Melee Academy: Expanded Melee Weapon Defaults for GURPS

I don't think it's actually possible to learn to fight in one way, without learning enough to help you fight in others.* The fact is many concepts, principles, and abilities overlap.

Fechtbuchen and Japanese martial arts schools are a good example of this - you don't spend X years working on unarmed, then X years working on swords, then X years working on spears, then X years on knives - taking 4X years. You spend X years on swords, then fraction-of-X on spears, then even-smaller-fraction-of-X on knives, etc. - and you learn much of it concurrently. Or you learn unarmed for X years, then when you add weapons you find the odd choices of the unarmed moves are actually perfectly sensible if you expect to be armed, instead or in addition. The footwork overlaps (if it's not actually identical, which it often is). The fight awareness overlaps. The principles are exactly the same. You don't re-learn it all from scratch. There may be differences between culturally different styles, but within a culture, or a broader system, it's rare that you aren't better off with some basis of combat training when you learn another.

GURPS goes a ways towards this with defaults - but really, all weapons should default to all weapons in some fashion.

A quick-and-easy fix for this is to give every melee weapon a default to every other melee weapon at -5 if they don't have one already.

This effectively makes a weapon skill a substitute for DX for most weapon skills.

For example: Conrad is DX 13, with Broadsword+6, for Broadsword-19.

That gives Conrad Broadsword-19, Shortsword-17, Rapier-15, and all other melee weapon skills-14.

Any holes in this I'm seeing?

I think this may go a short distance toward addressing a larger issue. In my opinion unfortunately, GURPS also assumes skill development is linear. A guy with 8 points to spend can learn Broadsword at DX+2, or Broadsword at DX+1 and Spear at DX+1. But that same guy with 48 points to spend on weapons who puts it all in Broadsword gets Broadsword @ DX+11. If the guy wants two weapons, say, Broadsword and Spear, those 48 points split evenly get DX+5 in each skill. Nice, but he's substantially better off in actual play if he does the former, and needs to put in real work to make the latter approach make any sense at all.

But in real life, it's much easier to get from "beginner" to "very good" in a series of weapons, even 2-3-4 of them, than it is to get extremely advanced in just one. It should be easier to get multiple skills to DX+5 than one skill to DX+11. Learning more takes more and more time, it is harder and harder to find practice that is challenging enough to improve you, and even those improvements are marginal and mostly show only against other masters . . . sometimes. The longer you spend on something, the longer the time you need to spend for each increment of improvement. High-level practicitioners of styles are often the ones who most benefit from cross-training in another style, which, in GURPS, is merely taking points from the style you want to actually improve unless the core skills are all identical. All that does is make "cross-training" taking Broadsword from someone who calls it the blade something different.

I don't have an easy solution for this. It's something that is more systemic.




* I realize that there are differences between styles, stances, etc. I could go on forever about them, but for all of the differences in footwork, fist positioning, stick usage by style and length, etc., etc., there are fundamental similarities. It can be hard to teach another, different stylist not to use what they know from another style in this one, but it's not like it's harder to teach an expert than a newbie . . . it's just different. I reject the idea that knowing too much of X messes up related skill Y. You wouldn't take someone who speaks a couple languages and say they should struggle more to add a third than it is for a new learner to learn a second.