DF Felltower merged weapon skills

After a vote - where my favorite option lost! - we ended up merging weapon skills in DF Felltower.

Shortsword and Broadsword merge into one skill (Broadsword)
Staff, Spear, and Polearm merge into one skill (Polearm)
Kusari, Whip, and Flail merge into one skill (Flail)

Ranged:

Knife Throwing and Shuriken merge into Knife Throwing. Shuriken get a -1 to hit without a Perk (Shuriken Thrower) to remove it.

Otherwise unchanged.

This option will likely include 10-point weapon talents. These have not yet been defined. It's quite likely it'll basically be Master of Arms from Delvers to Grow, without the reaction bonus.

This will retroactively affect existing characters, who will have points in affected skills merged. Useless overages will be saved towards a new level, to avoid the usual "Can I buy a new skill with it?" annoyances.

The pervese incentives of I-go-you-go combat resolution for many-on-one fights

I find that RPGs, GURPS included - perhaps especially, give perverse tactical incentives at times.

Take this situation:

You're facing off with three opponents, all armed with similar length weapons to you. You have no advantage of reach or speed to put distance between you and them, or ability to channel them to fight you one on one. Despite this, you manage to put one down, briefly - either through you own attack, or a miss by your opponent, one has fallen down and is unable to fight you effectively. The other two are still armed, dangerous, and close enough to menace you.

The real-world solution is to focus on them in some respect - either defensively or offensively. You don't want to lose track of the fallen foe, especially if said foe has merely bobbled a weapon, or tripped, or otherwise become only briefly out of action. You have two foes to worry about that are potentially lethal.

The in-game solution is to finish the fallen one. Take advantage of the foe's poor situation to finish it off - reduced defenses due to weapon loss or posture, or stunning, or whatever. You need to pounce and finish the foe and make it two on one. Next foe to be disadvantaged is finished next. Rather than priority the most lethal foe, you must prioritize finishing the most helpless foe.

Why is that?

In reality, you don't take turns. You don't swing, then your foes each swing, and so on. All of this is going on at once. A weapon parrying your attack is occupied. A foe trying to attack you is one you need to deal with. A helpless foe is vulnerable, yes, but also the time you take to attack that one - if foes are still in reach - is time your weapon is not spent preventing an attack. A foe can potentially take advantage. In an I-go-you-go situation, however, you have attacks to spend that only impede your defenses if your game system allows you to prioritize defense (A GURPS All-Out Defense.) Even then, you usually don't want that because the upside (better defenses) gives up any chance to reduce your foes' lethal potential.

I think in an ideal situation, I'd have a rulesset that incentivizes more moves that make realistic sense. This is one I've been pondering recently. I don't have a solution for GURPS, but it's something I want to keep in mind as I'm going over rules design for my current game - and for future ones. I'm sharing here so others may ponder in parallel with me.

In Memory of Bob Wall

This isn't exactly a gaming post, but it kind of is. The martial arts community lost Bob Wall yesterday. Bob Wall was Ohara in Enter the Dragon:



He's a gaming connection because that movie very heavily informed my martial arts experience, which of course heavily informed GURPS Martial Arts. Without guys like Bob Wall, just like Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris (who owned a karate dojo with Wall), and other martial arts stars of my youth . . . I don't know if I'd have really relentlessly pursued martial arts. Their willingness in real life to forever branch out - Wall studied BJJ with the Machado brothers - helped keep a continuity in the arts we represented in the book. There was never a clear dividing line between karate in the 60s, kung fu in the 70s, ninjas and kickboxers in the 80s, and BJJ in the 90s . . . there was a continiuity as arts continued to develop, mesh, split, and change each other.

It's a loss for the martial arts community - and the gains and losses there affect what I write and create for game. I need to do a Bob Wall homage . . . maybe I need to stat O'Hara after a quick re-watch of Enter the Dragon . . .

"The Use of Medieval Weaponry," D&D, and GURPS

I was given this book for Christmas. To be fair, I asked for it as I'd heard the author interviewed on a podcast and it sounded interesting.



The Use of Medieval Weaponry by Eric Lowe.

It's basically a primer on the weapons commonly discussed in the existing, written records of martial arts instructors of the time. It's by a HEMA instructor - that's Historical European Martial Arts, called WMA or Western Martial Arts previously. Overall, a good book, and if you're interested in non-gaming weapon use written by a former (?) gamer, it's a good read.

It's the gamer part I want to talk about here.

"The real genesis of this project is in games. When I was a teenager, my friends and I played a lot of tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons. We were storytellers, and we crafted long-form collaborative storytelling experiences that spanned years of real-time, full of intrigue, emotions, and derring-do."
- p. 2

Eric Lowe doesn't mention again the games he played . . . but I'd be surprised if they were not all D&D-based games.

So much of the back-references to games sound very, very D&D.

"When I was young, I was under the impression that shields were rather useless [. . . ] as I could plainly see from my roleplaying games, they offered very little in the way of actual protection (about as good as light armor, so I thought). Why anybody would give up a two-handed weapon just to wield a shield was quite beyond me."
- p. 71

No armor + shield is AC 9 in AD&D, AC 8 in D&D . . . the same as the lightest of armors.

