One of the most common questions that new players ask is what they can do to defeat a certain warrior from another team who always attacks first and beats their own warrior before he can get an attack in. Attacking first in a fight is called "jumping" your opponent, and it decides the victor in a majority of fights between two offensive warriors. By offensive, I mean Strikers, Bashers, Lungers, Slashers, and Aimed Blows, although any style can be run offensively.
In this article, I will teach some of the more common things you can do to make your warrior get the jump.
Part 1, the setup: To design a fast warrior, you must take into account Decisiveness skills. Decise is gained from only three statistics: Wit, Will, and Speed. Of these three, Speed is the only stat that has a large number of Decise skills in it. So if you design a rollup with a high Speed stat and/or a high Wit and Will, it will be fast.
Styles are also an important consideration. Strikers, Bashers, and Aimed Blows start with more Decise skills than any other style. Slashers and Lungers have slightly less, followed by Parry-Strike, Parry-Lunge, and Wall of Steel. Total Parries and Parry-Ripostes have very low starting Decise scores.
Each style also learns Decise skills at different speeds. Strikers learn Decise the fastest. Parry-Strikes also learn it quickly, and Bashers learn it reasonably well. The other styles fall into the "don't count on learning it unless it's your favorite learn" category.
Part 2, the strategy: What you put on your strategy sheet drastically affects your chances of getting the jump.
Offensive effort: As high as possible (10). The more your warrior tries to attack, the more likely he is to take the first opportunity offered him.
Activity level: As high as possible (10). The more your warrior moves around, the more chances he will see to attack.
Note that running at these levels will tire your warrior out very quickly, and your warrior may not fight at his best. Most styles prefer a much lower activity level as their "favorite". But this article is about getting the jump, not fighting efficiently. :)
Kill Desire: Kill desire is one of the most intangible factors in Duelmasters, but one of the common theories is that each number of KD corresponds to a certain skill, maximizing that skill. Seven is supposed to be the magic number for Decisiveness. Try it and see if it works for you.
Tactics: Obviously, the Decisiveness (D) tactic increases your Decise. Other tactics may increase your Decise, like the Bash tactic, but they don't increase it as much as Decisiveness does.
Armor: None. Nada. Zilch. Armor weighs you down. Even if you have the ability to carry a large load, you will still be faster running naked. Of course, you will take much more damage if you get hit, so you'd better make sure you can put your opponent down before he hits you back. With this strategy, you either win big or you die.
Faster weapons: Lighter weapons are faster than heavier ones, but there are certain weapons that are considered to be "faster" in general. Warhammer and Hatchet are some of the best. Dagger and Bare Fist (FI) are probably the fastest, but fighting bare-handed is dangerous.
So you've designed your warrior, probably a Striker or Basher with a good speed, wit, and will. You're running him 10-10-7 Decise with no armor and a Warhammer. And that same enemy warrior *still* outjumps you. If that's the case, he's probably running a similar strategy and just has more Decise skills than you. So you have one more trick up your sleeve: the Responsiveness tactic ('S' in the defensive tactics section). If your opponent is using Decise and you use Response, you will probably win. If your opponent is not using Decise, you will probably lose. It's like a rock-scissors-paper relationship:
Decise beats no tactic; no tactic beats Response; Response beats Decise.
There are some other minor factors in getting the jump that are beyond the scope of this article. Hopefully this will give you a better idea of how the warrior who attacks first in a fight gets chosen.
-- Captain K., manager of Men of the Sea in DM-12 and assorted others