Cinematic Sword Play

Three minutes. when's the last game you fought for 10 rounds?

One of the great classics in cinema is the long drawn out fight. These fights consist of long, drawn out contests of skill, movement, and even conversation. They take minutes to resolve, not seconds. Gurps is notable for its speed of combat -- it happens very quickly in game time and rather slowly in real time. It is not suited for emulating, say, the duel from The Princess Bride.

And yet gurps should be able to do anything! It should be able to handle both quick combat and long and drawn out combat.

The Basic Mechanic

Choose a primary attack skill and primary defense. Your "Combat advantage" is attack skill + double your active defense. compare to your opponent's combat advantage and divide by three. roll a quick contest of 10 vs 10+combat advantage. The winner lands a hit on their opponent, in a random location.

The GM may wish to modify combat slightly for extreme weapon mismatches. Of note is that unarmed opponents get -2 to combat advantage if they take damage from missed parries (though a cinematic campaign may reduce or eliminate this, and it may be waived for knights in armor) and  a weapon with a reach advantage often gets a +1.

And this one is what? five minutes on screen? twice that off screen?

This process takes a while, during which time the foes are dueling back and forth, slinging insults and moving around. The amount of time needed to produce a hit depends on the lower of the two active defenses:

Defense Score	Time per Contest
10	1 second
11	2 seconds
12	5 seconds
13	10 seconds
14	20 seconds
15	1 minute
16	2 minutes
17	5 minutes
+3	x10

Stunts

Cinematic Sword fights are full of stunts.  Swinging from chandeliers, kicking over barrels, standing on banisters, blocking with objects weapons will get stuck in -- of such stuff are cinematic fights made. Stunts in this system are essentially complementary skills. The player picks an action that will aid in the fighting, and the GM assigns the appropriate skill. A successful roll gives a +1 to the contest, -- but the opponent gets a chance to negate it, via rolling against an appropriate skill. Each stunt should only be attempted once per combat -- though in a fight with multiple foes, you may be able to use it more than once. The GM may simply add -2 to the stunt with each try, or may just say "Find something new and creative to do". Failed stunts give either a -1 to the contest or some other consequence, as the GM sees fit.

Successes other than Damage

Sometimes you have a goal other than damage. In fact, the silver screen is fond of such things -- a sword fight is as likely to end in a clever outmaneuver, disarming, or in the dirt with wild fists as they are likely to end with an elegant stab.

Yeah, its all one fight.

Changing Combat Paradigm: Quite often in fights, the fighting will change weapons. Medevial knight duels in film are notorious for going from horseback, to swords, to fists. A single success allows you to change the combat paradigm. This is a mild change -- you go from sword fighting to fists, you pick up your dropped sword, or unseat an enemy from their horse. This is not traditional disarming -- for that use a targeted attack. If two skills are involved, average them when determining combat rating:

for example, a man attempting to change from a sword fight to a wrestling match would use the average of his skill 16 sword and his skill 14 wrestling.

Yes, realistically, there should be more risk in turning a sword fight into a fist fight -- but this is cinematic combat, and in the movies, the hero rarely gets hurt at the moment when both sides loose their swords at the same time!

How We Fight

Of course, things would be boring if we abstracted absolutely everything away. In this abstracted combat, there are more abstract strategies you can take. The listed effects are not the only implications -- they very much effect what stunts are possible and can modify the difficulty of changing the combat paradigm.

Defensive: You focus on defending yourself, not on defeating your opponent. Double the time per contest.
Complete Defense: You aren't trying to hit your  foe at all! multiply the time per contest by five, but on a success you do not do any damage.
Offensive: You are in a hurry, more urgent to get this fight over with and with less regard to you safety. Halve the time per contest.
Rushed Offensive: You are urgently attacking your foe! divide time per contest by five but roll at -1 to your attack. 
Intensive: You are sinking a lot of energy into this fight. spend 1 or 2 FP to get a +1 or +2 to your next roll. Your opponent can tell you are doing this, and may choose to spend FP of their own in response.
Mobile: You are taking full advantage of the ability to retreat. Increase your effective defense score by the amount that a retreat would. However, your foe may choose to leave or pass you at any time.
Tricky: While you appear to be fighting with the intent to defeat your opponent conventionally, you're actually maneuvering him into a position you want him -- perhaps backing him towards the edge of a cliff, enticing him under a waiting ally hiding in the rafters with a rock, or faking a wound so you can use it later. This is a contest of acting, tactics, observation or whatever, but it isn't free -- making this attempt gives a -1 to the contest.
Multiple Attack Vectors: You are using non-optimal attacks to get in hits. you get a +1 to your contest, but any success by 2 or less is a hit with a limb, pommel, sheild bash or other non-optimal striking surface. To use this the character should have brawling, boxing, karate, shield, or other appropriate skills within 2 of the primary weapon. 
Targeted Attacks: If its really necessary, you can aim for a specific location. Divide the penalty to hit by three, round normally, and subtract it from your combat advantage. Or just re-figure the combat advantage.

Multiple Foes

Multiple worthy or higher foes are treated as multiple fights -- but the foe ganged up on has to pick a foe to hurt! a success on a different roll just buys him breathing time. A pair of foes can try to get a bonus to their attacks if they coordinate: Each combatant uses the lowest of their and one other allies tactics skill. rolls are at -2 if the allies are not familiar at fighting with one another, and -4 if they are also from completely different combat traditions. It is opposed by the target's tactics skill. a success gives a +1 to the opposed rolls. only one roll is allowed per 'situation'. A situation changes when the terrain changes, a new weapon is adopted, or the situation changes in the favor of the side seeking to reroll (no going from three attackers to two in order to reroll failed attacks!)

Analysis

We were hoping to make combat more cinematic, and have fights take both more time in game and less time for the players. I think I've accomplished that goal. Experienced players may experience some loss in power, but that's a function of removing an aspect of the game that the player is good at, not the character. Results should be roughly the same in terms of winner or looser if the combat paradigm doesn't change.

 One major aspect is missing from the system: dealing with mooks. This is complicated and involved enough that it deserves a post of its own: the system will feature opposed tactics and soldier rolls and focus on how many mooks you have to deal with at a time.

While I focused on swords, this system may be just as appropriate for gunfights in some genres: The gun character says "I'll go hold them off.", and then instead of going to an intense 30 second scene where he guys through enemies, we get cuts of a war of maneuver, aim, and rate of fire. That system has a lot more tactics in it, and probably needs the mook system to be fully useable.

I hope you enjoy this system, and I hope it tweaks your fight times in ways that are useful.