Which defense mechanic do you think is better for defending yourself from damage?
An active defense where offense and defense roll and whoever rolls better determines whether or not defense takes damage or not (ShadowRun)
or
A passive defense where your defense score makes it harder for offense to damage you, either because they have to roll over a target number (D&D) or because your defense score took away dice for them to use for their action (nWoD).
Which do you prefer?
bump
Why not both? Just make passive defense into damage resistance instead of armor class.
I prefer passive, but only because I have a lot of players and passive is slightly faster to resolve. That's it, really.
It depends a lot on the system. For simple single action attack vs defence rolls, passive is best for streamlining things.
However, Legends of the Wulin (a fascinating but troubled system) essentially requires active defence, as the system's unusual use of dice pools allows you to make multiple actions on a single roll, with different final values.
Active defence in this case isn't just a matter of rolling to get a number, it's also about decision making- If you're facing two or three different elements of an attack, and you only have the means to stop one or two of them, there's real depth that's added to the system as you consider how to best allocate your defensive resources, and this couldn't really be replicated with static defence values in the same way.
Exactly. I like to run a system that has passive armor, but also has block and dodge rolls. Block/dodge is less reliable but it can negate all damage whereas armor negates only a little. Weapons that have many attacks per turn with low damage are easily soaked up by armor but can do huge damage if someone fails a dodge. Weapons with low rate of fire but high damage will smash through armor but can be completely negated by block/dodge.
There is merit to this. Sometimes players just need something fast and easy.
If there are relevant choices that can be made during defense active defense makes sense. If it's just a roll vs roll you're simply adding fiddly bits so players feel like there's less downtime when it's not their turn.
Active if there are a variety of combat options, like TRoS and its successors or GURPS Martial Arts, where picking different maneuvers with different effects is a game in and of itself.
Passive if the game is some shit D&D clone where your combat options amount to little more than a bonus or penalty to a roll.
I'm always a fan of active defense; Exalted, with its charm activation to increase the success threshold your opponent has to hit/penalizes their roll. GURPS, with its dodge/block/parry system with different situations wanting each one, and how even an opponent with a seemingly insurmountably high defense can be defeated with feints and clever play, or even weirdos like Biomodus.
Biomodus is probably the least known one, as it's not actually out, but the way it does defense is; Every character has a pool of AP. Your max pool size is more than the amount of AP you get per turn. On your turn, you can take as many actions as you have AP to purchase them with, with each action costing varying amounts of AP. However, if someone tries to hit you, it's an Automatic Hit unless you spend 1 AP to defend against it, which allows you to force them to roll against your defense stat+lets you apply DR from shield. From there, if they hit, they roll and damage is soaked by armor. This can lead to some situations where a character can choose to blow their load on offense, hoping it'll take their opponent out immediately, or because they're banking on their natural DR being high enough to soak the blow.
depends on what they're doing, but i'm leaning towards passive defenses
i've played a lot of games with active defenses, and combat always seems way more random. the players (and opponents) fumble way more when rolloffs happen
a lot of the active defense games i've seen tend to have significantly more lethal combat than passive games, so maybe that's part of the design, that fighting is unpredictable.
Generally, I prefer passive defense systems. In general, less rolling to get to the same result is better than more rolling. If I'm going to introduce a mechanic which doubles the number of rolls I need to make a basic attack, I need a damn good reason, and inducing more randomness as to whether or not attacks hit doesn't cut it in my book.
Passive runs quicker and makes it easier for everyone to stay on the same page.
Both. A contest to see if the attacker hits or opponent blocks, parries, or dodges, and armor functioning as a flat damage reduction.
Personally, I like the players roll all the dice approach. I converted Shadowrun 5e over to that on the fly when I was running it. Want to shoot something? You roll to shoot, I tell you what the target number is. Something wants to shoot you? You roll to dodge, I tell you what the difficulty of the attack is.
Best of both worlds. Players get to feel like they're actively defending against attacks, without needing two separate rolls to take place.
I understand why people who write and run RPGs want the NPCs to work on the same rules as the PCs, but there's a lot to gain when they don't.
