Player selectable default combat posture

Has there ever been any previous discussion about being able to select those?

My suggestion is to at least enable the 'defender' to choose their default posture when attacked. For example, they might be an aggressive fighter or built around the concept of having those slight offensive buffs from the more aggressive postures. Why not let them have a "hair trigger" and violently respond to their attackers?

I think that allowing the 'attacker' to choose a posture could lead to some problems. For example in this situations where people are built to be evasive and benefit from a guarded stance. Allowing them to initiate a fight with a strong defense seems like a potential balance issue.

At the risk of throwing 'realism' into the mix here, I'll mention that it isn't realistic to start a fight defensively. Two combatants in defensive postures aren't actually fighting. Attacking someone requires leaving yourself open, however briefly.

On the other hand, it's totally realistic to come across people who believe that they can take a couple of hits and who are willing to trust their stamina and training to make up for a lack of defense.

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A somewhat recent update made it so if you're in the guarded position the other person can flee with no check, iirc.

You should adapt to your build, strengths and weaknesses. The current system works fine enough and there are already advantages on getting the first attack on people.

Doing this would just remove the element of having the first attack.

Lord grant me the confidence of someone who claims to have only been in a handful of fights but has some good ideas about how to fix combat.

This is devolving, can we please stay on topic and avoid personal attacks?

My character is a effectively pacifist for example, there's no IC reason my character would be in any posture but guarded at the start of a fight.

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The current system, with it's staggered changes, was introduced to make posturing less meta and remove the ability of skilled players to out-posture their opponents by having a better understanding of the game mechanics. What you're suggesting would be a step back to the old system and would confer those same meta advantages on skilled players again. Does that make sense?

With such an imbalance already in place, perhaps a mechanic like this would be a way to simultaneously rebalance the weapons and styles to allow for a more rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock situation?

apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but you're making it sound like there is a clearly best weapon/play style that exists so that the attacker using that weapon/play style has enough of an advantage to eliminate stalemates. Is that your intent?

I'm sure you didn't mean it as such, but that is a very elitist and exclusionary comment. Discussions about ideas should be open, educational, and civil. Not closed off and restricted to only those who have spent enough years playing a game to have precise arcane knowledge on a subject. This allows for approached and ideas that come from a fresh perspective to be presented, not limiting things to someone who is 'used to' a system, and entrenched in their viewpoints…or perhaps even benefits from the current meta and motivated to see it stay as is.

Closed off discussion should be limited to the actual implementation of the ideas found worthy in discussion.

This is just flat out not true. To stress in the strongest possible terms, you are not on the forums to be educated about combat mechanics.

I never said to be educated on combat mechanics 0x1mm. Educational does not mean instructional. I can be educated on how different people see the game, what different people are looking to get out of the game, why systems are the way they are. i can do all of this without being educated on a single specific mechanic.

Please pull back a bit and cease assigning ill intentions to my desires.

I'm only allowed to play one character at a time, and my current character is combat exclusionary, so there's not a lot of chance of that happening. That being said, at this point I'm probably more versed in several rare skills than 99% of the players in the game, but I still welcome their input when I participate in a topic involving those skills. it's illuminating to see how people perceive the game world and how they feel things should work.

Chummer…

Thanks for the response.

In all honesty, I wanted to be able to 'attack' someone but start off in a 'defensive' posture.

Rather than post here and suggest enabling people to set a default posture, I figured it would prudent to ask why such a thing hadn't already been abled.

As I suspected, there has been a lot of thought put into why things are the way that they are.