New Skill Idea: Choke

[Desertman]

You could just use the neckguard as a tool to strangle someone with....by pulling on the back of it.

My assumption is we are going for a blood choke and not an airway choke.

The reason I assume this is I -think- the choke skill would be basically a quick knockout skill designed to take someone out swiftly with stealth.

A blood choke can put someone out in six or seven seconds.

An airway choke could take A LOT longer to put someone out. I've never choked someone out with their airway before, but, I would imagine it would take about as long as the typical person can hold their breath, since you are basically just making it so they can't breathe. They would also fight, A LOT more. The beauty of the blood choke is that by the time the typical person realizes the real danger has nothing to do with being able to breathe, their brain is already foggy enough that they stop fighting and go limp.

That being said, if you pulled on their gorget/collar/neckguard to choke them, you wouldn't be applying the proper pressure to the correct arteries to perform a quick blood choke, you would be applying an airway choke.

That being said, you couldn't blood choke someone through neck armor. Even a heavy leather collar would pretty much prevent it from being applied properly unless the person applying it was incredibly strong.

[Synthesis]

I dunno, I bet you could still put a triangle on someone with a stiff leather collar.  A leg triangle, especially, since it generates a lot more pressure than a rear naked choke.  But Zalanthans doing BJJ seems kind of weird.

[Desertman]

I dunno, I bet you could still put a triangle on someone with a stiff leather collar.  A leg triangle, especially, since it generates a lot more pressure than a rear naked choke.  But Zalanthans doing BJJ seems kind of weird.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I don't want this skill. I think the Sap skill pretty much covers its real purpose, the end game is a knocked out opponent either way.

[roughneck]

I would not be eager to attempt a flying triangle on a person holding a bone sword.

[MeTekillot]

I would.

[evilcabbage]

Be prepared to have your leg cut off, Tekillot.

[Synthesis]

That's funny, because...

"Jujutsu is a Japanese martial art and a method of close combat for defeating an armed and armored opponent in which one uses no weapon or only a short weapon."

[Is Friday]

Japanese Jujitsu is primarily throws and is more similar to Judo, is why. I think a hip throw/axe stomp combo is incredibly useful against armed opponents while you are unarmed. I've used this during sparring. Sometimes it works, sometimes you get stabbed.

[Withered Ocotillo]

The problem with this proposed ability lies more with the subdue ability than anything else, imo.

Gather round the campfire for a story in Armageddon history.


Once upon a time (back to 1991), the subdue skill allowed you subdue a target in pretty much the same way it does today. It's been a very, very long time since I played with the subdue code back in 1991, but there have only ever been two changes to that code that I'm aware of.

The first code change was allowing agility to play an added role when defending vs subdue, whereas I believe it used to be all strength in its first incarnation.

The second code change (and it took just over 10 years for this change to happen - this was a very heated back and forth debate on forums for years) was a change in the way subdue allowed you to draw a weapon. To go into some explanation:

The original subdue code allowed you to subdue someone, and then you had the ability to draw a one-handed weapon if it was already sheathed on your body. I.e. you could only use the draw command. This was the equivalent of "pulling a knife" on your opponent's neck while holding them.

The grab and pull a knife idea seems perfectly reasonable and realistic from a real life perspective, which is one of the reasons it took so long for this code to be changed. The two sides of the argument were "playability" vs "realism", but after I thought about this issue long enough (and I've had years to do so), I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a question of whether drawing or not drawing the knife was playability vs realism, but rather it was the subdue code itself that should have been under scrutiny.

If anyone has played Harshlands MUD (not even sure if it's still up), you might be familiar with the subdue code in that game, and how it breaks the process into many steps. There are grapples and tackling, tumbling, tripping, double collisions that harm both PCs involved, and all sorts of interesting layers to the code that don't determine the fate of a character in a single dice roll. The process is spread out into multiple rolls during the struggle. Furthermore, the Armageddon single subdue roll does not take the target's preparations into account (such a drawn weapons, spiked armor, RPing standing on a table/boulder, etc). For this reason, any ability that increases the lethality of the subdue ability (in its current form) threatens to make the subdue skill too attractive as a method to fully minimize the coded defenses of a target.

While the current implementation of subdue is less abusive in 1v1 scenarios after the draw-kill option was removed, it is still plenty abusable when the attacker has another PC helping out. For this reason, my opinion is that a choke skill (or any skill that empowers subdue in a 1v1 situation further) is not a good idea until the subdue code has some changes made.

Necksnap is the exception, though.

[RogueGunslinger]

+1 to that post.

[X-D]

I agree...and also want to know if Ocotillo was a different Ocotillo at one time.


Mostly because I am just always happy to see anybody with a start date in 91 or 92. There really is not many of us.

[CravenMadness]

Would love to see something like this as a hg only racial or something hilarious...

Also further ideas for hg racial 'abilities' ...

shove - stumble target
shake - after target subdued, shake to empty living target of loose objects.
yell - induce 'ringing ears' echo that's an annoying few tics and maybe messes with languages.

[MeTekillot]

I think the HG racial "land an unarmed hit and target is unconscious" is plenty enough.