[A&A] If You Can't Hit, Grapple

Greg Christopher, author of Ambition & Avarice, posted these tips on Google+ yesterday. I thought I would share. It helps for those who might be stuck in a combat rut. Read on and open your imagination:
This was asked in the Ambitions & Avarice community, but I thought I would share publicly because it says a lot about how people think. It was brought up by [Jim].
Jim noticed that since my monster model also incorporates a very low rate of attack bonus progression, a PC in heavy armor would be very formidable. If your troll (you are running the game) has no attack bonus and the knight has an AC of 22, you are going to be flailing and doing nothing, right?
A lot of times in traditional RPGs, we think of combat as people standing next to each other just bashing away. That's why this seems to be a problem. And I'm not picking on Jim here, TONS of gamers think this way.
But in the A&A rules, you can initiate a grapple with a touch attack. So that knight with a 22 AC is getting 8 points of AC from his +1 Full Plate. That is ignored. So now you are just rolling vs a 14. On a success, you grab that little pipsqueak and begin strangling him. Watch him dance in that shiny armor.
Now his party members might come to his defense. They might jump on you and try to pull you off him. There are a flurry of contested rolls and eventually they end up pinning you down. Then the weakling wizard jumps up on top of you and pours flaming oil down your throat.
Wasn't that more fun than just swinging over and over?
There is a lot of nuance in these old school rule sets. A lot of people don't realize that. This is just one of the nuances in A&A. I hope you can find the rest of them.
Ciao

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