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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 8076288" data-attributes="member: 32164">So, I'll try to explain my thinking, and I grant that this is largely from an early to pre-modern (Renaissance and medieval) European swordplay perspective, although I have studied a variant of Kenpo and done some kickboxing as well...Typically in a dynamic sword fight, the point is to avoid getting hit, and the tendency is to either evade and interpose your blade, or move, evade and parry, and then wind into a counterattack. It is, in my experience, atypical to opt for just one or the other, as opposed to both. The better you are, the easier it is to prevent an attack from making solid contact, and it all comes down to fighting skill, but the distinction between parrying and dodging can be...murky at times.Case in point: let's say someone is coming with a fendente (overhead downward cut) for my head, and I sidestep their attack and make a hanging parry with my sword to deflect the downward stroke, then once their strike has been deflected, I carry my blade around with a return cut to their head. I've used this move a lot.You could say I dodged, because that's the primary move, or you could say I parried, because the blade made contact with mine. Regardless, this is very distinct from simply setting a block or making a slap parry. Or if I'd simply sidestepped, I could potentially have made a quicker counter-thrust. If we try to get into the minutiae of how the fight plays out, the system has to start taking into account the variant choices between those options, and draw a distinction.Or we could simply leave it at: "Character A used their fighting skill to avoid being struck with a sword, and launched a counterattack." That lets the character's ability be what determines whether the choice was a good or bad one, and subsumes the difference into the randomness of die rolls.Separately, you sometimes can both parry and dodge, and if they're not combined into a single thing called defense, you can quickly get to the absurdity of the old Palladium system that tried to resolve every single blow and part of the action individually...A makes an attack roll, and gets a 17.B rolls to dodge, and gets a 15: Fail.B rolls his parry, and gets a 9: Fail.B is wearing Mail Armour (AR 16), so the point of A's sword slips through their armor for 16 points of damage.B decides to roll with punch/fall/impact for half damage, and succeeds!Now, after one attack roll, 3 defense rolls, comparing to the AR, and a damage roll, B deducts 8 points of SDC damage - just a nick compared to their total of 40 S.D.C. and 23 hit points.And since A has 5 attacks per round, we now repeat this for their other 4 other sword strikes. And then we repeat this for every PC and all their adversaries. This is not hyperbole. It's a 100% realistic scenario from the salad days of the Palladium System. Just fyi, this is at 1st-level. And actually, it's pretty moderate. Ask anybody who played RIFTS.All that said, I'd be mostly okay with a system where the PC could choose whether to parry or dodge, or some combination as I mentioned above, but it should be either a static defense or a single die roll. IMO.</blockquote>

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