Interesting. Do you think it matters whether the DM rolls out the attack ahead of time and just narrates the result, or if they pause dramatically to roll after declaring the attack?
It really shouldn't matter whether your defense is a separate roll or included in the attack roll, but you're probably right that it changes the feel.
Or what about traps? Does it hurt worse when you fail to dodge the falling rocks, than when the rocks hit you and you don't even have a chance to avoid them?
It's been my experience with D&D that -due to how the system tends to work- it's difficult to look at things from a character perspective (or even a player perspective sometimes really) and have a clear idea of what the situation is in terms of survivability.
For example, it wasn't long ago that I played through the Strahd adventure for 5th Edition.
In one encounter, the party was unbelievably outnumbered by some sort of needle plant-creature things. We thought it would be a tough encounter based on how things looked. Instead, it was was a massacre. ...like not even close. The party easily killed them all.
In a different encounter, we were going into what I think was the Amber Temple. One magic spell from one creature hiding in a statue nearly killed half of the party.
Both were due to what you mention in the other post I quoted. In the plant encounter, it was virtually impossible for us to miss the enemy. Likewise, it was virtually impossible for the enemy to save against any spells or area effects the party had going.
In the encounter against the demon in the temple, the same was true in reverse. If I were targeted by something, my defenses were borderline worthless. I had no way to react to what was going on around me. Sure, the enemy needed to make a roll to hit, but rolling was little more than a formality.
I did not like feeling as though I was just sorta standing there.
Also, the other thing I take away from that is that -for me- there's little for me to base my decisions on when trying to look at a situation through the eyes of my character. Is it smart to run from a large hoard of creatures? Does one lone creature risk TPK?
The line between one and the other seems to be very small, and, in my opinion, learning that you're in the latter situation can be a rough thing to escape from and survive in a system where I have no active options for defending myself. Sure, I'm not getting crippled by HP loss or losing a limb, but I also have a smaller window of variance between safe and not safe while also having a smaller number of ways to respond to getting hit in a system where I'm just standing there while a creature rolls dice against me.
While losing HP in a system like GURPS actually does translate into physical harm for my character, I have opportunities to defend myself. I can try to block, parry, or (likely less successfully) dodge and give myself an opportunity to get out of the situation. I can also make tactical choices such as aiming for a less armored part of the opponent or such as fighting in formation to limit how many directions the enemy can attack me from. While I understand that the added granularity is a turn off for some gamers, I personally prefer it.
In my experience with GURPS, it's a dramatically different feel. Active defense rolls change combat pacing and creates a very specific kind of combat narrative. It is very much a "first one wounded loses." There's no narrative space to model "cinematic" combat, where the hero gets beat up and bruised, takes a cut or two, but then rallies. As a player I didn't like the feeling that every successful action I did in combat could almost always be negated by a simple success roll by the opponent. Some of this is just the nature of GURPS' roll under system (which I despise); some of it has to do with the fact that GURPS basically ignores degree of success. A fighter with a 14 attack and a defender with a 10 parry are not on equal footing on paper, due to chances of success, but it always bothered me that the 14 attacker could roll say, a 6, which is a very high degree of success, but that high degree of success makes no difference to the parry---all the defender has to roll is a 10 or below and the parry is successful.
I'm also thinking that @
Celebrim is right, in that the non-granularity of the Savage Worlds wound track is the culprit of what I was experiencing. The way to alleviate the non-granularity is to add SOMETHING to the wound track to represent something more than the 3 standard "states" of "unhindered," "shaken," and "wounded." Off the top of my head, I don't know what that is.
I do think that ultimately hit points + wound track is probably the "best of breed" system, but would be the most fiddly in terms of adjudication and resolution. Adding an enemy hit point counter to Savage Worlds runs counter to the intent of the system.
My experience with GURPS has been different thus far.
