So dodging is bad now?

Game Talk The Garage
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I’m certainly no combat expert but I would think that its because you are fighting zombies that dodging can be so effective. Zombies are exceedingly stupid, almost every media I have ever seen that portrays zombies has the correct way to fight them being exploiting their predictable attack patterns. We’re not talking about dodging several fighters who understand the principles of flanking. Or even animals who might instinctively attack from blindspots and the like. We’re talking about simple, slow lunges where they trip over their own feet more often than not.

My understanding is limited but I would like to think that even unskilled fighters would have trouble coordinating, simply put its easy to get in eachother’s way. But even more so with zombies. Usually zombies aren’t just getting in eachother’s way but they actively pull and climb over one another in their desperate scramble to bite a human. To the point where rather than calling it an attack its more like a wave of flesh when zombies gather. To that end, zombies should gain bonuses in a horde as their sheer mass overwhelms conventional fighting methods but in small groups they should hamper eachother as they struggle to form the most basic coordination.

Ofcourse it may be possible for some zombies to be reasonably intelligent (at least as intelligent as an animal) but the average zombie is definitely not.

Dodging being restricted against any other attacker working in tandem I would be ok with, especially with the dodge modifier from open spaces suggested earlier. But zombies are nigh incapable of working together and its only when they reach a critical mass can they form a vague semblance of coordination.

Although that is all besides the point I just wanted to ground the discussion in the game’s core engagement. This isn’t an MMA simulator but the key point of the game is fighting incredibly unskilled enemies. The realism argument is used because realism tends to be enjoyable but at the end of the day the game balance should be what gameplay is most enjoyable and encouraging diverse tactics. I’m not good enough at the game to even try to discuss game balance. But zombies have had their feeling changed greatly over the years and my opinion is that they should be given their own balance in regards to dodging and group fighting thats separate from other enemies to preserve the feeling of fighting a near mindless horde.

TLDR: One should fight a horde of zombies much, much differently compared to a pack of wolves or to a group of unskilled thugs or even to a well coordinated team of fighters.

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The point is, that this isn’t the case with these Zombies.
These are much more intelligent and coordinated beings that like to attack and swing at almost anything moving.
If you don’t mind massive spoilers, you can take a look at the Design Document and the Background Story to get a better understanding on what they really are.

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Lore aside, my go to tactic is to bait zombies into stumbling over terrain. They really aren’t the smartest bunch. Also for reference I’m a returning player since 0.C and early 0.D, naturally I am still used to their old behaviors the most.

Anyway, I don’t want to say much on the bullet dodging side of the discussion but given the number of game examples maybe a television example would be welcome. In the (relatively) new Marvel’s Punisher, minor spoilers, but he dodges a bullet in the most realistic portrayal I’ve seen in media. The unrealistic part is naturally the instant reaction time but it does give some visual reference of how far someone might be able move in the time it takes a bullet to travel. Its up to the devs ofc how (un)realistic reaction times should be and I have no preference either way I simply think its a good example.

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Even with Instant reaction times, the maximum acceleration of the body just isn’t viable to do anything about it. We don’t need to use a movie to tell us what rate a person can move at, its been studied with arms, and within the first 100ms of acceleration, the highest speeds recorded were still best measured in centimeters/second. Sure, near the end after coming up to speed over the better part of half a second, they got all the way up to a peak of 3m/s, but in that time, a bullet will have covered a near kilometer.

You can move pretty fast once you get up to speed, but that inertia and physical movement limitation is simply insurmountable without outside assistance, IE Augmentation and/or Mutation.

Regarding the punisher, while its a fun series, Superhero media is not a basis to judge realism on :stuck_out_tongue:

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45

To be honest I am not sure how realistic the scene is because I didn’t calculate the time it would have taken for the bullet to travel in reality. To describe it, a scoped rifle is aimed at his head or perhaps shoulder (since he may not have been intending to kill) from around 15 meters (50 ft) away. Theres heavy slow motion here making it hard to gauge the time but it took maybe 50 ms for the bullet to travel. Punisher instantly begins dropping as soon as the gun fires, not simply lowering down but physically falling and contracting his body to achieve the most movement possible. The result is he moves 5 to 10 cm (2 to 4 inches) effectively dodging the bullet as it was near the edge of his body to begin with. A bullet needing to travel 15 meters but a human needs to move less than a hundredth of that.

