Someone is trying to grapple you and you have a dagger in your hand.
Can you parry "his hand"? Or is evasion the only way?

Wow! Good question...

I would say that you could indeed parry it if you have "Grappling" as one of your own maneuvers. That just seems to make sense to me. OTOH, many grapples rely on the target trying to parry them IRL...

Man, this could get complicated.

A "defensive grapple" would be the best option, IMO, leading to a throw or something...that's what you would probably try to do in an actual fight. I think.

So my totally arbitrary ruling is:
Yes, if you yourself have the grappling maneuver in one of your non-default proficiencies.

Optional variant rulings are:
-Yes.
-No. Do a defensive grapple instead.
-TROS is broken and sucks! Let's play Sorcerer instead.

Heh. I'm in a good mood, I guess.

Jake

I think the point he was making was to "parry" with a hand-length weapon, such as a dagger.

In a situation such as this, I'd have you roll to attack, instead. If you successfully attack his hand with the dagger, then it works like a parry, and does damage to the hand, as well.

Based on my experience with Jiu-Jistsu (yes, I know it's not really the same kind of thing) and Greco-Roman wrestling, I'd say that both parrying and defensive grapples are viable options, under the right circumstances. With that being said, If you have reach over your opponent why not just stab him?

Yet another comment to be taken with a grain of salt :-)

G

Parrying a grapple?

Bah humbug. Ignore the grapple attempt and hack his arm off. After that he'll be 'armless (groan) and regretting the attempt in the first place. If you miss, so what, that means you probably would have missed the parry anyway.

That's if you have range of course. If he has range, what the hell are you doing? How did he get into hand range? Full evade and THEN hack his arm off. <Repeat sad "armless" joke here>.

Brian (in a funny mood today).

Why not use a counter?
That way you can be counter-productive...
:D

Hi!

I would let him parry with his dagger of course! And if sucessful count it as an attack against the part of body which comes fisrt in contact. The hand I think.

StahlMeister wrote: Hi!

I would let him parry with his dagger of course! And if sucessful count it as an attack against the part of body which comes fisrt in contact. The hand I think.

One thing, Brian..

As this is considered a defensive action (he's grappling you, and you're parrying, ie defending) you're probably not going to have initiative. So unless you buy initiative, he may toss your ass around before you ever get a chance to strike. That's why you shouldn't ignore the grapple. It's hard to hack someone's arm off when you're striking the ground with all the force they can put behind the throw.

Yeah, naturally, but I'm relying on the fact that he's not in the right range for a grapple. Plus he's a pussy. :-)

And hey, a grapple is a two step process. All I'm risking is that he gets the set up on me, I'm not going to actually be hurt this exchange, even if he succeeds.

Brian.

Most likely I'd just roll a normal parry, and work it out as usual. That is, if the attacker is left with some successes, the grapple succeeded, if not, you held your weapon so that he couldn't close range. If you rolled, say, two or more successes more than he did, decrease one success from your total and apply the rest as a hit on a/the grappling arm(s).

I don't have practical experience, but this seems workable at least from the game point of view.

Actually, the two Activation Costs given for grapple (2 and 4, respectively) are for set-up grapples, or grapples without a set-up. If he's willing to blow the additional CP, he can put you on the ground without the normal waiting period required by law.

Once he's paid those 4 dice, AND paid the range cost, AND put enough dice in there to be sure of putting me down, he's better be one farking good grappler.

Besides, I'll know if it's a set-up or straight up grapple, and I said I would do that in the case of a set-up :-)

Brian.

Actually, though, there's an interesting point in this...

Most parries in weapons (that I'm aware) are actually counter-attacks, often aimed at the attacking weapon. With most weapons this results in simple deflection or something of the sort, but I would actually say that if it's an arm or something of the sort coming in that a weapon could parry by making an attack against the incoming fist/leg/grapple, and that while it would be rolled as a parry for sake of TN, it would carry damage just like an attack.

THoughts?

Jake

My uninformed take on the subject is that I'd have the one parrying a grapple attack with a weapon roll parry as usual. If there's a tie, then the defender has handled his Trusty Implement of Messy Deah(TM) is a manner that prevented the grappler from coming close enough to get a good grip. If the defender wins, I'd subtract one from the MoS, and if there's still successes left, treat the rest as a succesful attack against the attacking limbs. (One of the arms, most likely.)

Does this make sense?

I'm a real Riddle of Steel neophyte - about to start playing in the next couple of weeks, only read the quickstart - so I may be missing really obvious stuff. A few questions:

Is there any reason why you wouldn't always drop red vs an unarmed opponent? Conversely - would you ever do anything but drop white going unarmed vs armed?

In other words - are there many situations where someone might be able to attack with a grapple where the weapons guy hasn't already made a mess of something?

From what limited personal experience I have unarmed grappler vs armed guy pretty much equals grappler loses unless the grappler is a long way superior to the weapons guy or the weapons guy makes an egregious error (which two are often connected).

Ian Charvill, there might be some rare circumstances where the guidelines you suggested wouldn't work, maybe when time is a concern (for one way or the other) or some such. But most, yes, that's usually how one would usually act. Though of course the grappler might try his luck on advantage. However, if you're armed and your opponent isn't, I would think that the ideal course of action would be pretty clear - hit him with the weapon and be done with it.

As for your point on the relative difficulty; all other things being equal, the armed guys will pretty much always win over the unarmed grappler. If he didn't, I'd think the system would be pretty wonky. I mean, would you like to go unarmed and try to wrestle a guy with a sword? I sure wouldn't!