I have always used Battlemats (for the thousand years I've been playing) but I tend to interpret position on the battlemat in what I believe is a commonsensical and relatively 'liberal' fashion - that is characters move in approximate amounts and I position the models in what seems a 'reasonable' fashion. I never bother to measure anything exactly and allow very liberal facing changes.
I agree with this definately. I do not play miniature games and do not want to. RPGs are too abstract to try and be so literal, it detracts from the game, I think.
Reading the charts to decide how much to parry is perfectly fine (in my opinion) just don't let them hem and haw very long. We use HackNSlash and I have the charts essentially memorized and will often just tell the players - parry with 45 to avoid taking stun or bleeding - and you can then attack with the remaining 40. Anything to keep things moving. Originally, I used a rule that forced players to use any available parry to avoid an injury if possible - but that's less 'heroic' than letting a hero take a non-stunning injury to make a counterattack.
This I would not allow. I feel the less the players know about the numbers the more realistic their actions will be. To be honest, I wouldn't mind running a game where the players didn't really know the rules or barely knew the rules. I would much rather they make decisions on character personalities combined with the situation and feel that too much is because of the "numbers." I think concentrating on the numbers limits description, which I feel is paramount to a fun gaming session. I hate to rely upon the dice to dictate the fun!
Retreating is bad thing - but it allows the character to live to fight another round. Potentially, the attacker will fumble the next round and suddenly they can counterattack and FORCE the other guy to retreat.
This I don't agree with. Retreating is NOT necessarily a bad thing. Well, OK if you use the word
Retreat....... I think a much better way to put this is "Giving Ground" because Retreating is full-on trying to get out of the fight completely. Maybe in fencing it means what you are saying (I only took it for 1 semester, and that was a long time ago), but not in REAL combat. Giving ground is something combatants do to try and gain an advantage because the current situation favors the opponent. And anyone relying upon the opponent to make a
critical mistake has already lost (not the same as trying to force a mistake). I think you are trying to mix too much of your fencing experiences into rules for combat that is nothing like fencing. No nice, flat mat beneath your feet in the vast majority of combats, and no ref to say you didn't (or did, I forget) lunge before you attacked.
Now, I do like some of this SPAR system and think it can be an improvement over what is there, especially if you keep the combat rounds so short. (3 seconds, right?!?) Personally, I prefer combat rounds to be more in the 5-6 seconds range, up to 10 seconds even. This is to reflect and allow for Combat Perception, which I prefer over most initiative models. This way a character who is not supremely fast, but excellent at reading the flow of combat can, at the very least, make up the difference. Example: Jon is a fighter (Initiative/Speed: 10, Combat Perception: 110) who has engaged in combat with Bill the rogue (Initiative/Speed: 18, Combat Perception: 85). You can roll their combat perceptions to see who has the better read on the situation and the one with the worst read declares their actions first, but then everyone goes in initiative/speed order (which can be a roll too, or not if you perfer). Or, the combat perception roll will generate a bonus to the characters initiative/speed base number which will generate their total initiative for the round, but then I would still have the character with the worst initiative declare their actions first to reflect that the ones who got the better read on the situation as the advantage. That one is kind of a double smacker though, so I would be careful in instituting that one.