By the way the link provided broke as its tied to a session. Edit: I was so preoccupied with the link breaking I assumed it was a study on guns so I deleted this section. Given your main point is on arm movement, I assume now it was a study on arm acceleration. The falling speed of gravity should also be taken into account.

Doing some looking at gun stats myself, it seems the bullet would have had to been at least twice as far away to reach the target within 50 m (or the bullet being especially low velocity) for this dodge to have been possible. Or perhaps he moved less than I originally thought and I mis-gauged the time it took.

Lets say a gun firing should take around ~150 or so ms to reach the target (range of 100 meters, bullet travels at 750 meters a second). If instant reactions are allowed (even through external means) then depending on how far someone can move in 150 ms a bullet might be partially dodged. While at closer ranges would only at most dodge grazes or convert a hit to a graze.

Although I have no idea how far someone can move or fall in 50 - 150 ms from a resting state.

Edited to be more neutral.

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Apologies, didn’t notice it was session keyed. This should work. Key graph being the right hand chart on page 2. Its worth keeping in mind that this is a study of the movement speed of the arms, and the chart is specifically looking at hand/wrist velocity, so the farthest out part, which would be the fastest overall part.

Dropping under a shot, at first thought, sounds like it would be faster, but I’m not inclined to believe so. Aside from the fact that there is still the bodily inertia to overcome, and muscles are capable of generating significantly more acceleration than gravity (otherwise they’d be pretty useless, no?), there’s also the problem that unless you’re already falling, your muscles and skeleton are actively working to support you. It will take time and muscle movement to pull the body parts out of that stable state or to relax to permit falling. I’m not inclined to believe that would be faster in the slightest, much less faster enough to be of significance.

If you wanted to test that yourself for fun, stand up, and without jumping, just pull your knees up to your chest, as fast as you can. It’ll be weird, make sure to stand in a clear area cuz you might topple a bit, but your feet will come up off the ground before gravity can pull you back down into contact. Inertia matters.

TL;DR for this, If you stack the deck in your favor, you can marginally exceed statistical luck against slower pistol caliber firearms. Against a common civilian rifle, you won't be able to make a difference.

Lets say a handgun firing at max range

Max game range or max effective range? Game range is a non-starter, with tiles being ~1m and a Glock 19’s range being 14 tiles, and I’ll use Glock stats and regular 9mm ammo for the rest of this. With a muzzle velocity of 350m/s, would give 40ms to move outta the way. Max range IRL is not really a thing (unless we’re talking kilometers), but max effective range for a handgun is a hundred or two hundred meters for a calm shooter taking their time. Effective real life accuracy is hard to get good stats on for this situation (life and death situations but the other guy isn’t shooting back aren’t super common to happen at long range, right), but we can probably split the different at 75m, benefit of doubt. So that’d be about 210ms to respond. Keep in mind, most shooters would consider 75m on a handgun to be a pointless venture regardless, but hey, lets see where it goes.

Referring to the fastest arc on the linked chart, that would lead to an average speed over the period of about 0.1m/s for the in game range, and a much more possible 1.5m/s for the max IRL presumed effective range. which would translate into 4mm movement in the game range, and a whole 31cm for the IRL. We will also presume that they are shooting specifically at your hand, and your hand is out of the way of the rest of the body, so we can ignore the fact that the distance moved for the rest of the arm will decline as you move up towards the shoulder.

