#224 – Automatic Dodge

Breakfast puppies.

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Hey man, you're listening to the Glitter Boys. Yeah.

The coalition soldier takes aim at you. Presses the trigger, it comes flying in. What do you do? Oh, I'm a juicer. I roll auto dodge and I got a +12. Wait, what?

What?

I don't think you have a +12 to auto dodge. Are you sure? Yeah. So today we're going to talk about auto dodge, probably one of the most misunderstood little additions to a lot of sheet— a lot of character classes, in my opinion, because of how you calculate the bonuses. what it's actually supposed to do, and what happens if you fail your auto dodge. Do you then get a regular dodge and then a parry and maybe a roll? And how do you handle it at your table?

So quick review in Palladium's active defense combat system. When you get attacked by— let's just go with a melee attack for now. It's the easiest one to handle. When you get attacked by someone swinging a sword, Your typical options are to try and parry or deflect it, which if you're trained in hand-to-hand combat, you can just do for free. Or you can try and dodge it. Now, if you dodge it, it's gonna spend one of your attacks per melee, or your action points as we call them. But automatic dodge is a special ability that some characters will have that lets them attempt to dodge without spending an attack.

And that is a crucial difference. There are some things that cannot be parried, and you have to either dodge it, take it, maybe roll with impact. And so the advent of auto dodge became a really powerful ability, I think is what I want to call it, because it's not really a skill. It's, it's, it's a, it's very powerful.

Combat option.

Combat option. There we go. It's good.

Now, I believe the first instance that I'm aware of was the Juicer in the Butts Edition.

Yes. And it's not clearly spelled out in the Butts Edition. It infers this ability and the whole line reads in the Juicer, Under their juicer powers, it says under item 4, gets an automatic parry or dodge on all attacks, comma, even from behind/surprise. And many people inferred that as you get an automatic parry or an automatic dodge. And I think that's actually what it says. Now, from there it gets interesting. Because there are no bonuses for automatic dodge spelled out.

Yeah, it's essentially the assumption that we had for years was the juicer is exceptional in that they get the normal dodge option, but it doesn't cost them attack. So dodge for all the normal modifiers. The term automatic dodge wasn't its own modifier at the time.

Right. And then in the Coalition War Campaign, they decided that through extreme training, the Coalition Commando OCC, which at the time was the only one that could take it, got hand-to-hand commando. And unlike running around without any drawers underneath your pants, you basically got to dodge automatically. And this was kind of a big deal when this came out. Alongside the best drawn armor of any Coalition suit there is, you got auto-dodge as a hand-to-hand.

Am I going to leave that in the episode or not? We shall see.

The stare you gave me was great. And so, but it actually helps define what this is. It's a little more clear about what this hand-to-hand method does, which I think helps a lot of people because I believe— I can find it.

Is that when it made it its own modifier?

That's when I think it made it its own modifier.

So I know that automatic dodge had definitely been addressed either in a rifter and/or a FAQ posting on the website, if not at the beginning of like, as Palladium has been known to do in the past, the beginning of a future book, like maybe the Rift sourcebook or something. Probably. What does that mean?

Well, it is in the GMG, and I'll get there in just a second, but in the Coalition War Campaign Book 11, it says automatic dodge on page 72. Automatic dodge. The character must roll a dodge as usual, but the dodge maneuver does not use up the melee attack/action. It functions just like a parry. This is a purely defensive move. Note, this is how automatic dodge is always supposed to function. Okay, cool. And then you go into the hand-to-hand description of what you get per level, and it starts pointing out +2 parry and dodge. Later on, you get automatic dodge at 5th level. Later on, I think you actually, you get a bonus at 11th level or 12th level. You get a +2 automatic dodge. Same level, you get a +1 parry and a +1 dodge. So it clearly is showing you automatic dodge has its own bonuses.

But it still doesn't say that.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't specifically say that. Later on, I think it's in the GMG somewhere, they say the only bonuses you get outside of the specific automatic dodge bonuses are dodge bonuses granted by PP. But again, it's hard to find.

Well, now in the Rifts Ultimate Edition, on page 344, that's automatic dodge. Certain characters and creatures are able to automatically dodge an attack. Without using up a melee attacker action, it is purely defensive move. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Roll for a dodge as normal. The automatic dodge is not an automatic success. It notes it's very very important because I can many times people thought that that's what it meant.

Right? You just automatically dodge.

Yeah. An automatic dodge works just like an automatic parry in that it does not use up any attacks to perform. Bonuses come from the character's physical prowess attribute and any special bonus specifically for it will say automatic dodge. Unless it specifically says a character has automatic dodge, he does not.

Now, if you go into the GMG, the Rifts Game Master Guide, actually one of my favorite reference books for Palladium, on page 33, it basically takes a bunch of the FAQ questions and canifies them and puts them in print. outside of the Rift or outside of the website. And it basically rephrases exactly what that says there.

Actually, technically the Ultimate Edition rephrases what it says in the GMG because the GMG came first.

You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Now, the item that is interesting regarding automatic dodge is one of the questions. Is that if you fail, you don't get to try parry, you don't get to try dodge, you take the hit. It specifically says automatic dodge is an all or nothing, and it refra— basically the question was, if the question— the question regarding automatic dodge, if you have automatic dodge and you roll for automatic dodge and you miss the roll, Do I automatically divert to the normal dodge for the action, or does the failure at automatic dodge just mean it hits me? And it's like, it's the latter. An automatic dodge is the character's defensive counter maneuver to an incoming attack. If he fails at it, he is hit just like a failed parry. Now that— had I read that years ago when that came out, it would have eliminated so many additional dice rolls in some games that I played, because I knew people who would like, oh, I have automatic dodge, and they'd fail at that. Yeah. I'm gonna try a regular dodge and I fail at that. I'm gonna try a regular parry. You're like, no, you can't stack all of those. Automatic dodge is awesome because it doesn't take an action.

