MoogleEmpMog said:
Conan doesn't run by a bunch of able-bodied opponents without tumbling or swinging his sword about to deflect their blows (i.e., using his Parry defense to avoid attacks) or even taking scratches from their feeble strikes. Being Conan, he doesn't die from these attacks, but they do occur. Conan himself certainly hews down foes who try to move past/away from him.
Sounds more like True20 to hear you describe it and very far from Attacks of Opportunity.
In True20 you would just note that your character is picking up superficial scratches and is blocking blows.
In D&D you would actually perform attack rolls for every opponent. And once you take damage from AoO (even a relative scratch) isn't your turn over? Or was that an option in another d20 RPG (or houserule a GM was using to keep people from running past people)
As for shooting - you were presumably firing from the hip with an automatic weapon, or at least firing a shotgun in the general direction of your opponent; otherwise, you either weren't concentrating on melee defense or weren't going to hit anything!
I was presumably aiming at someone and pulled a trigger. Once the finger moved I was attacked. Thats counter to logic. Once the trigger pulls, I can apply my perception and defense. I can't do that
prior to the attack.
I fail to see how moving my finger a centimeter will open me up to an attack vs me just standing there with my finger on a trigger not opening me to an attack.
AoOs as a system are debatable, but their logic is by no means stupid - nor is it untrue to the background material.
To what background material? I was just asking a question about Conan books. I wasn't trying to proove anything by asking the question. Yes AoO's are pretty flawed logic wise. In some cases they work logically and in others they're pretty fubar. Which is why I prefer to just use (or have the GM use) judgement.
Look at Star Wars (a more "modern" example). Why do the Jedi Jump or Tumble while moving into groups of enemies? Why do those enemies die when they try to shoot Jedi next to them? AoO. You can see the same thing in many martial arts movies; gunmen in melee go down when they try to fire - to AoOs.
Often it's the other way around. It's the Attacker doing something like attacking or grabbing a weapon that causes them to fire.
The Jedi would routinely use this tactic against foes who had guns aimed at them. As they're not dead Jedi and Jedi can't move faster than the speed of light, we can assume they didn't wait for the trigger to be pulled to act. They acted and the opponent tried to react.
I won't debate any sort of flavour people add into moving through combat - be it flips, rolls, defensive parries, etc. It's just flowery talk and you don't need rules to make it happen. Same as the flowery talk you use to describe avoiding an attack and damage (or lack of damage in True20's case) in both D&D and True20
You can use AoOs to try to simulate it. AoO's will work some of the time and will reinact a scene properly so long as people have trained Feats to do special techniques to allow them to bypass AoOs. Other times AoOs will rule against what you're going for.
