Dueling Blades and Initiative

[CRMcNeill]

I find myself using Peter Schweighofer's Dueling Blades (which I consider an honorary official rule) for more and more things. In addition to expanding on it for lightsaber combat, I've developed a similar table for starfighter combat, and I'm strongly considering a version of it to resolve capital ship combat, as well.

Something I'm running into is that, when using Dueling Blades-style combat, rolling Initiative seems superfluous. When two opposed rolls are used to represent an entire round's worth of attack / defense or combat maneuvering, how does initiative come into play? Is there even a point in rolling it?
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Whill]

Maybe just at the beginning of the duel, for the Initiative winner to have a bonus on the first round?
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[CRMcNeill]

[Raven Redstar]

Something to consider borrowing from another game is Ironsworn.

The game system uses 3 levels of success with a check: Miss, Weak Hit, Strong Hit.

In combat with a Miss, you miss and lose initiative.
Weak hit, you hit and deal damage, but lose initiative.
Strong Hit, You hit and deal damage and keep initiative.

I've been trying to consider how to adapt these to standard D6 to help speed up combat a little bit, but it's still in the early stages. However, I thought it might be worth combining with Dueling Blades to eliminate a superfluous roll.
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[CRMcNeill]

Interesting. I included something similar in my Dueling Sabers write-up, but I don't think it included initiative modifiers like that.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Crimson_red]

I've been asking myself a similar questions to the original post, notably I've been looking at resolving conflict (not necessarily just combat) with opposed rolls as often as possible as I've had it work to great effect in other games. With them and Dueling Blades initiative is a superfluous step, ultimately because they are conflict Scenes, not conflict Rounds (to use the 2R&E distinction).

Using Dueling Blades in conflict Rounds, I believe the solution lay with Actions and Reactions. If I'm correct in assuming when a character takes an action, they typically succeed when their roll ties/exceeds the difficulty number or opposed roll, meaning if you are taking a reaction you 'lose' if the roll ties.

In effect the Acting party has the Initiative.

So if I was going to drop a Dueling Blades duel in the middle of a broader combat Round, all quick and dirty like, the Combat Results table for the Melee Combat Action might look like [0 Force Back; 1-5 Knock off balance; 6-10 Wound; 11+ Trick] while remaining unchanged from Dueling Blades for the Melee Perry Reaction. With this a character would have to take a different reaction for each attack for it to work.

But like I said, that would be a quick and dirty solution. I'm much more interested in doing a full pass over Reaction skills and rules, as I strongly suspect (know?) others already have done. My reason for necroing this particular thread when others might have better suited the broader topic is Raven Redstar's post was what got me to think of the whole action/reaction as having/not having the initiative for the first time... even though that is kinda the point of rolling initiative and taking actions in the first place

[CRMcNeill]

At the moment, I’m considering a hybrid of the RAW and Dueling Blades, rolling Melee Combat and Melee Parry once each per round, with each roll representing a full around of attacking and defending, respectively. I haven’t worked out all the bugs yet, but I do like how it allows MAPs to play into how a character can gain a dice advantage (or at least avoid a dice penalty) by choosing to either fully attack or defend.
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Crimson_red]

At the moment my approach is less hybrid and more injecting a Dueling Blades-like system into Combat Rounds by altering how Reactions are expressed, mainly expanding what you can do with a reaction. For now I’m working with specific reactions such as:

A Dash/Dodge reaction that allows a character to make their move, if they haven’t already done so in the round, potentially allowing them to reach cover. I’m debating whether it would grant a small Moving Target modifier to the difficulty to hit them, or change it into an opposed roll. There would be no more Dodge skill, but depending on Movement Speed and Terrain, and/or if I decide to make it an opposed roll, the character may have to use an appropriate movement skill like any other move action.

A Parry/Riposte reaction allowing a character to ward off and potentially counterattack against melee combat, and point-blank ranged combat actions. This would likely use a Parry skill and be an Opposed Roll.

Also some sort of Quickdraw/Fast Strike reaction where a character attempts to counterattack, but takes/has no option to ward off the initiating action. The Better roll is resolved first, then if the other actor is still able to act, their action is resolved after. This is supposed to replicate western quickdraw scenes, fast trigger work, decisive sword work, etc, and would use an appropriate combat skill, melee or ranged, so long as the target is within reach.

I should probably either add more types of reactions, or broaden what each type can do to account for more variations in actions (Stormtrooper shoots at the astromech plugged into the socket at the far end of the hanger, so the astromech reacts by slicing the system to drop that TIE hanging from the hanger ceiling on the trooper’s head).

However I do all this, I think actions taken as reactions are either more challenging than taking them as actions, or at the least, they don’t succeed on a tie in the case of Opposed Rolls. And of course, some margin of success/failure is part of it, like in Dueling Blades.