How do you handle Martial Arts..

[Fallon Kell]

[garhkal]

Whats one of them>.??
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[Fallon Kell]

[garhkal]

Ah..
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[dph]

Wow, great timing guys, I was going to ask the exact same question for pretty much the same reasons...

I'm a pretty relaxed GM and my players are pretty responsible so I tend to go ahead with optional rules like Martial Arts, however...

I have a Wookie with 4D strength, 5D Brawling +2DMartial Art(S). I can't say it's been unbalancing but when you can use MA anytime to make a basic attack, you're pretty much guaranteed to hit every time even when you take a lot of actions (and at 5D damage that's pretty rough)... And that 'basic attack' can be increased at half the CP cost!

And that for me is the biggest problem; that you can USE MA as a basic attack. If you specialize in Blaster:Carbine, or Pilot:X-Wing or even Brawling:Boxing you are very good but only with a very specific tool.

So reading this great thread, whilst I do like the idea of MA as an Advanced skill (particularly how Rerun941 has set it out) I'm a bit more like jmanski in that I like a cinematic approach and I've been thinking that it could be kept very simple, essentially treating MA as a slightly more flexible version of Brawling.

So I'm thinking I might use MA like this:

Martial Arts is the base skill.
Your 'Style' (as presented in the Spec Force guide) is your specialization.
Also as presented in the Spec Force guide you receive a 'maneuver' with each die above the MA base.
However, importantly...
You use MA to make your basic attacks (as you might with Brawling).
But you use your total specialization (MA + Specialized Style) to make your maneuver rolls.
I should point out that I roll Parry in with all melee/Brawling skills.

I don't think this way is 'better' way to do things but I do think this works best for me in my campaign!


I have an additional question though... I found the Spec Force Guide a bit vague as to whether your 'maneuver roll' is an 'additional action' to the attack incurring a MAP (like drawing a weapon) or is it an additional but 'separate' roll made with the exact same dice total as the MA basic attack? (like a jump as part of a move) What's your call?
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[jmanski]

[garhkal]

I have had a few gms who played it you rolled only brawling when NOT doing any special maneuvers..
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[jmanski]

and that's the way it's supposed to be, i think
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[Law]

Alot of our rules have been leaning more toward d6 Space so this may not help everybody, but here's what we use...

To preface, we're using the Strength damage from d6 Space, so to figure melee STR damage, drop pips in strength and divide the full die code by two and round up. At least off the top of my head I am pretty sure that's the rule. So a wookie with 4d+2 strength would do 2d unarmed before weapons or claws. We may have modified some of the melee weapon damage ratings as well, not sure without the books in front of me.

Now for Martial Arts, we made it a 10 cp advantage. Once you buy it, it allows you to figure your unarmed STR damage based on your brawling (now martial arts) skill instead of by your strength attribute. As a GM I would probably also cut some slack when defending against an armed opponent in melee but we haven't got that far into it.

I imagine this isn't going to be a whole lot of use with the RAW, but will hopefully give you guys some ideas on other ways of handling it.

I have a whole sheet of advantages we've made up, some based on feats from the various other Star Wars RPG incarnations, that I'll have to post up for you guys. These mostly came about to give the non-force-sensitives some cool abilities. Everyone started with 20 cp worth of advantages in my campaign and force-users pay 20 cp for force-sensitivity.