which of his dudes are parrying.

7. The attacker rolls all his attacks and adds up all the attack damage. The defender rolls all his parries (rolling against just the Use rating of their weapons, not the Skill Rolls of any specific incoming attacks) and subtracts the total weapon damage from the attack damage total.

8. The defending squad takes the remaining attack damage as Target Overkill damage, blowing through multiple targets until the damage runs out. The defender gets to choose the order in which his units get hit. Casualties are removed.

9. The defender declares which of his surviving dudes (with an unused weapon) are counterattacking. The attacker declares which of his dudes (with an unused weapon) are parrying.

10. Continue as before, until everyone has run out of CC weapons to use.

6. Two squads enter close combat. The attacker and defender declare how many total weapons are going to be used for attacking, and how many for parrying, rolling weapons for both (or more) hands at once.

7. The attacker and defender roll all of their attacks and all of their parries at once. They then add up their total attack damage and subtract their opponent's total parrying damage.

8. Each player applies the final total to their own squad as Target Overkill damage.

I'm thinking about making some changes to the flow of Close Combat to make this a little smoother - first, removing the "Parry and Riposte" counter and just saying that a defender gets to Parry and then Counter if he wants to, without any special modifiers, and second, maybe removing the requirement to beat the opponent's attack roll to make a successful parry.

Removing Parry and Riposte makes the flow a lot cleaner. Rather than:

• Attacker attacks
  -> defenders counter; casualties removed
  -> attackers counter-counter; casualties removed
  -> surviving defenders counter-counter-counter; casualties removed
  -> etc

It'll be more like:

• Attackers attack/shove/grab
  -> defenders may parry; casualties removed
  -> surviving defenders attack/shove/grab
  -> attackers may parry; casualties removed
  -> etc.

[Valak87]

I like modifiers when "Parry and Risposte", because i think is fair that is more difficult than just "Parry" or "Counter".