How do you handle Martial Arts..

[ZzaphodD]

[garhkal]

[Anakin]

[Taelin]

Well, it looks like I'm not the only person to treat Martial Arts as an Advanced Skill building off of Brawling/Brawling Parry.

I treat it as an Advanced skill, and for every 1D in Martial Arts, they can select a technique from the list in Rules of Engagement: The Rebel SpecForce Handbook. To activate the technique they roll just Martial Arts, but they roll Brawling+Martial Arts to hit, or Brawling Parry+Martial Arts to block. Using the (A) Martial Arts skill to activate a technique does not incur a penalty for taking multiple actions when used in concert with a Brawling or Brawling Parry roll.

I don't require characters to have both skills at 5D, I treat it like how (A) Droid Engineering is treated in Cynabars Fantastic Technology: Droids with relation to Droid Programming and Droid Repair. You must have one of the two techniques at 5D to learn the skill, and you can only add your Martial Arts dice if you have 5D in the skill.

I've got some martial arts experience as well. I resisted the urge to make each style a separate skill or specialization and keep things relatively simple. Very few NPCs the PCs encounter have these skills, my only "stock" NPCs that has Martial Arts is my Royal Guardsmen have Brawling 5D and (A) Martial Arts 1D to represent their Echani training and my Noghri Warriors have Brawling 5D and (A) Martial Arts 1D+2 for their Noghri arts. Both have Punch as their initial technique, Very Easy difficulty for STR+1D damage.

Making Martial Arts a specialization is way, way too powerful. It gets you all the benefits of brawling, for cheaper (and if using any of the optional MA systems WEG put out; Noghri Martial Arts, Teras Kasi, or the system from Rules of Engagement far more powerful than Brawling). Using those systems as-written I've seen them horribly broken. In an old campaign I ran, I had a PC martial artist using those rules who once managed to break a TIE fighter with a Flying Kick, some pretty lucky rolling, and a Force Point. Force Points are supposed to let you do cool things, but taking down a parked starfighter with one hit from an unarmed attack was breaking credibility to the point I realized that the system needed help.

[jmanski]

I guess I'm in the minority in that I don't see Martial Arts as overpowering.

As to your example: is it realistic? No. Is it cinematic? I think so. I can see Jet Li in a climactic scene using his martial arts prowess to destroy an enemy vehicle.

But it all comes down to how you want your game to be.
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[garhkal]

I think from here on out for my home games, i will push M.arts as an advanced skill
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[Fallon Kell]

I made up more than one martial art advanced skill. They required generally 4D-5D in brawling and brawling parry. They could be added to brawling or melee, and any either parry. Each die you had in one of the arts allowed you to add 1 pip to damage for brawling or melee. I don't remember the specifics of the others. If I dig them up, I'll post them for you all.
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[ZzaphodD]

I have a PC with the Advanced Martial Arts skill (a combat oriented jedi) but with no hard rules.

I was thinking of using the maneuvers from RoE but I have two problems.

1. How to handle which maneuvers you learn given that now its an advanced skill (with low skill dice).

2. How to deal with MA damage, so its not more lethal than a vibroblade (which is the case with RoE rules).
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[Bren]

[garhkal]

[jmanski]

Or use 1/2 Lifting for brawling/martial arts damage.
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Blasted rules. Why can't they just be perfect?

[Fallon Kell]

[vanir]

In our game most players seem to trust my own experience with wing chun, budo taijutsu and kobudo most particularly because I seek at every turn to uncomplicate the mystical aura that popular media culture has ascribed to martial arts.

Yes it is just a specialisation of brawling, and I'm talking the real world here. That's the plain truth, you do not go into combat without the presumption that you will sustain injuries against any opposition no matter how inept. In fact a lot of combat martial arts is about ignoring the potential of injury to succeed with a greater objective (such as winning the fight instead of landing a blow successfully or preventing one landing on you). Combat as opposed to competition fighting has absolutely nothing to do with competing with your opponent and everything to do with walking away while you can still breathe, take a knife to break a neck to put it flamboyantly and being a bit theatrical about it.

