Topic: OB / parry split?

[Cory Magel]

We announce DB for foes when you attack them as the players are smart enough to figure it out fairly quickly themselves.  Given that your players are dolts it's not worth the GM doing all the math and attack/critical lookups himself (i.e. it' s a time saver).  However everyone needs to be careful in assuming a particular amount given is a "normal" DB.  The foe could be using a spell, parrying, or any other number of possible modifiers. 

OB the players will have to figure out for themselves.

With me it depends on what I'm up against.  If I have a fairly good idea of my foes ability I'll simply put my parry to a level that gives him a DB I feel is appropriate to stay mostly unharmed.  If I don't know what I'm up against and I'm the apparent target then I'll error on the cautious side for a round or two.

[Marc R]

As GM I tend to write down the parry splits for the NPCs first, then ask the PCs to declare, the DB and OB are then inferable from results in resolution, but might change round to round, so the players often don't depend on them. . .though a smart player will infer total ob+db and thus the maximum swing. . .i.e. if someone does 40 OB and 30 DB in round one, you can guess that they can't do more than 70 OB or 70 DB, which could lead to calculating your round 2.

As a player, I'll often be somewhat conservative in DB round 1, then once I know they have at most 70 (i.e. in the first 10 seconds of high parry I assess how good they are in a fight) I then declare based on that.

If I have 140 OB, I then go 70/70 and they are screwed likely. . .but if I only have 35 skill, this might be the moment to start to worry I've bitten off more than I can chew and start full parrying and hoping one of the other PCs will come stab this guy in the back.

[Ecthelion]

I also do declare the opponents DB (incl. parry). But not before the first attack gets resolved. Therefore the player will have to decide how much he parries in the first round without knowing the opponents defensive capabilities. And afterwards he cannot be sure how much of the DB was from parrying.

[pastaav]

I usually have assistance from the players with lookups during combat, but I only give the net OB and the net DB. A player skilled in head calculations can after a few attacks tell the approximate combat stats of the attacker, but normally people are going with the flow of the combat and to busy to reverse engineer the enemy OB and DB split. The important thing is that you alternate the OB and DB split randomly so that the player need some combat before they can tell the stats of the enemy.