So to my group's great merit, we never assumed that you got a whole chain of things to do. The combat rules were always pretty, I think, on the point when they said somebody attacked and then you got to choose how you defended. It didn't say anything about multiple options for defend or multiple defense checks. Like you You either defended or you didn't, and your choice of defense determined what you rolled and whether or not it cost an action.

I may have had a few more munchkins in my groups than you.

Wow. Well, anyway, something to notice that the automatic dodge, as at least as of the Ultimate Edition, very clearly states that it does not apply dodge bonuses from anywhere else that you get them.

Except for PP and specifically stated bonuses that say automatic dodge plus blah.

Now, here's a question that came up in our Glitter Boys Rifts game just this past week during a combat session. The crazy in Ultimate Edition gets automatic dodge. No longer is it limited to the juicer and the commando skill. The crazy now also has it from the beginning of the game. Automatic dodge. The crazy also can take a psychic ability called intuitive combat, and intuitive combat gives dodge bonuses. Now that psychic ability was written before automatic dodge became a codified mechanic. So game masters, does the crazy who intuitively automatic dodges using Intuitive Combat get to apply the Intuitive Combat dodge bonus to their intuitive automatic dodge? That was the question. The call that we made was yes, actually, that makes sense, but it's up to you.

So the Intuitive Combat skill has come up in my games a couple of times. Many players never use it

because it takes a whole

round, right? You have to sit down in a whole round Meditate. And then it only lasts a couple minutes per level, I think. So if you knew that a bad thing was coming up, and it was always one of those ones that you would prep—

Always. That's how it was in this session,

right? I— okay, we're gonna go into combat, we're gonna surprise them, so I'm gonna sit down for 15 seconds and ignore the world and go into this state. Because of that penalty, I would have probably made the same call that, yeah, it would apply to auto dodge because you're already like, you have to have the foresight already to put this in the game or into play.

That was the approach that we took with the ruling. I think it makes sense personally. Again, the intuitive automatic dodge, intuitive combat. I mean, just come on. And the fact that you have to spend a whole freaking round doing it.

Now, rules as written, because it doesn't say automatic dodge, you shouldn't. But I think that's the right call.

Do you think the Crazy should have automatic dodge?

I was really torn when I saw that in the Ultimate Edition. I was like, oh, now the Crazy was always supposed to be juicer analog, in my opinion. It was always supposed to be the juicer and the, and the crazy were the same, were different approaches to get to the same super soldier. And so in some parts of me, it's like, it makes sense, but the crazy could keep living. They just got a little more insane as they went along. Right. Whereas the juicer, they only had 5 years, right? 3 to 5 years, depending on what was going on. And so it felt a little bit cheap to give it to them in the ultimate edition, in my opinion. Like. They didn't earn it, I guess. But that's, that was kind of a personal thought. I'm over it. It wasn't a big deal. But—

I mean, if you think about it, the crazy player earned it more than the juicer player because the crazy player actively has to deal with the crazy side effects in every session. While the juicer's thing is literally just the thing down the road that might not even happen if this game doesn't run long enough.

That's very valid. 100% valid. Yeah. I think when they redid it, they kind of made the Juicer and the Crazy a little bit more on par with each other, just different, which I thought was good. Uh, yeah, it was, it was weird when I saw that for the first time. It's like, wait, the Crazy gets auto dodge now? Oh, okay. So yeah.

I don't like the Commando skill though. I don't think it should be something that you can just get from taking a hand-to-hand combat skill. It's just, I liked it as like a special thing that certain classes could do.

And the CS Commando, the way it's, the way it's written, I think later on they kind of opened it up a little bit, but when the Coalition War Campaign book came about, came out, I think only the CS Commando and I think the SEAL CS Specialist or whatever it was from the original Rifts main book were retroactively given the ability to take it, but it was really narrow. Not many could take it at all.

It's a later thing too, right? They don't get it at level 1.

Um, I think the CS Special Forces could select it at level 1.

No, I mean the automatic dodge.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, the automatic dodge doesn't show up until like level 5, I think.

Okay.

Yeah, so it's, it's definitely not right away, so you got to get some play in. Yeah. Before you get it. So, but the CS Commando was, I thought it was a really interesting way of like, hey, we figured out training techniques to teach someone to be almost on par with a juicer, but not really, you know?

Yeah. Okay.

Cool. Well, yeah, thank you. These little combat delves are really interesting and I hope you like them. And if you do, please come onto the Discord and tell us all about it. If you disagree with our opinions, please come on and tell us about it as well. Come on the Discord, help us build the community and engage with really cool conversations about everything we're doing.

And it would be really awesome if you did it while wearing a sweet Glitter Boys hoodie, which you can get from Redbubble.

Absolutely. And if you want to support us in other ways, we have a Ko-fi page, which we always appreciate any of the people who donate on there. Help us keep the lights on. And if you can't do that, we totally understand. Maybe leave us a review on Spotify or on YouTube and get the word out about the Glitter Boys podcast and come enjoy everything that we're doing.

Thanks for listening, folks. We'll catch you next time.

Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades. by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies, and I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you. Have a good one.

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys— that's B-O-I-S— and check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time. Bye.