In fact military special forces training began during WW2 as combat technicians much more than combat experts, most of their combat training involved trying to keep up with your average thug rather than surpassing him which was all but impossible for a feller who spent most of his career in radio shacks and research laboratories and not on the battlefield learning how to shrug off a bullet. Mostly they just weren't built for combat and that's what martial arts is about.

Wing Chun practitioners were peaceful monks forced to take on professional government soldiery. Budo Taijutsu was developed among forest priests and commoners to have some fighting chance against roving Samurai. Kobudo concentrates on developing aspects of battlefield combat from an "out of the box" perspective and is primarily philosophical in nature. Military combat arts generally relate to taking down unsuspecting station guards who have no idea you're even there, not running at them with guns blazing. The main bonus of martial arts is just the coincidence that traditional practitioners are nerdy weaklings who tend to think much more deeply about everything in the universe than someone who can just pummel opposition into submission if they feel like it.

What you get when you have a martial artist who is tougher than everybody around him is just another thug. This is a fact very, very prevalent among the MA community and I tell you this presumption of combat expertise is sheer delusion. Simple fact is a karate shihan looks just as silly as anyone being run over by a bus while drunk and a drunken priest would be too busy playing with squirrels to be anywhere near the road, and a catholic priest is really no different to a traditional martial artist. This is about philosophy, it is not about The Uber-Deadleh of Mah Teknique, that is the kind of thug reasoning that will quickly get you killed in warfare.

Hollywood supermen are firstly antiheroes and secondly don't really exist.

With all this in mind, the original SWRPG rule for martial arts as a brawling specialisation perfectly reflects my own experience and works extremely well in our gaming.
Here is why: subject specific skill specialisations provide benefits (such as lower difficulty ratings within the field) which you do not get in the generalised field.

For example, you want to know if a particular crystal you've found is suitable for use in a lightsabre and must make a moderate Jedi Lore roll to determine this. Because you do not have the specialisation Scholar: Jedi Lore and are just using your base Scholar skill which you've put points in, the difficulty rating is very difficult at best. For the average scholar it is an obscure piece of information, for someone specialised in Jedi Lore it is only moderate, reasonably common enough information.

Martial arts works the same way with Brawling. The generalised skill does not give you access to the benefits of Noghri martial arts. Nevertheless martial arts in its fighting capacity is a form of brawling, sometimes specialised, just as often an exaggerated claim of being highly specialised and in fact making your way using superior strength or willpower and salesmanship.

I use the same rules as for technological modification if players wish to invent a specialised martial art with additional combat benefits (such as heightened damage). You must flesh out a basic philosophy for the Art, what is it about, what is it based on? You will need to develop some Scholastic specialisation or spend character points to make a Knowledge or Perception difficulty in a succession of developing the specific benefits of your Art. The difficulty rating will be adjudicated using the standard weapon modification guidelines for +1pip to +1D+2 additional physical damage, plus circumstantial modifiers.

In effect you will have to engineer your martial art from scratch yourself, or find a Noghri to train with who doesn't feel like eating you.

Special manoeuvres are a matter of circumstantial creativity and are as available to a general brawler as they are to a martial artist. The benefits of specialising in Rebel Special Forces martial arts in this case is a tabled series of special techniques you can simply reference without having to be too creative as a player. It's easy to get bogged down in round by round combat using this method however, GMs should try to keep the action moving and seek to simplify matters wherever they can.

[BessieKnox]

Since we have a player in our group who has studied Muay Thai since 1998, we try to make sure Martial Arts work pretty close to real-life in our game sessions.

This has caused our GM (my sister) to develop individual Martial Arts for different groups and cultures - Mandalorian Martial Arts, Rodian Fighting Arts, Tusken DeathDance, etc.

The way we do it, Martial Arts is a skill-group on its own, costing the same as any other skill, with the different fighting styles functioning as Specialties.

For example, a character might have Martial Arts 4d+2, and then have Tusken DeathDance 5d (probably a Tusken Raider character !).

We even have one character in our campaign - a female Twi'lek smuggler captain - who developed her own fighting style where she uses her Lekku in style similar to a whip. But it is tricky for her because if she "misses" really terribly she can actually inflict full damage on herself since the lekku are very sensitive.

[garhkal]

If they are so sensitive, wouldn't hitting someone with them cause her pain?
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