Meanwhile, he quotes Domingo Luis Godinho, the fencing master, as saying, "It is queen."

GURPS pretty much feels that way, too. Shields are so effective defensively that Man-to-Man originally made Block Shield/3 instead of Shield/2, because they were too effective (see the Q&A in Roleplayer #1). But that effectiveness is accurate. They don't necessary work the way in game they might in reality (restricting a lot more targets than just the shield arm and shield hand), but they're a game-changer for defense. You don't give up a two-handed weapon to take a shield, you give up a shield to take a two-handed weapon. GURPS Martial Arts and GURPS Low-Tech had to sweeten the deal for two-handed weapons to make them even a reasonable choice in the face of shields behind available.

So I'd wager real money Eric Lowe isn't also talking about his GURPS days.

Given a choice between light armor and a shield in GURPS, I know my players - and I - would choose the shield.

"[ . . . ] spears hit very hard and very fast [. . . ] this surprises non-fencers [. . .] Perhaps, like me, they grew up with games telling them that swords and axes do more damage than spears."
- p. 182-3

Again, D&D or D&D-like likely here. Spears do 1d6/1d8 in AD&D, 1d6 in D&D. Longswords do 1d8/1d12, hand axes 1d6/1d4 and battle axes 1d8/1d8.

In GURPS, though, a spear in two hands does thr+3/impaling. It takes a bastard sword in two hands, a greatsword, or a longsword in two hands to do thr+3/impaling. It's on par when used one-handed, but that's also the case if you take a second hand off of a spear in reality. It loses a lot - probably more than the +1, honestly.

It doesn't do as much raw damage as a full swing by any of those weapons, for sure, but its wounding potential is much higher given an unarmored opponent or lightly armored target location.

This isn't to say GURPS is perfect - it's not - but it is clear that it's not the game he's comparing things to. GURPS Martial Arts allows you to do more of the actual historical stuff than Basic Set allows, but still doesn't quite get the rhythms and nuances of swordfighting as discussed in this book or the original sources. Still, it's interesting how your expectations of real martial arts can be shaped by the rules of the fantasy one you played. I don't think a GURPS native would think spears stab less well than a sword or a shield isn't worth its weight.

Royalties & GURPS Martial Arts

One reason I like royalties, the main reason even? They keep on giving.

GURPS Martial Arts came out in 2007. It sold very, very well - enough that I blew right past the advance and into royalties right away. That was lucrative and satisfying.

2007 was 15 years ago. But I still got royalties this past quarter on 50 copies of GURPS Martial Arts sold as Print on Demand through Createspace. That's besides the steady trickle of PDFs it sells month after month after month.

It's been about 16 years since I wrote that book. So much research in 2004 and 2005. Lots and lots of writing in 2006, and playtesting after that. All that work is long done - yet I still keep getting payments for the work.

That is why I like royalties. If my work has lasting value, I get lasting payments. That's so much more of how I like to view my work.

Assorted notes from session 157

Just some notes from last time.

- As always, fights are incredibly brief. Exchanges of blows in a fight can be incredibly fast, but that means GURPS fights are always done at that speed. The Sakatha fight is about 7 seconds old at this point.

- Someone asked if Gerry could re-build Skeleton Rahtnar. Nope. You can't re-animate a corpse using old bones. You can't rebuild zombies from destroyed zombies. So Skeletal Rahtnar is gone.

Too bad, really, it was fun having the skeleton of a former, killed PC going around. I quite enjoyed it. But after getting dipped in acid it wasn't combat-worthy enough to fight a serious combatant solo and that is what it had to do. I'm surprised it made it through the earlier fight, although - because it was a former PC - its defenses were already so high that skill 16 foes couldn't reasonably Deceptive Attack it low enough.

But it was fun. I'm sure they'll try to bring back the lizardmen for Gerry but that won't work, either, as they are former undead.

Gerry did harvest flesh from the clerics and the lizardmen for "research" but it's unclear what he'll do with it. We joked he'll put in the fridge at Ulf's swamp-side shack, unlabeled.

- I still wish I was doing fixed-effect Feints. They're kind un-fun to do the math on.

- I basically made up Beat, but I do wish I'd made it mesh a little better with disarm. A crushingly effective Beat should really disarm a foe . . . like when you win the contest by like 20 points. Against a two-defense foe, Beat is often irrelevant, because they just defend with the other weapon unpenalized anyway.

- Wait and Move is a very common request in my games. At least once a fight, someone wants to Wait and their trigger is "(so-and-so) moves" and their action is Move to follow that person.

I get that with a staggered initiative this seems silly - If A moves before B, B can follow, but if A just stands around and then B moves, A has to let C, D, etc. go between them before A can follow. But is it really silly? If you're a hair faster than a slow person, does that mean you can always stay exactly on their tail? And ensure that no one else goes before you?

People who really want to move in a formation together can take the Teamwork perk (Martial Arts, p. 52) and spend the time to form up, and then move as a unit.

