[CONAN] Circle Step combat maneuver

[Water Bob]

A new combat maneuver for the d20 Conan RPG....



CIRCLE STEP
You circle around your opponent, as fighters will, looking to catch your opponent off balance or find a weak spot in his defense.

Action: Immediate. (Version of the Five-Foot Step.)

Circumstance: You must have initiative and be in base-to-base contact during one-on-one melee with your opponent.

Effect: The character makes his attack while moving from one square to another, circleing around his opponent, moving from his starting square to a square either to the left or right of his target. If a Critical Threat is scored on the attack throw, this action allows for a +1 bonus on the Critical Check. As usual, the defender can keep facing with his attacker as a free action.







For example--

Conan has initiative and begins the round in base-to-base contact with his opponent. In order to perform the Circle Step, Conan must use his five foot step to move either to the right or the left of his target, attacking as he does so.

Conan rolls a critical threat with his attack and therefore gains a +1 bonus when making the critical check.

Success indicates that Conan did, in fact, find a soft spot in his opponent's defenses.

 

[slwoyach]

I like. yoink.

 

[Water Bob]

I don't use miniatures, but I do use counters on a battleboard, and this encourages more life-like fights with movement. In real life, people don't just stand in one spot and go at each other, even in a six second combat round. This encourages the combatants to move around, circle around, each other as in a real fight.

You don't need it when there's more than two combatants fighting each other because the outnumbered character is always moving, shifting the battle, to break the flanking opponents.

I needed something that encouraged movement with only two fighters the way three-against-one did.

Viola. What you see is my answer to the movement issue. I didn't want it to be overpowered, and I wanted it to be attractive to low level characters (because higher level characters can use full-round attacks, and movement will rob those full round attacks back down to single attacks.).

With this, each stage of the game has some movement, like real life fights.