I've been doing some more thinking about a martial art where you take down your opponent with one move. Does anyone want to discuss it? (I'm not posting any salient information unless I get some bites on this.)
(Doing Therapy)
Is that really an entire martial art, or more like a maneuver within a larger skill?
I would say start with real martial arts that already do that. Iaijutsu, for instance.
Well, I used to work with a black belt that had a real Johnny Lawrence complex. (If he isn't in jail, I'd be really surprised) I was thinking about how this martial art would defend against his style. Scott and some others were talking about an entirely defensive martial art. How much more defensive can you get, than ending the fight before it can begin?
I would argue that that's the most offensive you can get - destroying your opponent preemptively. The epitome of defense would be preventing the fight from beginning at all, perhaps through diplomacy or evasion.
Well Scott, as the saying goes, "The best defense is a good offense." It was just something I was thinking about.
This is kind of how I was thinking about it. An attack on the person's chest would knock the wind out of them. The same attack, placed mere inches away, would break their collar bone, and the same attack mere inches away from that would crush their Adam's Apple and kill them instantly.
A groin kick, depending on how you positioned your foot, would miss their family jewels completely, and just lift them off the ground. Position your foot a slightly different way, well, I don't want to go into that.....
A nose punch. A downward stroke would break their nose, an upward stroke would drive the bone into their brain and kill them instantly.
Any one of these attacks is either damaging or lethal, and would end the fight instantly. It would be things along these lines.
In game terms, this sounds like a heavy reliance on hard-hitting special maneuvers, especially B7@3 Intensified Damage strikes. In order to be sure of dealing high base damage, these maneuvers would have to take penalties, most likely defensive penalties - after all, if you've dropped your opponent, who cares if you've dropped your guard? However, this would have the effect that if your "one strike" approach fails, you're left in a bad position. This means that it's probably not a very effective style for the amateur, requiring experience and skill before reaching its intended effectiveness.
If I were to design it, I would go Slow Offensive Weaponless (RF1), kick style, +20 att SM, +40 att DM, +15 defensive penalty (added to opponent attack success); the maneuver list would be an array of base Dangerous and base Lethal B7@3 Intensified Damage attacks with a variety of steep penalties of various kinds, so the practitioner could choose the one with the drawback appropriate to the situation. No tactical moves, no parries, no defenses.
This would not be a good choice for fighting multiple combatants.
No tactical moves, no parries, no defenses.
Well actually, the defenses turn into attacks. There's a move I've seen done where you block the punch, then wrap their arm up in between your arm and your body. A quick twist of your body, and you snap their arm at the elbow. That would certainly end the fight, I'd think. The defenses turn into attacks in the same move.
This would not be a good choice for fighting multiple combatants.
That I agree with you on. The other thing is that the person would have to be extremely disciplined. You'd really hurt somebody with this. Not the kind of thing you would want to use in your average, day to day drunken street brawl.
Or perhaps I'm just helping to design a host of new special attacks for the game. Who knows?
(Doing Therapy)
O.K., a few notes on this.
First, any base lethal attack has the potential to be "that's all she wrote"; that's one of the reasons why they have detriments. Figure it out:
- Because it is a maneuver in a martial arts style, it's already +DC which makes it fatal. Figure an ordinary person has a 1@5 BRA and a 1@5 MSV (average of his 1@5 strength, 1@5 hand/eye, and 1@5 intuition). That's +30.
- The ordinary person he is trying to hit has a 1@4 TV (average of his 1@1 density, 1@5 agility, and 1@5 intuition), for -14.
- Since our attacker knows martial arts, he has a 7@ bod bias, for +14; this cancels the -14 TV, bringing us back to 30.
- He has to have at least a 1@1 SAL, which makes 41% chance to hit.
- For a roll of 41, the damage is 21 intensities; thus we have a damage potential of 1-21.
- The ordinary defender has a 1@5 damage value (average of 1@5 stamina, 1@5 resistance, 1@1 density, 1@5 will power).
- Of 41 in a hundred successful hit rolls, 12 will do at least 15 intensities of damage (any roll of at least 30).
And there are also paralyzing and incapacitating maneuvers such as you describe--injuring a person and immobilizing his arm in the process.
So this kind of thing is covered.
--M. J. Young
Didn't mean to imply that an amateur at this wouldn't be killing people; all I meant was, on the 59% chance that you missed (well, 39% in the example style), you'd best hope that your opponent doesn't have a knife to go with his +30 attack sit-mod.
Impressive numbers. I knew it was deadly, but I hadn't worked it all out.
Edit: And actually, as long as I'm running numbers from the example style, the +40 damage mod means Joe Shmoe's minimum damage with the base lethal maneuver is twenty-one intensities, so anyone with a level one damage value (which is nearly everyone) will be killed by any hit that lands - in this case, 61% of his attacks. The names 'lethal' and 'fatal' weren't picked from a hat.
It was just something I was thinking about. Perhaps we could design some new special maneuvers out of this, but I don't think a martial arts style would be likely to come of it.
I did not mean to suggest anything you said was mistaken, Scott. I was addressing the question John seemed to be raising, about whether it was possible to design a "style" around the notion of killing an opponent on the first strike. I could and perhaps should have noted that the sword-based style of the Samurai in Dark Honor Empire alpha has such maneuvers, although they are weapon-based. I know John is more interested in killing someone with his bare body parts (hmmm...that actually doesn't sound as innocuous as "bare hands"), so I was addressing that.
John, you are certainly welcome to consider the design of martial arts maneuvers for use in your own game. For my part, I do not design "in a vacuum", as it were--I only work on martial arts styles and maneuvers when I have a purpose.
You can attribute that to one of my "battle scars", as it were. Many of the styles in the Style Collection of the Martial Arts in Role Playing Games site were originally designed by players in an Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game I was running. I had designed a few of these within the context of the game--creating styles suitable to specific player characters and the adversaries they would face--and my young players took to creating such styles as a game in itself, bombarding me with perhaps half the styles originally included there. Many of them have never been used in any game, as far as I know, because they were created mostly for the fun of creating them.
When I use styles, I tend to use those that are there. When I create new worlds that are going to be published, I will create styles suitable to the scenarios--but then I will copy them to the web site. I do the same with most of the special maneuvers I use in styles. The big reason for this is that the web site acts as my reference book: if I want to look up a maneuver or a style, I know where to find it.
I would thus rather use maneuvers included in Summary of Special Maneuvers, because I can find them there when I need to look. I have added a few maneuvers to the site when they were created as part of a game or world, so that I would be able to reference them there, but I do not always do that because it's a lot of work to update the site for something so small. I prefer to match "newly created" maneuvers to something already there when I have control of the creation process; I just won't limit players to those things already listed if they have interesting ideas of their own.
So I'll gladly entertain the creation of any maneuvers you develop as part of your character's play as long as you do not bombard me with scads of them in rapid succession along with other aspects of play, but I will probably give little attention to the development of maneuvers just for the sake of playing with the system. As useful as that is (and yes, I will give my thoughts on it to help people learn how it's done), it seems a poor use of my time relative to what else I might be doing with it.
--M. J. Young
Understood MJ. I hadn't considered that, if I'm designing them, someone else already has. Probably quite a few times.
In that case, I'll just leave this here for anyone that wants to develop anything from them, and forget about it.
(Doing Therapy)