Problem defining martial arts

[Shreyas Sampat]

hopefully I can capture the sense of flow in combat that will make people realize that combat IS dynamic and not static, where the line between offense and defense blurs, and where ultimately the mind should be nowhere in particular.

Here is a possibility...

You are making the player and the character do radically different things; the player has to assemble, from a set of unrelated options, a movement that attains his current tactical goal. Meanwhile the character is in some tactical and physical position, and constrained by those, he needs to decide, very quickly, how to react.

I suggest that moving away from this "combine components to generate actions" thinking could help. Let me sketch out an alternative possibility.

Suppose that you have a set of tactical relationships similar to what Jasper suggested:
Neutral position
Fighting close
Fighting far
One retreating
One advancing
Both retreating
Both advancing
Groundfighting
One immobilized
One controls the other's movement
Both bound by the other
&c.

Now each fighting style contains a set of transitions which move you from one situation to another. Crucially, there are no transitions that move from one situation to the same situation!

Some of the transitions are fairly uninteresting: Retreat, Advance, Stand, etc. Others contain some action; maybe "Spider Cutting Form" moves from any static position to "I am advancing" and also contains an attack. "Falling Wren" might have a bunch of attacks, but then it places you into the situation where you are bound by your opponent. &c.

This means that you need a basic set of transitions and some methodology for expanding them into idiosyncratic kung fu, and in general a lot of work, but I think that the shift from "The character takes some action" to "The character derives some effect" is valuable and productive.

[TheTris]

I think that last suggestion is brilliant :-D

[Harlequin]

Pick up and read the game Swashbuckler! by Jolly Roger Games.  While addressing an entirely different genre, it captures a lot of what it feels like you want, in a mechanism which is tight and smooth.  (It's also essentially incomplete, really it's just a combat system pretending to be an RPG, but hey - that's what you want it for anyway.)

In short the way it works is that they've broken down swordfighting into a set of twentyish maneuvers - things like "fast slash" or "feint".  Both players select a maneuver, reveal, and cross-index the two; the result is a modifier to their rolls on 1d20.  Winner's intention is successful, doing damage as listed under the maneuver.  The cute trick is that each maneuver also has a list of things you can do next which is quite constrained.  For instance, Lunge is statistically fairly powerful... but the list of things you can do next is basically "Recover stance" and maybe a weak parry, and that's it.

The interesting thing is the way it brings sequences of maneuvers to the forefront of tactical thinking.  The bonus on an appropriate defence is high enough that the defender will almost always win that roll, so it's all about timing and positioning, waiting for the other guy to trap himself into a situation where he can't properly deal with what you throw at him.  All it would take for this to be wuxia-compatible is basically to give names and visualizations to these sequences, emergent from a set of maneuvers designed for martial arts.

Anyway.  Just a pointer to a source that has done something kind of like what you're talking about...

- Eric

[yesala]

The last comment had a really important bit - your action determines what you can do next.  The character will be affected both by the response of his opponent, and the position he has put himself in.  If the last move was "headfirst dive at the other guy's feet," then there's no way that the next move could ever be "roundhouse" - an intermediate step (such as "get back to feet") is required.

I'm not sure how this would be handled - the first thing I thought of was trees of action, where each potential move has a limited number of next moves listed, to be modified by opponent's actions.  This is where a more nebulous system, like the intention based ideas up above, would simplify things quite a bit, simply because your lists could be much shorter!

I also am not afraid of complicated combat systems, but the thing to be careful of is that your system doesn't turn into a tabletop game, or that the drama isn't utterly wiped out because it takes ten minutes to do one round.  

Cheers!  :)

[Dauntless]

hmmm, very interesting suggestions so far.

There was a nebulous thought in my brain that it was the relationships between postures and moves that was important...which was how the idea of a matrix of moves first came into my head, but I couldn't seem to figure out how to flesh out the idea.  I had a vague notion of postures before, but I think Shreyas hit it on the head that it is the blending of intention and implementation within the movement of actions.  It hadn't really occurred me to combine movement and technique together (I had even gone so far as to seperate the two into Intercept and Maneuver categories which would imply that one could either focus on striking/grabbing, or moving in/out of combat range).

