But you shouldn't get immediately silenced. Strangling is already good enough. You shouldn't be able to completely kick the legs out from under someone in a single round of combat.
I think if the choking has gone on long enough, you shouldn't even be able to talk. I understand people with balance and such, but most of the time, a shout still won't save you, so what's the big deal?
But that's my opinion, no offense to anyone. I couldn't bother reading every single reply as this is the first time I've seen the thread.
If it's okay to shout while you're being strangled, you're kind of ignoring how vocal cords work and when they don't. Kind of overruling biology, or maybe it's psychics, I suck at science. But it's just ridiculous in my opinion.
So when you manage to free some space, you take a breath and use that moment to scream bloody murder in the middle of it.
Problem with removing that is that strangle + drag into no sic means that you now can do whatever you want with the victim and not fear anyone finding out. While every other way of combat has more risks.
For realism
and the argument is what, so it doesn't make it as hard to kill someone? If you can grab someone and strangle them it promotes RP, because if you take you time and can do more stuff while killing them, not to mention it's a pretty slow way to kill someone, almost every other method is much faster.
I also gotta say @Jotun makes a good point. Strangling can be an incredibly slow way to kill someone, that also puts pressure on the killer, that someone will notice.
Grapple already has balances. You pass checks to initiate and checks to hold on. the balance could easily be after a given amount of rounds and your endurance depending, your speech becomes garbled. So instead of “Halllp” they hear “Unnnnnnnf” and can then decide if it is a call to help or if someone is banging a cat splice nearby. A boring choke death, no sic signal, being able to be choked out to begin with all fall into the “too bad” category to me because that is just your opponents proper planning or UE investment over yours.
Point I wanted to make was, it is SUPPOSED to be pretty easy to choke someone out, whether it is with the intent to kill or knock them out, you drift into unconsciousness and you're no longer conscious enough to speak or move.
It's a strong move, and a very useful tool. However, it's literally worse than straight combat in almost every circumstance. There are niche use cases where it's superior to combat, but generally, I find myself using grapple more as an RP tool than I use it for anything else.
I get that it's frustrating to be in a situation where you feel like your character is not in control and/or is doomed, but I can assure you, if you've been successfully grappled and choked out, then you were almost certainly fucked to begin with when it came to getting red texted.
As for shouting, I think that simply masking the speech as garbled shouts would be sufficient.
"I get that it's frustrating to be in a situation where you feel like your character is not in control and/or is doomed, but I can assure you, if you've been successfully grappled and choked out, then you were almost certainly fucked to begin with when it came to getting red texted."
That is not true for quite a few IC circumstances where grapple works around things that otherwise would've easily saved your PC. I won't spill the IC beans, but grapple got my PC killed in few spots where under direct attack, it would be 99% certainly alive.
It's the ability to move people around that makes it powerful, not the ability to choke them. Grabbing someone and dragging them somewhere secure to fight/torture/threaten whatever is a very strong move and often used. That said, I guess you can't drag someone while choking them. It's true that in many cases, if you're able to grab someone and hold them for the duration of a choke, you could probably just kill them in outright combat.
But not always. Imagine you're bare-handed going against someone with a sword, or a gun. If you can grab them and choke them to death, that at least saves you from getting shot or stabbed, although there are other options as well. The point is, grabbing is good.