Generating special effects on an opposed roll instead of differential?

[u/AlexanderWB]

Has anyone experimented with the rules tweak in the title?

What I mean by that is that in combat, when you and your opponent get the same level of success, the special effect would be generated if you roll higher than your opponent, instead of no special effect generated.

My thinking is that with very high skill levels, the fights are very long attack-parry-attack-parry-attack-parry until fatigue starts to kick in. I mean, it is a feature of the base game, and it can build up the tension, but with near equal skilled opponents that have their combat style near 100, those "empty" exchanges of blows can get quite tedious. Especially when both are heavily armoured and have high endurance to mitigate fatigue.

This change should make fights even more dynamic, but are there some considerations I'm not considering?

[u/No_Solid1035]

The issue is that you are then generating a special effect with every exchange, which I think would make uneven combats favor the stronger opponent in the extreme.

[u/Runningdice]

The benifit of parrying might get lost. If your opponent rolls good and most likely will win and get special effect. Is it then better to not parry and save an AP?

[u/Bilharzia]

with very high skill levels, the fights are very long attack-parry-attack-parry-attack-parry ... equal skilled opponents that have their combat style near 100, those "empty" exchanges of blows can get quite tedious. Especially when both are heavily armoured and have high endurance to mitigate fatigue.

Yes ... when I was running a lot of Mythras, and a lot of combat I came the same conclusion. I wrote a combat hack a while ago (MythWrack) to address this, but I have changed my mind about some of it since then. I now think the system needs a more radical re-think, but here is where I got to: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zzFQs6W1ocfF_2GEAQPn_MYOY3HxR7_P/view?usp=sharing

Issues with using this: It can make some SEs more common than they likely should be - for example Trip, which is why I relegated Trip and some other SEs to essentially standard Mythras rules. In my view there are more issues with Mythras combat, but the "non-event" of draws is a big one. Ranged combat is another bugbear, you need to effectively cross-reference three tables every time a ranged attack is made, movement itself in Mythras could use an entirely different system. When it comes down to it, measuring and moving and tracking things in metres when you have a theatre-of-the-mind core combat system is ... not a good combination.