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Reasons for lulls
Fri, 2007-01-05 06:17 — Juballa (not verified)I'm only wondering whether readers have any insights into what goes in in real-life lulls, breaks, and "circling", that could actually be translated well into game rules.
> I'm only wondering whether readers have any insights into what goes in in real-life lulls, breaks, and "circling", that could actually be translated well into game rules.
Consider everything below to be prefaced, many times, with a big ol' "IMHO".
A fighter chooses these tactics:
- To create distance to launch a powerful, long-range attack (a step-behind side kick, for example).
- To recover from a blow.
- To recover fatigue.
- To recover balance/get better footing/better grip on your weapon - you could include recovering from a badly-failed attack here as well.
- To get time to think ("well, _that_ didn't work... what else can I try?").
- To get time to accomplish some non-combat goal (pick something up, such as a dropped weapon).
- To showboat, taunt, ridicule, talk smack, etc. Doing something to get a mental edge.
- To create a lull and draw your opponent into that lull, in order to attack explosively.
- To feel out the opponent (for example, provide a target of opportunity, let's say exposing your left-side ribs, to see if you can trick him into attacking that location).
- To check out what's going on in the immediate vicinity.
- To determine how effective your attack was.
- To learn something about your opponent (for example, throw a punch while clearly out of range, to see if your opponent reacts to it anyway).
Almost all lulls occur outside of weapon reach. Lulls happen, in GURPS terms, when one combatant takes a Step or Move away from the opponent, and the opponent doesn't follow - but GURPS doesn't typically model any reason for the opponent to not close the gap. Sometimes this will be accurate; of course, an ideal time to attack is when your opponent is trying to accomplish any of the above. But many times it won't be. When one fighter disengages, the other allows it, to accomplish their own goal.
As a side note, part of the difficulty of any 2-on-1 situation is the 1 doesn't get much of a chance to take advantage of lulls.
I think we can all see ways to model these in GURPS - you mentioned a few in your article. Certainly, you're looking at increased bookkeeping for most of these.