MJ, and anyone else, I have no formal fighting style. I fight with whatever works. I will bite, I will pull hair, I'll grab someone's genitals if I have to. I am apparently decently skilled in wrestling. I wrestled in a no-holds-barred match against a former Green Beret who was built like a brick wall and he said later "Oh, you're a pretty decent wrestler." (You'd have to hear the tone of his voice, it was high praise from him.)
How do you gauge something like this on the Multiverser scale?
(Doing therapy)
First, let's establish that it is possible to fight without having any skill at it at all. You can punch someone, or kick someone. What you have, though, are base annoying attacks. They usually cause temporary discomfort. You rarely ever injure someone if you're not skilled.
You can overcome that by doing it enough that you attain a professional level at the attacks. This gives you the damage category bonus to damaging. Note, though, that a trained fighter getting that same bonus already has a bonus from annoying to damaging for his style training, so this gives him a bonus to dangerous. You can also get a damage category bonus for a 2@ martial strike value, which you get when the average of your intuition (knowing when and where to hit), hand/eye (landing the punches where you want them), and strength (having the force and speed behind them) reaches that extraordinary level.
You can also learn maneuvers in the absence of a style, and so for example have practiced a technique of hitting someone where it hurts, or twisting a limb, or some similar attack. These might have a higher base damage than annoying, but not having the style bonus you don't do it as well as someone who knows it within a style.
Then again, not having a "formal" style does not mean you don't have a style. If you've been in enough fights, you've probably developed your own style. It probably is not as good as those that have been honed by experts over centuries, but it probably gives you the same kinds of bonuses as a style. That's up to the referee to determine, but it's been done. You would get the damage category bonus, probably, plus you would get modifiers, and maybe multiple attacks.
Multiple attacks means you've learned a way to move faster than most people, so that you have a better chance to land more than one attack in a minute. That sounds stupid to people who do not have the background in the theory of the early role playing games (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons), because you think you can punch someone at least once every five seconds. But can you punch someone effectively that often whose skill is equal to your own? Probably not--because you don't think they can punch you that often. You're blocking, dodging, looking for an opening, glancing off an arm. One shot in a minute that might land is not an unreasonable number of attacks in a minute. Someone who is trained knows how to get more attacks in--if that's part of his training. On the other hand, his training might be focused on other aspects: how to use your hand in a way that does more damage, how to knock opponent attacks out of the way, how to target particular vulnerable points, how to recognize when an opponent is off balance.
It is perfectly reasonable to analyze your "informal" style in the same terms as you would a "formal" one. Does it make you fight faster, or not? Are you more focused on landing your attacks, or on making those attacks hurt more, or on avoiding your opponent's attacks, or on making those attacks hurt less? These are the variables we manipulate.
And really, it's no different doing this with your personal informal style than it is with "real" or "formal" styles. In those cases, I ask the same questions. I've got very little martial arts training. I know a few things about how styles work, and with that information I try to come to grips with how any individual player's style works. In fact, it's more difficult sometimes to deal with someone with a real style, because nearly every trained martial artist I have met who knows only one style has trouble seeing its weaknesses--he sees the weaknesses of all the other styles and why his style is able to exploit them. The guy whose style is "barroom brawling" or "backalley fighting", on the other hand, usually can get to the answers to my questions pretty quickly.
So that's not at all difficult.
--M. J. Young