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<blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9409957" data-attributes="member: 7026617">...Even stage fencing isn't well simulated by an overly simple system.&nbsp; In fact, I'd argue few fighting styles are.&nbsp; They may have techniques that are, effectively, buried in the abstraction, but that's the point; once you bury all of that, all the styles involved fundamentally look the same in play (barring, essentially, trying to recreate it on the fly by GM/player interaction, which seems to work for some people but I believe requires other things that don't make it a reliable choice for most).&nbsp; This was one of the things that chased me out of OD&amp;D many a year ago; fundamentally all a fighter had in supported decision was what weapon to use and who to use it on.(As an aside regarding something you said in the part I clipped: one of the problems I had with GURPS when I ran it is that its very short melee cycles actually resolved combat too fast, and the biggest part of that was it didn't recognize how much of virtually every form of combat is spent either reassessing the situation between exchanges (and this is, far as I can tell, just as true of an exchange of gunfire as a knife fight), trying to reposition, or watching for openings.&nbsp; While many combat round cycles are too long, even for firearms combat, resolutions that will have combats reliably over in ten seconds have just erred in the opposite direction).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thomas Shey, post: 9409957, member: 7026617"] ... Even stage fencing isn't well simulated by an overly simple system. In fact, I'd argue few fighting styles are. They may have techniques that are, effectively, buried in the abstraction, but that's the point; once you bury all of that, all the styles involved fundamentally look the same in play (barring, essentially, trying to recreate it on the fly by GM/player interaction, which seems to work for some people but I believe requires other things that don't make it a reliable choice for most). This was one of the things that chased me out of OD&D many a year ago; fundamentally all a fighter had in supported decision was what weapon to use and who to use it on. (As an aside regarding something you said in the part I clipped: one of the problems I had with GURPS when I ran it is that its very short melee cycles actually resolved combat too fast, and the biggest part of that was it didn't recognize how much of virtually every form of combat is spent either reassessing the situation between exchanges (and this is, far as I can tell, just as true of an exchange of gunfire as a knife fight), trying to reposition, or watching for openings. While many combat round cycles are too long, even for firearms combat, resolutions that will have combats reliably over in ten seconds have just erred in the opposite direction). [/QUOTE]

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