I like active defense because it feels cooler
but I'd rather play passive defense with my current group
I'm under the impression that a player should always feel like they have some level of agency in gameplay. As such I prefer Active mechanics over Passive overall. However I've found that having something like an "Active Parry" defense as an action and still having a more subdued Armor Class as a Passive underneath is probably the most efficient I have dealt with.
I do the players roll their defense against the monster's static "attack" score.
That way I can just go "Dan, Bill and Alex, roll your defenses, you're attacked" instead of me rolling thrice and comparing the rolls to their AC.
This is an extra step that can be ommited; if your armor halves damage, you could just double the health of the armored wearer. It's not the same, but it's kinda around there and is a sacrifice to simplicity and speed.
I do monsters as monsters, static numbers that are there to be beaten by the players or fuck players up.
Monsters don't roll or use player-stats, they just have Attack and Defense and bonuses or maluses to that depending on what a player uses (An Ice Giant will have a malus to defense if hit by a flame spell).
Makes everything really quick at the expense of less randomness.
The mere act of rolling dice does not impart agency.
But it does give the illusion of it. There's a physical component to ttrpgs, and the handling of dice is a big part of it, at least to players or non-munchkins.
There is a great joy of rolling 40d6 for a shadowrun c4-funhouse, or casting a 10d6 fireball (even if its damage is shit). A rogue sneak attacking or a dice-pool character using his best stat.
Even using different size dice as your character upgrades from a club(1d6) to a morningstar(1d8).
Notice how every one of your examples is an active attack (choice, therefore agency) and not a reactive defense (no choice, therefore no agency)?
Depends on the system and what it defines as "Active" defense.
As others have pointed out, if there are a variety of options for the player, as with GURPS, active defense is much better for engagement, fun, and a feeling of agency.
If the active defense is just a roll-off with a monster, then the illusion of agency there is not really worth the extra time, unless there's some way to make it engaging.
The only other compelling reason I can see to use active defense if there aren't many options for the player, is for the narrative value. GURPS combat loop supports both real agency and narrative descriptions of the action.
user, you are leaning fairly hard on a false dichotomy that unless you are actively rolling or taking the odds on your own hands, you have no agency.
No agency would be "They swing, they hit". Agency implies you can do something about your situation, in this case, actively maintaining a defense (represented by your defensive score).
Stop trying to misrepresent the other side to make yourself look good, you just look twatish.
>Agency implies you can do something about your situation
But you can't. There is no difference between a static and a rolled defense in terms of agency, because there is no choice involved either way.
>there is no choice involved
Do you understand what agency is, user?
It seems like you do not if you think having methods to defend yourself are "no choice".
If all the methods to defend yourself result in the same roll with the same consequences being made, there is no choice.
For some reason, you are not seeing this for the situation it is.
Agency is not the comparison of mechanics, agency is the judgment of how the player can influence the world and the game they are playing in.
No agency when it comes to defense means you can't defend yourself, not you make X roll or not.
Passive, it's quicker than requiring another roll.
Combat is already too much rolling, passive is less rolling therefore passive.
>agency is the judgment of how the player can influence the world
Yeah, and unless the player knows how to manipulate the random number generator to output a certain number, the player has no influence on the world in that defense roll, which is an automatic consequence of an attack, with no input from the players.
Unless you count the option to just refuse to roll, in which case anyone else at the table can do that for you so the game doesn't stall.
Uh, listen. Shadowrun doesn't have damage dice.
Good try.
That would only be true if every player had the exact same defensive score and there was nothing they could ever do to change that
If we're just changing defensive scores, we're back to there being no difference between a static and a rolled defense in terms of agency, because at the moment of the defense, the player takes no additional influence either way.
I think what it really comes down to is what was mentioned earlier.
Does the player have any real choices to make during the defence? If not, static scores.
If the player does have real choices to make during the defence, however, active defences can be worthwhile, as while they do add rolling they also add depth.
Why not just modify the static scores with the real choices?
...
Interesting.
