Combining Melee and Brawling

[Mamatried]

[garhkal]

[pakman]

I have no idea how to make this short....but will try...

My personal experience side;

As someone with experience in both hand to hand, and melee weapon (martial ars, some boxing, actual strip fencing, historical combat, and stuntwork/stage combat) I feel while there are similarities - (foot work, reading an opponent, balance, etc.) but they are very different (forms, movement, reach, parrying methods, blocking, blade control etc.).

Others have articulated this better thane me.

From a GM experience side;

if it were a system with 20 or so skills, I could see them being the same - melee combat, or close combat - and the specifics could be specilizations.

Such a system with few skills, each skill means a lot more (savage words, dnd 5e, mythic d6, etc.).

If it were a system with over 60 skills - I feel they should be different.
As such a system has skills that show greater distinction from one another.

Now, having said this - I have merged the parry into the attack skill in my game (melee parry is done with the melee skill, brawling parry is with the brawling skill, etc.). However, I keep melee and unarmed separate.

Also...a possible un-intended consequence
Fewer skills mean each point of skill increase is more valuable - if we consolidate too much - there may be a need to reduce the number of CP between adventures.

Honestly, I think they should be separate - but that is just me.

What works for your game, is not my game (unless you got better snacks, then maybe I should be in your game....but I am off on a tangent here...).
_________________
SW Fan, Gamer, Comic, Corporate nerd.
Working on massive House Rules document - pretty much a new book. Will post soon....

[Mamatried]

I see this from a game mechanics perspective and in that there is actually no difference between armed and unarmed close combat, the only different is the weapon damage added to damage.

Any and all the "techniques" we see be them for unarmed combat or armed combat we have much if this covered under the varuous marital arts that spesifically have these thechniques.

But as one who learned HEMA I can tell you I can "wave" a sword, and even look good doing it without being at all combat effective, aka I know many techniniques or seeminly but I do not know how to implement them in actual combat.

So with brawling unarmed being on Hit STR Damage, and STR+X with some glove types.

We then have in Armed melee STR + WEAPON Damage, so I can not see the need to have this being 3-4 skills.

Now to cove the intricacy of marial Arts techiques we have these covered in the Martial Arts supliment, and I have seen much if the debate go on the marial Arts aspec, the knife fighting if you will rather than fighting with a knife, becuse those two are in fact different.

And if we look at any form of attack other than the very basick punch, strike, thrust, and swing, then I am sure we have convered the most basic ones and we add in the damage for the weapon, and once we want to do some riddick moves or some bruce lee jumping we do thins with the maritla arts as in 2REPU which covered most if not all of advanced hand to hand, both armed and unarmed.

that being said Brawling should not be a STR skill but a DEX skill as it really is irrelevant how strong you are as to you Chance to Hit, but it doe have a significan effect on damage

[KageRyu]

[Grimace]

I've done some work on concentration of skills, boiling them down to the basics. I came up with a basic set of skills that can be used, then focused in on more specific skill classifications.

With that said, I came up with the distilled version as follows:
Under STR:
Weaponless Fighting - fighting with your hands, arms, feet and legs. Encompasses everything from wrestling to boxing, to fist fighting and controlled styles of fighting like karate

Under DEX:
Melee Weapons - related to any hand to hand weapon use, such as blades, blunt weapons, piercing weapons, axes, flails and other such things


Under my distilled skill list, I have 3 skills in Strength, 10 skills in Dexterity, 2 skills in Constitution (yes, I broke that separate from STR to avoid the bullet-proof Wookiee syndrome), 5 skills under Charisma, 21 skills under Intelligence, 10 skills under Perception. That's all the things.

For a Star Wars setting, only 37 skills (out of 51) would be used.

So, yeah, you can distill down the skills to much more bare elements, but if you do you run the risk of having every character look the same after a short period of time. I avoided this by adding another layer to the skills, called them "focused" skills, and then going even one level further into expertise and masteries. This gives players to ability to have more specialized skill focus, or become experts or even masters in their field.

That gives each player character the ability to be quite different from others, even with the limited skill list.

If you don't allow for that granularity in your system, you're going to end up with advanced characters all having a lot of the same skills around the same levels, and not a whole lot to make them distinct from other PCs of the same experience.

[garhkal]

[Mamatried]

An alternative could of course be to combine melee combat and melee parry into one skill, Melee

and brawling parry and brawling into one skill Brawling.

and while brwaling is a stregth skill to me it make very little sense as strenght imo impacts how much dama ge you deal, not you ability to hit to me this is mobility and thus dexterity.

I can not see a withlifter having a higher chance of hitting than a taxi driver, but I can see a major difference in the outcome.

I would move have both brawling and brawling parry under same attribute, being str or dex. and then have the 2 skills

Str- Braling ( combined brawling and brawling parry)

dex-melee (combained melee combat and melee parry)

[Ninja-Bear]

I can certainly see Melee and Melee Parry being folded into one skill and the same with Brawling and Brawling Parry since that is the way Lightsaber skill works. I previously moved Brawling to DEX and created Brawling Damage to STR.

[Ninja-Bear]

[Mamatried]

[pakman]

A lot of good commentary here - and some differing opinions for sure.

However, I would go back to the initial statement which started it...

[Darklighter79]

[Mamatried]

I can see a good argument for Brawling and Bralwing parry being merge into one Brawling Skill.

I can not for the life of me see that you do not block (which is a parry) and move and more when you fight even if you are a trained brawler or not.

I can say the same with melee combat and melee parry, having one and not the other makes little sense.
and yes you may be better defensively than offensively, however I also think mich of that can be and should be added to the weapn used.

I will say it is the weapon not you defensive skill that is the main defensive diffence betwen the quarter staff and the dagger........here we have reach.

I can see that some weapons have a +X parry bonus in addtion to STR+XD+X damage

So maybe trather than combing the 4 skills we can look at combining brawling and brawling parry, and melee combat and melee parry into two skills Brawling and melee.

[KageRyu]