You can't act with complete independence and with complete coordination. They're opposing poles. So you can't rush in front of your friends and hack and slash and slay, but also have them move in coordination with you while you block and parry for them, but have the ability to just retreat back if you need to, or let them waltz by you on their turn. You need to actually learn to coordinate and then do so.

I'm sure reading that, my players will want to get everyone to buy the Teamwork perk. Okay, fine, but everyone needs it - no, you can't kinda fake-form-up around someone and drag them along as you move, say, or transfer Feints and Ruses, etc. to them. You're in or you're out, as written.

And for the love of the Good God, Ya'll, before someone asks, you can't Wait and have your trigger be "when my friends come by" and the action be "form up with a Ready." No, you have to waste a turn getting into position - maybe more than one - and then you're in a movable formation after you all take the Ready. The other benefits will accrue as appropriate as each person is added to the group. GM judgement may force a re-form up after casualties or someone comes running up to join - or not, depending on the logic of the actual circumstances.

And yes, this is a Combat Perk.

Delusion in Martial Arts example: Ripping off Funakoshi's flesh

Here is a good example of a Delusion (GURPS Martial Arts, p 53-54) in action. This would probably be a Minor Delusion in a low-combat campaign, and a Major Delusion in a higher-combat campaign.

"In karate," they say, "a strong grip is essential [. . . ] The man who has strengthened his grip to the maximum in this way is easily capable of ripping the flesh of his adversary into strips."

What Nonsense! One day such a man came into my dōjō and offered and offered to teach me the secret of ripping flesh into strips. I begged him to demonstrate on me but burst into laughter when, at last, he succeeded in pinching my skin a bit without even causing a single black-and-blue.

- Gichin Funakoshi, "Karate-dō: My Way of Life"

At least he tried it on the generally pacifistic Funakoshi Gichin. Still, it struck me as a good example of how a Delusion can get you in trouble. Perhaps the practitioner didn't really believe his own b.s., but if he was willing to give it a go on a master instructor, he probably did.

Random Links & Thoughts for Boxing Day 2020

- Not that boxing day is about boxing, but I'm reading "Royal Flash" (I finally decided to fill in the missing volumes in my collection and read them all.) In it you get not only a 19th century boxing match (of sorts . . . ) but a schlager duel. Both 19th century bare-knuckle boxing (p. 153) and Schlager (p. 160) are in GURPS Martial Arts.

- Ravens & Pennies - Being a Worthy Player

This isn't unique advice but it's never bad hearing this again. A lot less applies in a game like mine, where we pretty much recruit friends to play with, not gamers. A lot of the behavior we do automatically . . . and I can't think of anyone at the table who doesn't prioritize the group's fun over their own fun, honestly. Except maybe me, as demonstrated by the prevalance of exploding monsters in my DF game. Bwahahahahahaha. Maybe I need more of this?

- Thanks to the Sundaland RPG Setting blog for this post:

Shout Out: War Elephants

Which linked these three posts:

War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms

War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves

War Elephants, Part III: Elephant Memories

I learned a lot about war elephants. I already knew a fair amount, but not nearly as much about the logistics and handling of them as I do now. And that I'm not the only one who didn't like 300.

- This thing is pretty creepy. It put me in mind of the creepy-as-hell "Jolly Weeper" from Shadow Prowler. Speaking of which, I only have two of those books anymore. I wonder which of my players has the missing volume?

- I've been noodling about limitations for skills, defenses, feint, etc. for GURPS in general, but I have some ideas for Felltower in particular but overall more for DF as a line. I've got to figure out a good way to assemble my thoughts before I put it all down, but the posts I've made (and the comments on them) have really got me thinking.

GURPS Combat Cards

I've been remiss in not mentioning this on the blog:

GURPS Combat Cards Now Available

One of my players uses combat cards; I think a few more would benefit from having them in front of them so we wouldn't have the same questions so often (Usually about doing a "Wild Swing" - they mean Move and Attack - and defenses, or what your options are on Committed Attack when you take an extra step, and All-Out Defend.) It's a good way to do "No Rules Lookups in Play" and yet have the rules at your fingertips.

They're $12.95 on Warehouse23.

They real, potentially crippling downside to this set is that it's Basic Set only. It's Martial Arts that introduces a lot of options to combat, and Martial Arts really needs a set of combat cards for its options. For now, we'll have to stick with notes and home-made cards.

Random Links for 11/13/2020

- Tenkar is going to pay for S&W articles. Time to brush off one or two of my half-finished ones and sell them at $0.05 a word. If I write quickly, I might earn what I do training people. Heh. But still, for RPG word, that's a good rate!

- Diseases in GURPS get a look over at Mailanka's blog:

Noboby Takes Resist Disease

I'll note that in Might & Magic I (and II), disease means when you rest, you lose HP instead of gaining them - and thus can't heal naturally. That could make a useful wrinkle on the excellent disease setup in the article.

- Doug writes about a specific combination in some detail. It's amusing how often the answer is, "It's in GURPS Martial Arts." Yeah, we did good work. