T w e n t y S i d e d
I tend to archive binge on Darths & Droids instead of reading it as it comes out. Unlike my shooting gallery for common tropes, Darths & Droids is far more intricate and lends itself more to binge-style reading.
Last week Darths & Droids took on the Dungeons & Dragons (or the fictional equivalent being used in their world) system of grappling, and linked back to my own lampooning of Attacks of Opportunity. (The thread on that comic is one of my favorites. Every post insisting that AoO are simple is refuted by the simple fact of its existence. Then there were counter-arguments based on that fact. There were some posts that went on for paragraphs trying to sum up the rules, and I suspected they were actually just provocateurs on the other side of the argument. The layers of irony stacked on until I couldn’t tell which side people were on anymore. It was brilliant. Then there was a secondary discussion about archery. If you read the comic and not the comments, you missed out on at least half the fun.)
Attacks of Opportunity is a system that lets combatants take an extra attack out of order to prevent people from exploiting the inherent turn-based nature of the game. You can’t just run between the guards and take a swipe at the king without them getting the chance to act.
The grapple rules deal with people grabbing, shoving, pushing, and wrestling in a fight. If you want to pry the golden chalice away from someone or knock the driver off the stagecoach, then you’re probably going to need to turn to the grapple rules. Those rules are, as the Comic Irregulars point out, many times more complex than AoO.
It is odd that I went after AoO instead of the grapple rules. Aragorn is even doing a grapple while they argue over AoO! This is mostly due to the fact that I’d never bothered with the grapple rules. In the games I ran, on the occasions that someone did want to grapple I always glossed over it with such vigorous handwaving that it probably looked like I was trying to fly.