I'm fine with that as a design idea. (only PCs roll dice.)
The example in shows a specific case.
Generally, however, because if you're dealing with static values then it's easy to see the 'right' thing to do. Based on your opponent's offence, if you compare the numbers it will be relatively easy to come to an optimal answer every time, which isn't particularly interesting decision making.
Active defences, however, force a greater element of risk vs reward and careful expenditure of resources, where although you can calculate you can never be certain if it'll pay off.
Of course, it takes good system design to fully take advantage of it and make these defences choices a meaningful part of combat. My point isn't that it's always a good thing, but instead that there are cases when active defences can be a meaningful addition of depth to a combat.
Both has ups and downs.
Active is good because is gives you the feeling of you being able to do something. It is actively trying to keep yourself from harm and that can be very engageing in and of itself.
It is bad though because depending on your system, it can take a while to resolve and if alot of parties are involved, it can get a diceorgy.
Passive makes things easier and faster, buuut it can lead you to feel helpless and that kinda sucks.
Yes, which is why we should default to the one that reduces needless dice fondling.
Active like Numbers does it is the best way I've seen so far. Making the players roll for everything makes it so much faster and easier to DM.
Having a resource you can burn on being hit would be more interesting.
The system does also involve a combat resource, Chi, that can be spent to activate various techniques, including offensive and defensive stat boosts. You start out with quite a lot of Chi, but only regenerate a small amount every round, so you have that side of resource management to consider along with dice allocation.
Passive offense, active defense. This way you can't roll a nat 1 on your swordblow and cut off your arm - if you're good, you have a high static attack. If the defender rolls higher, they manage to duck and avoid the blow or parry it, otherwise it connects.
That sounds like bad combat design rather than a problem with active defense though. If you design your game properly fumbles and whiffs should be relatively rare - Active defense also gives opportunities for reversals, counter attacks etc. worst case is that you both roll so close to each other that nothing happens.
> When you don't read a post properly and and end up looking like a penis.
Good try though
I run a dice pool system based on stats and a stamina pool that counts successes, skills give an automatic number of successes depending on level, so a reasonably skilled combatant is never going to make a total shitshow of their rolls (without disadvantage anyway) but there's still enough swing in the process to make it interesting for anything but the most one side combats.
Both work and have their respective ups and downs. So it depends what you want more, having the focus on a single player at a time or having all engaged at once.
Just whatever you do, don't do something like arbitrary making the attacker roll to hit AC but have the defender roll to save for magic.
Passive because it requires fewer dice rolls and makes the game move faster.
Passive offense, active defense. This way you can't roll a nat 1 on your swordblow and cut off your arm - if you're good, you have a high static attack. If the defender rolls higher, they manage to duck and avoid the blow or parry it, otherwise it connects.
That's literally the reason I normally play wizard and spam low level damage spells in DnD. Spells can't backfire and even if they save they typically still take half damage.
For what it's worth I have repeatedly ask the GM out right either nelf the spells or stop using critical fumbles, he the old fashion stubborn sort. We still use second edition THAC0 and everything.
Depends on the focus of the game. Having active defences gives you options like parry/block/dodge or even trading blows and can make combat more interesting and feel more tense. Passive defences are more suitable when there's more combatants and the extra choices and rolls from active defences would slow the game to a crawl.
Rifts gives each player a number of actions per round. Parries take no action, dodges use an action but (typically) give a higher bonus and trading hits also takes an action and lets you inflict damage in exchange for taking it (and is a good way to get past an opponent with high defences). I like that set up since each reaction has different mechanical effects and there isn't one that's always going to be the best option every time and certain attacks can bypass a given defence (trips and grabs can't be parried, you can't always trade ranged attacks etc). It's a shame so much of the system is a complete mess, it could really use a second edition to tighten up the mechanics and ditch the unused MA and PB stats.
Can someone explain the differences between parry and block in the games where they appears? Shouldn't they be the same thing?
Sometimes they should, but in other cases 'Block' is entirely defensive while 'Parry' might be riskier, but involve a chance at a counterattack.