Margin of success and skill level do matter. The chance to score a critical is higher for a more skilled character. Margin of success (and failure) comes into play when it comes to opposed checks (such as grappling*, spells, and a variety of other things.)
*I do have a few gripes about the default grappling system, but they only bug me because I've seen how much better things can work by using some of the optional rules from a splat that I own.
Different folks like different things. In your case, you dislike that you can have high skill and someone with low skill can still defend. I can see how that is bothersome. For me, I like that for a few reasons. The two main ones are 1) that it prevents someone from just dumping all their character points into knowing how to use a sword and suddenly becoming virtually immune to actions taken by other combatants, and 2) I feel like my actions matter regardless of whether I'm the one attacking or defending.
It's worth noting that skill does still actually matter though. The lesser skilled combatant is going to have a much tougher time dealing with multiple attackers, penalties from environmental conditions, feints, and many other things. The lesser skilled combatant will likely have a tougher time defending against attacks from being flanked (attacks from behind and side hexes) as well. Those things will be easier for a more skilled character to deal with, and the more skilled character can voluntarily take penalties to do things like rapid strike, make a deceptive attack, target body parts, and etc.
Personally, I like that, but I can understand why others might not.
I also like that combat has more of a sliding scale to determine results. Being hits hurts more, but, for me, it feels less like rocket tag, and I feel more involved in what my character is doing.
I've found a few ways to make GURPS combat a little more cinematic as well, but I don't want to derail the thread any more than I likely already have. Suffice to say that I've successfully run a game which was based around Pro-Wrestling.
No system is perfect. Even in GURPS, there are things that bug me, but I feel confident that the Dungeon Fantasy book coming out next year will address most of my personal gripes.
I'm glad different systems have different approaches. What works for me may not work for someone else.
I will say that I tend to like wound tracks and conditions as a nice middle ground between D&D style HP and more granular systems. I liked that D&D 4th Edition added the Bloodied condition and keyed things off of it. I also liked the idea behind the 4th Edition Disease Track; I wish they had used that idea for more things in D&D 4E.
Have you considered the alternatives, though?
A big problem with games that do consider the degree of success is that they give far too much control to the attacker, to the point where it makes the defense roll unnecessary. Using your specific example, if the attacker succeeded by that 8-point margin, then the defender who rolls 3d6 and tries to score under 10 cannot possibly defend from that attack. It basically goes back to being D&D at that point, where the attacker hits you while you stand there and take it.
The great thing about the way GURPS does it is that both numbers always* matter. You never get to the point that D&D sometimes has, where someone will roll at +15 to hit and it doesn't matter whether your AC was 12 or 14 because there's no way that they could possibly fail. In GURPS, it doesn't matter how well they hit you, because you'll always have your 21% chance to dodge (or whatever it works out to).
The chance of them dealing damage to you with an attack in GURPS is equal to the product of their chance to hit times your chance to not dodge. Both numbers always factor into the probability, whether it's 2 percent or 99 percent*. Even if they somehow got their accuracy up to 100 percent, beyond which they would gain no further benefit, you still have your chance to dodge. They never get to invalidate your defenses based entirely on choices that they made in a vacuum.
To contrast, you can look at something like Shadowrun or Exalted, where margin of success translates into extra damage, and the attacker is always better off throwing as much into their attack skill as possible - more dice just translates directly into a wider variety of enemies who can't possibly defend against you and increases the damage you deal to everyone in every situation. You don't have that great built-in limit that GURPS has, where there's no point* in investing more in a skill because your skill isn't the only determining factor in what happens.
There are a few things I'd change about GURPS 4E, but -for me personally- I found the game to be a lot more intuitive than I assumed it would be when I first looked at GURPS books.
My experience with Savage Worlds was brief and a long time ago. I liked a lot of the concepts in the system, but I didn't always like how things worked in actual play. A lot of the things mentioned in the original post of this thread echo what I remember my feelings being.
I'm not familiar enough with the game to give what I feel is valuable feedback.
