Full defence / parry / etc effectively got a nerf in 6e, the way I see it. Is anyone else bothered by this? Anyone else thought of a houserule to mitigate it?
When I last mooted using 6e's action economy backported to our 5e game, one of my players' characters was a physad mildlyoptimised around full defence (he had Agile Defender and, umm, some physad ability stacked on top of that.) Under 5e, he'd typically be sacrificing his 2nd or maybe 3rd phase to turn on full defence, then have a stackload extra defence dice against every attack for the rest of the turn.
In 6e, this gets nerfed two different ways.
Firstly: in 6e, losing 1 Major action per turn is 50% of his potential attacks, as opposed to losing 1/3 or 1/4 of his phases in 5e, so the cost - in terms of reduced opportunity to act - has gone up.
Secondly (and more seriously): under 5e, he can keep his option about using defensive interrupts until he needs them, as he can always take the initiative hit later during the turn. Under 6e, if he thinks he might need a defensive interrupt later, he has to keep actions back - and if he was wrong about that, those actions will be wasted. It becomes a pretty painful choice for a combat character acting on phase 35 to decide to hold back fully half of his actions for the entire turn in case things turn nasty when the group of gangers who rolled 8 get a go. And if the combat character didn't need defence after all - well, now, that action he saved is wasted.
Perhaps that risk/reward calculation is a good thing for some, but it bothered the crap out of me, and I couldn't either make myself not care or find a way to fix it. So that, on top of having a character in play who would be a bit broken by it, was enough to make me kill the idea.
Has anyone thought of a houserule to fix this?
