Intermission: Pulling Aggro

I really like playing tanks. Big things, covered in armour. They make loud noises, they can take a beating, and they're a great distraction for squishier things smaller than them that need to do more technical work. The main role of a tank in a fantasy role-playing game is tying up enemies while the DPS does the big numbers - for which they need to be able to soak a lot of hits, and to appear to be a bigger threat than the rogue, wizard, or whatever class is dealing the damage. The first role is easy to fix - lots of armour, lots of HP, lots of defences. The second is more complicated.

In video games, the ability to appear threatening is sometimes approximated by an "aggro" statistic, whether that be visible to the player or not. Enemies have to decide who they want to fight, so they rank player characters by proximity and threat, among other things. (The wizard deals a lot of damage? Better go kill him.) The tank, even though he doesn't necessarily deal a lot of damage personally, often gets abilities that increase his effective damage for the purpose of attracting enemies. This might be by putting an aggro multiplier on his damage output, or giving him abilities like a taunting shout that increases his aggro directly. Without these abilities, enemies might just run past him and whack the highly-damaging wizard, assassin, etc, and everything goes to pot. This is especially important in MMOs, where the battlefield is often simple, like a big circle, so natural chokepoints are few and far between. Tactics dedicated to maximising the party's damage output while keeping the DPS characters' aggro just below the tanks' can get very complicated, and require a lot of practice, timing and skill. There's a reason WoW guilds can be pretty hardcore. 

The rationale

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (and its offshoot, DFRPG) has a dedicated tank class, the knight, but it's been left fairly unloved over the years. The barbarian, the swashbuckler and the thief have each received dedicated books (the Denizens series). The other "mundane" classes, the martial artist and the scout, already get pretty great power-ups, like chi skills, or the ability to shoot two arrows at once, multiple times per second. The most knight power-ups I've found in one place are in the DFRPG books, where they get extra armour, the ability to break allies' mental stun, sacrificial parries and blocks, and better shields. None of this is bad, per se, although the list is exceptionally short compared to, say, the swashbuckler's - but none of it stops enemies from simply running past them, or loosing crossbow bolts at the wizard. 

Before launching into my power-up idea, a brief thought on battle-map brain. It's exceptionally difficult to separate your knowledge as a player (or a GM, as the case may be) from your character's knowledge. This is tough outside of combat; inside combat, it's near-impossible. The swashbuckler just overextended with an All-out (Long) - there's nothing stopping the GM from having the orc do a full 180 and whack him with a stick besides the honour system. Most people have never been in a brawl, let alone an armed line fight. How hard can it be to notice that the guy two hexes over just did an All-out Attack? This exacerbates the problem of needing the tank to pull enemies, because without any mechanical limitations on the units, the temptation to do what is tactically ideal from the bird's eye view is always going to be there. Even with the best will in the world, knowing what your character knows is hard. 

The power-up

So, a knight power-up to pull bad guys (heavily based on the Taunting rule from After the End 2: The New World): 

Your Mother was a Hamster

5 points

Prerequisites: Born War Leader; Tactics at 12+.

Your overwhelming presence on the battlefield means that enemies find it difficult to ignore you. Take a Concentrate manoeuvre and roll a Quick Contest of Tactics against the higher of the opponent's IQ or Will.

Modifiers: -1 per opponent you're trying to taunt; increase the enemies' effective score by the range penalty for that distance. A foe already toe-to-toe with a party member (i.e., one that has already attempted a melee attack or defence) is much harder to distract - they get +5 to resist. 

If you win, that foe attacks you preferentially for the remainder of the combat. A tie has no effect on his behaviour. If you lose, he targets a more vulnerable party member! Regardless of the outcome of the quick contest, if you critically succeed on your roll, he takes an All-out Attack manoeuvre on his next turn. As a side benefit, enraging your opponent means you can read his moves more effectively - add 1 to your Parry against foes you have taunted!

Advantages: Extra Option (Taunting) [1]; Skill Adaptation (Taunting is possible with Tactics) [1]; Enhanced Parry 1 (Weapon skill of choice) (Only against taunted opponents, -40%) [3].

Final thoughts

I've made a few modifications to the rule in After the End, all of which I feel need justifying: 

• The skill change to Tactics both allows the knight to increase the ability on-template, and encourages the purchase of Born War-Leader, which I've always felt was under-utilised. There's no reference to different enemy types for simplicity.
• The ability to taunt multiple opponents is a big change, and really matters for hordes of enemies. It's no good taunting one goblin when the rest are rushing past you to shank the cleric! The effectiveness decreases as you spread your taunting, but is fairly limited by how many enemies the knight thinks he can fight anyway. 
• Adding a range penalty is important to stop enemies charging across the battlefield just to mess with the knight, but using the Speed/Range Table means that taunting ranged opponents is possible (if difficult). Other options include applying -1 per yard of distance, like Song of Humiliation, but that would heavily penalise an already risky roll. 
• In melee, distracting an opponent is as good as a kill - if he turns around, he'll eat a hit to the back of the head. This needs to be penalised to prevent stupid enemies from presenting their squishy brainpans quite so readily. 
• The Enhanced Parry was added to round out the numbers, and to improve the knight's survivability if he attracts a horde of giant ants. 

One modification I didn't make, but considered, was dropping the option for enemies to resist being taunted with Will. This would make animal opponents (IQ < 6) exceptionally easy to taunt - the aforementioned giant ants would resist with a base IQ of 1! This is pretty justifiable but would trivialise encounters with animal enemies as they all crowd around the knight while the swashbuckler turns them into a fine paste - or the wizard Glues the floor. You'd need a lot of foes to counter this, and that can be an issue for playability. Letting them use Will means a knight at the minimum requirements for this power-up will struggle to taunt more than one (average IQ) enemy at once, and only then at close range - but this might be fine for the big heavy that would squish the wizard.