4mm isn’t enough to change anything period, so we’ll throw that out, and focus on the 31cm. That looks like a statistically significant difference, but there’s one other factor to bring in. Groupings. Even with an expert marksman, all the time in the world to sight in, and calm weather, not every shot goes in the exact same place. Now its hard to get scientific numbers about groupings because of the wildly human element, but generally you’ll hear that from a 9mm pistol, a 2-3 inch grouping at 25 yards is real good, so we’ll go with that for benefit of the doubt, 3 inches at 25. So at 75 meters, or 86 yards, if we extrapolate out the same error ratio, you end up with 10 inches and change, we’ll round that down. Realistically, it’d be greater, as out at those ranges, drop, the sights not being precise enough, etc, but I don’t have good numbers on that. 31cm gives you 12 inches of movement against a ten-inch natural mechanical variability of accuracy.

So assuming a flawless instant reaction, perfect angle to move the arm from, a fit, fast moving arm, the shooter standing at a very optimistic distance with a relatively low velocity weapon, and an optimistic grouping, you would just be capable of exceeding the range of “you just got lucky” from getting shot. The reason I’m specifically addressing this is if they aim the gun at your hand, and you start moving it up when they pull the trigger, there’s no guarantee that A: The round was ever gonna hit you, B: That the round isn’t travelling to where you are moving your arm in the first place. Its just luck inside that range.

A regular AR15 has a muzzle velocity of just over 1,000m/s, and a good shooter can be expected to get a 2 inch wide grouping out at 100 meters. I don’t think I need to run the math to say that dodging that will be even less effective.

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At a glance at the study an arm could move ~25 cm in ~150 ms. I don’t understand why they insist on using meters so that may be 20-30 cm. Say for the sake of argument that you could move (or twist/ fall) your body 10% of that just so we have a discussion point rather than tying up the discussion in stats.

2 cm is not irrelevant, in game mechanics that would be around 1% dodge shift. 2 cm sounds like nothing sure, but how big is a human heart? ~10 cm? The keyword shift means if they have 5% crit rate they now have 4% crit as when they roll a 5 it is shifted up 1. Likewise 60% hitrate becomes 59%. So naturally in cover and at long range a 1% dodge shift matters more. To explain further, a bullet thats 2 cm away from missing can then be dodged with this system.

Now if 1% is what is strictly realistic I would like to think the game is slightly unrealistic on multiple points already. Or let’s say believably realistic is a better term, so a 2 to 3% chance could be justifiable. Especially if we then take into account scifi aspects of the game we might see 4 to 6%.

But honestly I don’t see this being worth the effort to add this system in a satisfying way. All the bullet velocities would have to be taken into account. Many items that modify movement would be taken into account. Encumbrance, speed, etcetera. Not to mention the player would have to find ways to justify overriding reaction time and then this is all for a couple % of dodge. And ofcourse faster bullets wouldn’t even give you 150 ms, let alone scifi guns, so this is only relevant against lowtier fire arms or at high range.

I’m more trying to justify how the example is relevant than anything here to be honest. Maybe dex needs a buff but this seems like a lot of work for a buff, although it seemed like some people did like the idea so maybe it has more merit than I am giving it.

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This hard limit on dodging with multiple opponents adjacent in no way comports with my experience fighting. You don’t suddenly switch to fighting immobile and tanking every hit just because a second opponent engages you - I don’t even know where that idea would come from.

Most ‘dodges’ in melee are pretty small motions. 6-12", maybe 18" if you’re trying to escape an overextended lunge or sweep - certainly not multiple meters, that’s just running and kiting.

You can definitely dodge multiple opponents at once in a real melee - do it all the time, it just gets harder. And yes, its tiring. Trying to fight three people at once is exhausting, so that part is fine - but having your dodge effectively drop to nil just because 2 people are adjacent? That’s not a thing. Quite UN-realistic.

I could easily see a -1.0 dodge penalty for each adjacent opponent beyond the first - that’s perfectly legit, and pretty quickly negates dodge for lower skill characters who try to fight several opponents - and would effectively negate dodge almost completely when surrounded.

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49

But this does explain why my current survivor gets dinged up so quickly whenever they engage even a small group of opponents. Not a fan of this, in terms of realism, because it creates a very odd and artificial binary effect in combat.

