Combat Maneuvers

Every man-to-man combat system begins with the assumption that both sides will take turns bipping one another with swords or lasers or whatever. The moment you allow for more complicated forms of interaction, things can get amazingly complicated in a hurry.

Our current campaign under the ACKS system uses a double-test for any special combat maneuver:

• make a normal attack with a -4 penalty, then
• give the target a saving throw vs paralysis

Effectively this makes success depend on three things: (1) attacker level, (2) defender armor class, and (3) defender level. (There's also a loose admonition to apply suitable penalties for size differential, but those are left to judge's discretion.)

The most controversial feature here is armor class. The system designer (Alex Macris) is pretty adamant about the innovation of a "touch AC" in D&D (or a CMD in Pathfinder) going to far in terms of negating the value of gear. The concept here is that being armored doesn't just block attacks, it also frees you up to defend in a totally different and far more confident way. A knight doesn't need to focus on anything except holding a sword and using it to beat someone else on the head. A light fencer needs to focus on survival-footwork first, and so is much more vulnerable to trickery. For example, he's going to constantly be using his sword to parry, which is going to make it easier to sunder that sword.

From a gamist perspective, there's another argument at stake here: "tanks" should be hard to control. If a heavily armored fighter steps forward, you don't want there to be a single right answer for how to neutralize him every encounter. "Trip him and make him fall down" is funny the first time, but if it happens every battle and becomes such an obvious tactic as to be mandatory, then it's negating the whole concept of having armor class as a numerical proxy for defense ability. The best tactic is then always to grapple the tank, then run past to murder everyone else. So special maneuvers shouldn't, in general, be able to disregard armor class, since that would negate the value (and fun) of stomping around the battlefield as an impregnably armored behemoth.

The bottom line is that I've decided it's probably best to keep using armor class as the defending stat for special maneuvers, rather than try to introduce an independent combat maneuver defense. For things like "sunder weapon" or "disarm", I think the best approach might be to define an alternate minimum armor class equal to level + strength-bonus, so that hulking shirtless barbarians can still hold onto their giant axes. High AC defenders could still use armor class, but low AC strikers could replace that with their raw force and tenacity.