Comic Strips

Looked up HEMA and found Bartitsu:

🤣🤣

Yeah, my experience as the "good guy" is that, eventually, you go down, no matter how well you use lack of unison against the "bad" guys. But, it's also the case that you can whittle them down if the rules of the session remove them if you would have removed them from a real fight. Not HEMA, Japanese martial arts, some kali, etc, but the same basic idea.

It's one of those situations where you have to be perfect, or near it, every single move, but they only have to be perfect once. But it is possible to come out of it "alive", if injured (and likely beat all to hell for real).

If you're talking about grappling then yes. But most fights in movies don't go there because it looks boring. If you're grappling and everyone grabs a limb and dog piles that is pretty hard to beat.

That sounds like the Warlock trilogy by Larry Niven (Not Long Before the End, What Good is a Glass Dagger and The Magic Goes Away) except in those it wouldn't recover.

I've actually been in situations similar to this, irl, a few times.

Once a gaggle of piss drunk teenagers pulled up to a convenience store I was at, as I was leaving.

The car is obviously one of their parents', its a current year Escalade and there's no way they're beyond high school age.

Oh, and the car has serious front end damage, fresh front end damage, including a front wheel that is busted so bad that its 60 degrees off of the other wheel's alignment.

These idiot drunk kids were just in a car accident.

I tell them they need to get out of the car, call somebody to pick them up, you idiots are gonna kill someone.

They decide they don't appreciate that.

I start to call the police, but am interupted by them all falling out of the car, something like 12 of them packed into a car there's no way more than 6 can be in legally.

The 4 or 5 males start to circle up around me, I retreat into the convenience store.

Narrow Aisles.

Better to have max 2 simultaneous attackers than 4.

Also the store has many more cameras inside.

Two of them are actually drunk/ballsy/high enough to swing at me, and I just tank the hits, blocking, until the store owner grabs a gun, tells em the police are on the way.

At that point they pile back into the car, telling me I'm gonna be on WorldStar tonight, the ones not ballsy enough to fight were recording it on their phones.

They then pull out in an extremely haphazard manner, almost taking out a gas pump, then peel out and drive off at 50mph in a 25mph area, front axel cracking and popping as they do so.

I checked WorldStar 2 hrs later, after being interviewed by the cops.

They never posted shit.

Pussies.

Try Prototype.
While it tends to be easier, you will still be, on occasion, if you are bad enough at it, be pummelled to the ground by multiple large pink thingies.
The first release, not the second one.

Sadly, I've never played it, but for me, the most prominent example is ... maybe not all, but certainly most of the Assasins Creed games.

A while back I argued that modern AssCreed doesn't really count as a 'stealth action' game in my book, the way MGS or at least the first 3 Splinter Cell games, or Hitman games, hell, even the Thief series...

...because the turn taking enemies ruin what I view as the main concept of a 'stealth action' game: If you go loud, if you get caught, 95% chance you're gonna die or fail the mission, unless you are either extremely lucky, or extremely talented.

AssCreed ruins this because if you're even moderately competent, you can dispatch a stupid number of guards, and/or easily lose your proverbial wanted level.

This person fired back that its just as hard as Dark Souls.

To which I fired back: No, one of the primary reasons Dark Souls is so difficult is that if you get a bunch of enemies aggroed onto you, they do not have a collective AI that governs and limits them as a group, they'll all act individually, they will very often attack you while you're in the middle of focusing on one particular enemy, and you don't get any psuedo iFrames the way that AssCreed any many other games will give the player while you're mid attack animation, instead your attack anim will be cancelled and you'll instantly switch to a stagger anim, or die.

Now that I think about, I think even GTA5 has a more 'realistic' melee combat system in this sense; If you're in a group brawl and the enemies are actually all aggroed to you, they'll also attack you simultaneously, and the whole euphoria / intelligent ragdoll system will also basically cancel your attacks... though they can also accidentally injure their buddies and do other shenanigans.

Hit the nail on the head.

The game is designed around making you feel like Aragon or Legolas, taking on dozens of orcs in stylish fight choreography, and I love every second of it.

No, they are talking about Pokémon

Different games do it slightly differently, but yeah, I'm just trying to throw a big net over any melee combat system where a group of enemies attacking you has some kind of modified or collective AI that makes it so they very rarely attack more than one at a time, and / or are not really capable of meaningfully interupting a player mid attack, or successfuly striking/grabbing you from another angle you while you're blocking/parrying another enemy from another direction.

Kenshi + mods actually allows you to just easily change the number of enemies that can attack you (and any other npc) at the same time, I think its just a number in an ini file somewhere, not directly in the options menu.

Combat is all one v one by default...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1257520021

But with this, now it can all be 5 v 1, or 1 v 5, for every NPC and the PC.

I think you can dial it up higher, but it becomes insanely difficult early game, because there is no overarching system that limits groups, all individuals will just attack you from all angles, going only by their own stats, no group limiting system exists.

I actually chatted with this mod maintainer (iirc, she didn't originally make this mod, but whoever did handed it over to her, as that person retired from modding), and she told me its also possible in Kenshi to turn friendly fire back on, but you really shouldn't.

Apparently that was the default in early versions of the game, but so many combat anims have such wide AoEs, basically, that combat between two large groups involves just a fuckton of accidental melee friendly fire with swords and such, that it just got switched off.

I think what you'd need to address that would be some kind of new AI mod that basically blacklists certain combat anims while in a combat formation like a testudo or a phalanx... but you'd also have to make the AI actually do combat formations.

As far as I know, nothing like that exists, no idea if its possible or not.

Much better example of one vs many