CyberGeneration - Combat Speed

Combat is one of those things in an RPG that tend to make you pull your hair out, well it tends to make me pull my hair out. Nothing kills the feel of a game of CyberGen than combat, after combat, after combat. It might work for other games, but when you're trying to get a good bit of teenage angst, you want to combat to be quick and dirty.

The current system for CyberGen, Saturday Night Skuffle, is a streamlined version of Cyberpunk's Friday Night Firefight. Now there are some things that FNFF does well, but one of the things it can do it take a long time, especially in melee combat, particularly between two skilled people. The main reason for that is there are a roll where the only benefit that you get is a lack of damage, in the game it's called a defense roll. That means when you get attacked, you don't do anything other than get out of the way with a good roll. If you've got a bunch of people who are doing nothing but rolling well on the defensive side of the battle, then it's going to take forever to finish up.

What I'm going to introduce here, is that in hand to hand combat there is going to be the same opposed roll but the winner is going to come out doing damage, even if you are the one being attacked.

This isn't a unique proposition. It has been used in other games, and I think it would work well here in CyberGen since the stated goal is to make the system get out of the way as fast as possible.