[Rq-rules] Aiming and attack speed

[Tom Cantine]

The more I think about this, along with my own experience in fencing, 
the more I am inclined to drop aiming rules for melee combat. It seems 
to me that if I'm trying to hit my opponent in a spot I perceive as 
especially vulnerable or tactically useful, one of the things I will be 
doing to enhance my likelihood of hitting there is trying to get him to 
defend somewhere else, and that means actively going after those other 
spots.

Now, suppose I'm going after another spot, like the legs or maybe the 
weapon arm, simply because I want to subdue my opponent with minimal 
risk of accidentally killing him. In this case, it isn't so much that I 
want to hit the targeted area as that I want NOT to hit the vitals.

So I wonder if it might help things if we change the sequence of the 
dice rolls a bit. Remember that, as Bjorn pointed out, strike ranks are 
not so much a temporal sequence as they are a mechanism for determining 
priority; all other things being equal, a guy who attacks on SR 6 is 
just likelier to prevail against a guy who attacks on SR 7; it does not 
mean that he swings 1.2 seconds before the other guy.

Here's my suggestion, then: If I want to target a location, roll the 
hit location BEFORE finishing the statement of intent. That way, if I'm 
up against someone with an unarmoured head, and I see from his stance 
that his armoured left arm is exposed, I can state Parry and Dodge. 
Actually, since I can in principle declare a variety of different 
attacks (slash, stab, punch, kick, headbutt, grapple, shield bash...), 
we could be perverse and roll a different location for each potential 
attack, and then decide what intent to declare. (Incidentally, it also 
could influence defensive tactics; if I realize my shielded left arm is 
exposed to the guy with the bastardsword on my left, while my 
unarmoured abdomen is vulnerable to the one on my right, I might choose 
to parry differently.)

Obviously, the excess dice rolling is a pain, and probably not worth it 
most of the time. But it DOES provide a nice way to mix up combat a 
bit; I've often observed that there's rarely any reason to resort to 
other forms of attack besides one's primary weapon, when a satisfyingly 
bloody battle will involve all sorts of cinematic maneuvers. In RQ, 
it's almost never worthwhile to sword parry and shield bash, for 
example, but with my proposal here it could be.