The suggestion that the sequence of moves is important also hadn't occurred to me.  Obviously if a fighter winds up on the ground, it's going to be hard to do some techniques.  Trying to account for the gazillion possibilites might be too difficult to officially categorize, so this may have to be left up to GM judgment on the issue.  Still, it'd be nice to at least give rough guidelines.  In some ways I had accounted for this with tertiary combat elements.  For example, some moves have a Follow element, which means that the move can only be attempted after the completion of another successful technique (often after grabs).  I think if I want to include, it will be absolutely necessary to indicate which limbs are involved in the technique, and what angle of attack they are used in.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Trying to account for the gazillion possibilites might be too difficult to officially categorize, so this may have to be left up to GM judgment on the issue.

I was talking about this in #indierpgs, and Nat(han "Paganini Banks)e suggested that, basically, there are only so many ways the human body can move, and only a small fraction of these are useful fighting techniques.

This seems obvious, but wait!

We know that martial arts have distinguishable techniques and postures. Generally, what demarcates these techniques are gestures that aren't important to the efficacy of the fighting form. The postures are, like, places between techniques that shorten the route to particular techniques. Sometimes a style just doesn't teach a particular technique.

This can lead to a pretty simple accounting of how the techniques (which are, at the moment, finite in number) are connected, and then you can differentiate between styles of combat by saying, "This style does not learn techniques X,Y, or Z. It has these stances..." and then you find out what the stances are connected to.

Finally, for your arcane techniques, you can say, "This is a Punch," or "this follows techniques as though it were a Punch, and techniques follow it as though it were a Backfist." If you disallow techniques that define whole new linkage arrangements for themselves (easily justifiable, since you have already stated that the body only moves in particular ways), then you have a nice hard cap on the complexity of the system, but you're still able to play it to different levels of Bruce Lee > Zhang Ziyi.

[Mortaneus]

My main suggestion is this:

Make a set of cards for each combatant.  Each card represents a given choice.  On the card are the possible results of that choice, based upon what you picked and what your opponent picked, plus a list of valid next choices.

[M. J. Young]

I've been trying not to say, Multiverser does that, because I'm not sure it does everything you want the way you want it to do it; but I'm posting this because it does several of the things you want, and could easily do several more.

The primary point I see is that it permits players to create moves on the fly and attempt them during combat.

It divides moves into categories based loosely on intent--moves that do intensified damage, moves that provide tactical advantage, moves that overcome tactical disadvantage, moves that block or parry attacks, and similar sorts of things. It provides baselines for these and ways to modify them to match whatever the player describes. Thus if the player says, "I'm going to do a partial split so that my torso falls straight down, and then make a straight jab for his groin" (a maneuver someone actually used in play), the tools exist to determine how likely this is to succeed and what it will cost the player to attempt it.

Once a character has created a move, it becomes part of that character's abilities, and he can use it again whenever he wishes. Repeated use or practice of the same move improves the character's ability with that move, and so makes it more effective. He can still create a new move at any time. There is a degree to which relying on moves you know well is more dependable than creating new ones, but new situations can call for new moves.

Defensive moves can work in any of several ways. The most common of these is to act as a penalty against attacks/damage (the single roll attack and damage system means that any penalty to the chance to hit is inherently a penalty against the maximum possible damage that hit can do). Although the system does not specialize these in the main, that would not be difficult to do.

You were interested in distinguishing the guy who punches well from the guy who kicks well. That's not inherent in the system, but can easily be included. As written, the system easily supports a character being better at maneuvers he already knows which are based on a particular body part, and it supports setting up styles that favor particular body parts (in numbers of attacks permitted with that body part). It would be simple to provide individual characters with bonuses on a specific kind of attack which would apply whether the attack was known or newly created; it's just not specified as a normal variable in the rules.

It doesn't have the move-versus-move matricing of something like Burning Wheel or Riddle of Steel, but such complexities are easily added if desired. It's just a matter of more narrowly defining the maneuvers.

I hope that helps. As always, I'm glad to answer questions about it here or by e-mail.

--M. J. Young