Fight one thing? You’re good. Probably go untouched. Fight two things? Well you go from being good to being just plain bad. Not penalized, or less good - just awful. It feels deeply artificial and wrong in gameplay.

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50

I am not sure if you are clear on the details, but I get the impression from your post you are not.

The only new limit on dodging is that you can perform only 1 dodge per second (martial arts changing this, of course).
The number of adjacent enemies only matters because it (probably) means that more than one enemy is attacking you per second.

If this was clear to you, disregard this post.

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That was clear to me. 1 dodge/sec roughly amounts to only being able to dodge attacks from one (average speed) enemy per second, leaving you completely vulnerable to every other attacker for that action frame. Even if you’re Jackie Chan, zed #2 is now guaranteed to hit you every time.

It may sound realistic in terms of ‘hey, how can you dodge more quickly’ but it isn’t remotely.

The fact is, you can dodge faster than that, you can dodge in such a way as to avoid multiple attacks simultaneously, and the reality of melee combat - especially with several combatants - is that no-one is ever attacking ‘once per second’.

The real pace is both faster and much, much slower. With extremely rapid flurries of attacks to create and exploit openings, and far longer pauses between those assaults.

Next big problem is that all attacks are not created equally. You’re naturally going to be trying harder to avoid serious blows aimed for vital locations rather than dodging the first Zombie Child attack and leaving yourself mysteriously flat-footed for the Zombie Hulk punch 1/2 second later. But that’s exactly what now happens now, just based on who gets to take the first poke at you. If the Hulk comes up first, you may be ok, if the child comes up first, you’re guaranteed dead - doesn’t matter if you have dodge 1000, because now its just a coin flip created by a bad abstraction.

The more realistic approach is to penalize the defender’s dodge skill for the number of hostiles melee adjacent when any given attack is made, not based on some arbitrarily abstracted resetting time beat. Add a further penalty for grabs, that’s also perfectly realistic.

Having to divide your attention and engage in the physical contortions necessary to dodge simultaneous attacks form multiple directions is certainly harder. Martial Arts that allow more dodges would be better off reducing the melee adjacent dodge penalty in some manner.

Every successful dodge should cost a little stamina - failures generally shouldn’t, as they usually represent you not responding in time to move, and the the stamina collapse rate for failed dodge checks would swiftly cripple armored characters who aren’t even trying to dodge.

As a note, you should want as few mechanics to be dependent on the turn-based nature of the game as you can possibly manage, as it inevitably leads to uncomfortable and unrealistic abstractions whenever you lean on it too hard.

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Even if you’re Jackie Chan, zed #2 is now guaranteed to hit you every time.

If you’re Jackie Chan, you’re using martial arts, which can add extra dodges

With extremely rapid flurries of attacks to create and exploit openings, and far longer pauses between those assaults

Unless you’re a trained expert fighter, rapid flurries and long pauses aren’t really the order of the day. Watch some regular street fights with normal shmucks. Even then, last I knew, the movement cost of an unarmed strike was 65, so you can land those pretty quick. If you are an expert fighter, you’re likely using a developed martial art in game (Or even just well leveled brawling), which often add bonuses and flurry attacks and such to reflect that capability.

You’re naturally going to be trying harder to avoid serious blows aimed for vital locations rather than dodging the first Zombie Child attack and leaving yourself mysteriously flat-footed for the Zombie Hulk punch 1/2 second later

This is presuming perfect knowledge of what’s going on. Tunnel vision in a fight is very common, and letting something bite you in the leg while bracing to evade something else is a good way to evade neither. Even from a game perspective, this fails, because you’ll end up not dodging a hit from something slightly less dangerous than a hulk, and then the hulk missing. That would be equally bad, standing there like a dumbass and not doing anything.

As a note, you should want as few mechanics to be dependent on the turn-based nature of the game as you can possibly manage, as it inevitably leads to uncomfortable and unrealistic abstractions whenever you lean on it too hard

Which is why actions are not guaranteed strict 1 a second, attacks and moving use the movement point system to allow potentially multiple actions, or slow actions, and martial arts allow multiple dodges a second.

