My Take on Evaluate

After +Jason Packer posted the following:

Assertion: The Evaluate maneuver is utterly useless if your skill exceeds that of your opponent, and is dubious at best if your skill exceeds 10.

A discussion followed about how to make Evaluate a useful combat option. Not too long ago I had a discussion with one of my players on the relative uselessness of Evaluate. "Loosing" a turn or more was just not worth the bonus.

After playing around with many different ideas for Evaluate (a per-based contested roll, an option for the Wait maneuver). I decided that most of these add more complexity and still don't do enough to make Evaluate more attractive than other combat options.

Here is a simple option that tries to give Evaluate more value:

For each second of evaluate you get +1 to your attack and +1 to defend against the evaluated target (both capped at +3). Additionally the target is -1 per turn (max -3) to defend against.

So "sacrifice" a turn to gain a small defense bonus, but also a greater chance to hit (and not be dodged/parried/blocked). This might be a bit "overpowered" but taking 3 turns to get the full bonus, while someone else gets to make 3 attacks seems fair to me.