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Revised Defense Flow: REVISE THE WHOLE THING?
Thanks, everyone, for the many comments. With great points made by people here and on the SJG forums, I need to make some revisions to the article, such as adding some points about Feints, critical hits, etc.
But wait...
There's a bigger revision to be made. After all the discussion, I now think the entire focus of my article is a bit off target.
I began with, and focused on, this question:
"Should the defender make the decision to defend before or after the attacker checks TH?"
But that's not actually the core issue. The real question to ask is this:
"Should the defender know the TH result when he decides to defend?"
What's the difference?
If you play with all rolls made openly, it's the same thing. The only way the defender won't know the TH result before he decides to defend, is if you don't roll TH before he decides to defend. So either way, we end up talking about order: deciding defense first, and then rolling TH.
But you could play with hidden TH rolls as well – especially the GM's TH rolls for NPC attackers. In that case, when the TH roll is made doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not the defender knows the result before defending.
Or as I mused in the forum, it all boils down to:
Do we say to the defender, "The attack will hit; what do you do?" Or do we say, "The attack might hit; what do you do?"
That one-word difference – "will" vs "might" – is the heart of it all.
So. The way I've been playing the revision, and all the points in the article, are valid. But in writing about it, I focused on order of steps: how to order statements of defense, rolls, etc. That's all peripheral. It's really not an issue of order and flow, but an issue of character knowledge.
It's this one question:
"Should the defender know the TH result when he decides to defend?"
You all know my response: "Maybe he should know versus melee attacks; it's debatable and can be played several ways. But versus gunfire, no, the defender should have to act without knowing the TH results." No change in my take on things.
But would you agree that it's better to recast the whole issue in terms of the above question about character knowledge, rather than focusing on order of things?
Break time
And that's enough from me for the moment; time for a break. One interesting thing about the topic is that it's simultaneously deep and important to the game, yet profoundly trivial at the same time!