At the end of the day, if your not trained in any martial arts, your not gonna be very good at melee combat, which is pretty realistic. Even brawling is focused on block buffs, which are much more reasonable to learn ‘the hard way’. Trying to go Fist of the North Star as a day one survivor will go about as well as you’d imagine irl. On the flip side, learning Boxing will give you a flurry attack at unarmed 2, and the relevant book is pretty common to find in a Boxing Gym.

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Right, I’ll keep it simple and state that as an experienced sword fighter (30 yrs) with no formal martial arts training, I disagree with you on basically this entire statement, as it runs directly contrary to my experience in the field in every regard.

But especially the hulk/child thing. Even the most pathetically inexperienced fighter is going to have their attention glued to the 9ft tall mass of terror while basically ignoring the ankelbiter - and for perfectly valid and important reasons having to do with imminent death.

As a note, I have no problem with dodging being nerfed in some manner - just, this method results in some very unsatisfying gameplay artifacts, and pretty much just means you spend all your time having to do mind-numbing creep & kite tactics, even when you’re an advanced survivor clearing low grade street trash.

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as an experienced sword fighter (30 yrs) with no formal martial arts training

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say by this. Are you trying to say that Sword Fighting techniques are not a martial art? Hint, what does the HEMA acronym that covers common schools of sword fighting stand for. We have Fior Di Battaglia for some of the longer stuff, while Medieval Swordsmanship and Fencing covers our more sword specific martial arts.

Martial arts is used here in the dictionary sense, a set of developed combat actions and skills, not strictly in the common pop culture sense of unarmed combat styles. Hence the many weapon focused or weapon exclusive options.

pretty much just means you spend all your time having to do mind-numbing creep & kite tactics, even when you’re an advanced survivor clearing low grade street trash.

Yea, it does slow down things, both in the boring sense as often as it slows them down in a more fun, threatening sense, trying to keep track of movements from bigger threats. But its one of those things that does come with the realism side, even an experience fighter who ultimately wins a fight irl will usually be seen trading ground for time to position and land their blows.

I guess a lot of it comes down to opinion on which is less boring and mind numbing gameplay, active kiting absolutely everything, or dodge stacking immunity while hammering a directional key. My preference would be the kiting, at least then the environment comes in to play.

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Did I forget something? Oh, yeah, right, in real life, there are no Zombies to dodge from…

This comment will be using this exact register of communication. If the OP does not like this register, they should not use it in the first place.

Let’s begin.

So, maybe get in some real fights before you comment. Nearly everything you said was not only wrong, but liable to get someone who thought you were right seriously HURT.

You need to remove this comment immediately as you’re actually giving unsafe advice to to people based on a completely mistaken idea of how fighting works in the real world.

I’m a former US Marine and bouncer, so not only have I been trained in CQB, but I’ve actually used it.

In real life, dodging is really, really exhausting.

That’s why we have a stamina bar in the game. You probably forgot about that. It’s okay, you were busy talking about stuff you have know knowledge of, so this was probably that too.

In real life, if two people attack you at the same time, you sometimes can’t dodge even one of the attacks, as you’re not a fluid…

In real life, dodging is actually about quickly determining the following. You have about a millisecond to do it, meaning muscle memory, i.e. training, i.e. having a high Dodge stat is incredibly important:

  • What attacks are incoming
  • What attacks are going to hit you
  • What attacks are going to hurt you
  • What attacks are worth the effort to avoid (notice that this comes AFTER deciding what attacks are going to hurt you, this is a fight, you’re not getting out of it scott free)
  • What method are you going to use to avoid those attacks worth avoiding
  • What position are you going to end up in, both bodily and spatially after avoiding

When dealing with multiple opponents, dodging is not just a necessary tool in your arsenal, it is absolutely the ONLY way you survive AT ALL. What two or more people are going to do is try to pull you down and beat you to death, not ‘oh, you can’t dodge’ or some unrealistic malarkey. What they’re ABSOLUTELY not going to do is “stand there next to you and undermine your dodge mechanic”.

