It’s hard enough fighting off one attacker. When three are taking turns rearranging your face, it gets harder.
Real life isn’t like Final Fantasy. If you’re being attacked, your assailants will not form a line, then sequentially run up to you, hit you, then run back.
Instead they will surround you. They will try to get in your blind spots. They will take advantage every time you turn away, and pop you one when you’re not paying attention. The more of them there are, the harder you’ll fall.
Then again, if you have some martial arts training or you’ve been in enough fights to know what you’re doing, you can better deal with a few attackers at once.
You might know how to move, to make sure one attacker is always between you and another. You may be especially skilled at paying attention to your surroundings, positioning yourself where you cannot be easily flanked. Or, you have a sixth sense in combat, letting you anticipate the movements of others even if you can’t see them. Whatever the case may be, you’re better at not being overwhelmed when there’s many of them and only one of you.
We can introduce some simple rules in UA to model this.
It’s harder to fend off attacks when you’re surrounded by multiple attackers in melee combat. It’s also easier for one of them to land a harder blow on a weak spot as they turn away to deal with another attacker. If you are overwhelmed in this way, all attackers get a +10% shift against you.
In general, your ability in combat approximates your ability to handle multiple attackers without being overwhelmed. Use the ten’s place of your Struggle skill for the number of simultaneous attackers it takes until they start getting around your guard. This applies to multiple attackers only, so single attackers do not gain any advantage, even if your Struggle is below 20%.
So, if you have Jeet Kune Do at 36%, you can deal with two crazed (maybe possessed), psychopaths, one with a 2×4, the other with a sharp piece of glass (held like a vise in his bleeding hand), without giving them an advantage.
However, if they are joined by their lead-pipe-weilding friend Biff, you might want to consider getting out of there. There’s now more concentrated chaos around you than you can adequately handle, and all three get a +10% shift against you.
Now, if you hadn’t slacked off in your training during the last year, you might be at 40%, and know some more effective footwork to deal with such a situation.
So, if you’ve only been in a few fistfights and you’re walking into certain danger, bring a friend, because you do not want the number stacked against you.
As mentioned above, this models how many simultaneous attackers it takes to overwhelm you in a high-stress, pants-wetting brawl.
In a more controlled kind of combat, like multi-person sparring, it takes the ten’s place of your Struggle + 1 attackers before you get overwhelmed.
So with Jeet Kune do at 36%, you can take three opponents in a sparring match, but when life and death are on the line and your fear and pulse are off the scale, three opponents can start to get around your guard, and you might not last as long as you’d think.
Hmm. Just out of idle curiosity, how many people can actually simultaneously attack one person in hand to hand without getting in each others way? Me, I reckon about three, with more just adding some bonus because they make it more difficult for you to evade.
Still, the rules you propose work just fine with this intact, just limiting it to three actual attacks, but with the bonus from the entire mob.
That is, while you are still standing, when you’re on the ground, it’s not really a fight anymore.
And when the participants get above a certain number, we move into riot territory.
Dodge, if you’re dodging, should probably kick in when dealing with multiple attackers (i.e, use the tens place of your Dodge skill).
I like it, especially combined with the three-at-a-time rule. In a mob, select which three at random? Or just the three with the highest initiative?
Huh…I completely forgot about Dodge…
I don’t think I like splitting the effects based on whether you’re dodging or not. I’d like something a little simpler, but the Dodge skill should definitely come into play.
I suppose it would make sense to use the ten’s place of Dodge or Struggle, whichever is higher. Even if you don’t have much combat experience, being able to move out of the way quickly has got to count for something.
You’re probably right about not needing to be dodging at the time. It would give the dodge skill more use; in actual play, I’ve rarely seen any points put in it, since keeping on dodging is a losing proposition anyway, so better to spend your points kicking ass. It only really sees use in combination with Do Two Things At Once and a combat skill, which is admittedly an effective combination.
As an aside, we occasionally run a few multiple-attacker exercises at my aiki tai jutsu class. My experience is that you can about 3-4 attackers is the upper limit, beyond which they start getting in each other’s way all the time, assuming the defender is moving around a lot to keep from getting surrounded.
Wow… did that ever come out badly. Serves me right for trying to do a quick edit without reading through the whole thing. Please ignore the words ‘you can’ at the start of my second sentence.