Tbh though, there’s advantages to doing it that way. Disadvantages as well, but the reason it never ends well in movies is a different thing than in reality.
A group of less experienced fighters can still wear down and “beat” an individual more reliably than rushing in all at once, particularly if they haven’t worked together in that way much.
You do sparring in martial arts, and you’ll eventually train against multiple partners. If they don’t work together well, you can play them off of each other, even if they’d whip your ass 1v1. Even a concerted rush to take you down can fail if they aren’t coordinated as well as coming as a group.
Thing is, it doesn’t take much coordination for you to end up with your ass in a cheese grater.
I’ve seen a few videos of HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioners trying out 1 vs many situations. Call the 1 the “good guy” and the many the “bad guys”. You often see “bad guys” tripping over each-other, putting them off balance, and making them vulnerable to the “good guy”. OTOH, it’s absolutely exhausting for the “good guy” because they have to keep on moving extremely quickly so they don’t get surrounded.
The “good guy” is free to swing wildly because everyone nearby is an enemy. The “bad guys” need to be careful because there’s one target and lots of other allies you don’t want to hit.
The movie portrayals are almost always BS, showing one “good guy” easily keeping track of every bad guy, even the ones behind him, and smoothly countering every single attack. On the other hand, a coordinated attack is harder than it seems, and it is realistic that if every “bad guy” attacked at once they’d just get in each-other’s way.
Nice, they say it’s been having a revival lately. I hope that all practitioners are required to wear a stylish hat and a handlebar mustache.
It’s fun that one of the influences is Savate. That’s another fun martial art. The theory is that hitting someone with a closed fist was seen as attacking with a deadly weapon in France, so the sailors (who liked to brawl) developed a fighting technique using kicks and open-handed slaps.
Bully!
That’s the martial art that Sherlock Holmes practices.
(Well, it’s called “Baritsu” in the stories, but most agree that that was a typo.)
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).
The “good guy” being perfect is a big part of what I saw. The “bad guys” can afford to be imperfect because there are so many more of them, and eventually their numbers win.
Also, from what I saw, the tempo of the fight goes way up, which is hard on the “good guy”. Like, maybe in a normal 1 on 1 fight each person makes roughly 1 attack every 3 seconds. In a many-on-one fight the “bad guys” might attack at 1 attack every 5 seconds, a bit slower because they need to chase down the good guy and avoid their own team. But, if there are 5 of them, that ends up with 1 attack per second on average that the “good guy” has to deal with, which becomes pretty frantic.
Overall, I’d definitely rather be on the “bad guy” team, because you’re almost certainly going to win. But, I wouldn’t want to be one of the closest / first attackers because they have to deal with a fresh “good guy” while avoiding running into their own allies, or getting hit by a wild swing.
I did a couple months of Aikido in college and they did sparring against multiple opponents. More than 2 or 3 and they’re really just getting in the way of each other.
Throw in swords, and attacking simultaneously is more of a liability than anything else.
Nope. Ok, a "protagonist might connect one hit, knocking out one attacker. Then, half a second later, six bodies (including the kbocked down person, pile up on the protagonist. Yes, they don’t use any special moves, they just get on top. That’s it.
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.
Yes, i meant real world, and the real world IS boring. You wanted to kick around, but instead you’re just held, and then they can do anything to you, in a really “unbalanced” manner
That’s how most actual fights I’ve seen play out; just a bunch of people rolling around on the floor in an uncoordinated mess, except for the one guy that got sucker punched at got knocked out.
They just know their tropes
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu
I remember a story where their magic system uses up mana in the air, so you cannot use too many magic in one area without needing to wait for it to recover slowly.
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.
Came here to say exactly this :)
Same rule applies to video games, especially third person, 3D, single player games.
So, so many power fantasy games have enemies literally
cueEDIT: queue up to fight you one at a time, only occasionally attacking you when you’re in the middle of taking on one particular person.Less forgiving games don’t do this, or at least do this faaar less, and are thus usually much more difficult and require either stat grinding or finding a more effective strategy.
then you pull them one by one. Imagine that situation in real life - there are 5 thugs sipping beer from 40 oz bottles standing in a circle. You pull them one by one by standing 5,99 m from one of them, to make him aggro. His eyes turn red, he walks in your direction, and the others are like:
-where did Mike go?- I don’t know, but his forehead vein was dilated! He is so jumpy recently, I think he needs therapy
(you repeat that three more times)
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.
I checked WorldStar 2 hrs later
I think they are the ones that should be on WorldStar, considering how they packaged themselves in the vehicle.
This is the correct url:
https://worldstarhiphop.com/videos/
Its been commonly shortened to just ‘WorldStar’ for about 15 years now.
WorldStarHipHop actually started/launched the same year youtube did, and is one of the very few remnants of Web 1.0 that didn’t get completely get absorbed by giant tech corporations.
… And that is because it has basically no content moderation.
Its basically all sensationalist shock videos, its founder described it as the ‘CNN of the ghetto.’
All the modern Web 3.0 alternative video hosting sites run by cryptobro/fascists to ‘escape censorship’… I guess fittingly forget or don’t even know that a Haitian immigrant beat them to them to the punch on that by almost 20 years.
- I don’t know, but his forehead vein was dilated! He is so jumpy recently, I think he needs therapy
Meanwhile Dynasty Warriors.
Shadow of Mordor in a nutshell.
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.
Then “Batman: The Archam asylum” and other similar games could be good for you: you drop in the middle of a group, and distribute it evenly around adjacent walls
No, they are talking about Pokémon
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.
It’s especially stupid in games with ranged weapons.
They queue up. In other words, each one waits for a cue to know when it’s their turn to attack.
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.
They’re just pointing out your misuse of cue, when you probably should have to used queue
Oh.
… whoops!
Arguably, the ‘Burly Brawl’ between 100s of Agent Smiths and Neo has significantly less ‘everyone else just stand around’.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Gizr3er4TYQ
It certainly has it to a good degree, but as the fight gets more insane, especially the all CGI scenes, Neo is actively attacking or warding off 10s of them at a time.
Even before the flood of Smiths gets ridiculous, Neo is attacking 2 or 3 or them at a time, takes multiple punches right to the face, and then as more and more of them flood in, he spends more time trying to avoid being surrounded.
Much better example of one vs many
Check out ‘Jean Claude Van Johnson’.