If they haven’t literally taken you down and beaten you to death, then you’ve already been successfully dodging, including their ‘attacks’. Not only is your conception of what dodging is wrong, your conception of what’s happening after the change to the dodge mechanics in the squares of the game doesn’t comport to any sort of reality either.

In real life, no matter how good you are at it, you might not be able to dodge at all if the space does not allow it.

Fortunately, this isn’t real life. It’s a game where you stand in one square and ‘move into’ another square to ‘attack’ what’s ‘inside’ that square, so trying to bring ‘real life’ into it is as useless as your knowledge of real fighting. It’s a GAME with a now useless DODGE mechanic. Go outside, smell some grass. Seriously.

Try fighting with high strength and no dexterity, you’ll break your weapon in no time…

This isn’t a real life thing. So we’ve confirmed for a third time you’re perfectly comfortable with abstraction. This is good, because that means you’re comfortable with abstracting Dodge in a way that makes sense like it did before and your argument is over. That said, you’re still wrong here. In a real fight, you’re either using a weapon designed to be hit, or you’re using an improvised device, which may or may not be sturdy enough to handle even a blow by someone who only hits 98lbs soaking wet. Which is usually fine, because now your improvised bludgeon probably has some sharp pointy bits to it.

Unless you’re in the matrix, you can’t dodge fired projectiles…

Are you serious? Other than hard cover, dodging fired projectiles is literally your only defense. Your body armor is for flack and other incidental projectiles, like shrapnel from a missed bullet scattering crap your way. People actively working on not being hit are MUCH harder to hit than people just standing there. In fact, the military teaches you exactly how to do it.

Luckily, the game is open source, so all you need to do is to copy it and undo the change. Or play on an older version. Or… so many possiblities…

But real life involves real dangers and there are real, tried and true methods of dealing with them, each and every one of which you screwed up. Maybe don’t take such a smug tone until you actually know what you’re talking about.

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OK, after 55 comments of pure debate I finally get the point.

Now you may want to pick a martial art in the character creation menu, or find as quickly as possible any martial arts book. So you can now be able to fight monsters without dying.

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Not really. There’s common books that can be found about as part of the looting, and autolearned brawling with its arm/leg block buffs make it really viable to keep torso encumbrance low while spreading damage.

Edit: To be more clear, not really if you’re creating a normal person. If the character yer looking to roll up is supposed to be an experienced fighter, then sure, its probably required. But no more than a high marksmanship skill would be required to create an experienced sniper.

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Thanks, that makes more sense. But to unlock the brawling style, don’t you need to have 2 or 3 of an skill that I don’t recall right now?

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I haven’t. My last character was after this change, preferred melee, and did quite well… lasted a couple weeks, fought some pretty tough fights, died to an armed NPC and my own errors.

There is no “need” here. There is possibly a relevant argument somewhere deep in here about how better to model tracking multiple enemies and attacks (something Kevin’s actually working on), but mostly, the only way I can see this being such a problem for you is if you only know one way to play and cannot accept any change to it. Otherwise, it’s not at all difficult to make a survivable character that isn’t exclusively reliant on dodge, and pick up some martial skills as you progress. Your recurrent hyperbole is absolutely guaranteeing that nobody making decisions on this is going to pay attention to your concerns.

@Unstable - you make some good points that have come up in discussing this before, many of which we plan to add… Also, you clearly have martial arts training and therefore would likely have multiple dodges per turn in game.

It’s possibly worth going through and making sure more of the martial arts grant extra dodges, or adding a system where a high melee combat skill grants an extra dodge. I suspect though that all that stuff will get rolled into a better on the fly threat assessment ai.

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You autolearn Brawling at Melee 1, so beat one or two zombies to death and you’re started down the path. And on unarmed 1 you’ll get Arm Block, which gives you more unarmed defensive options.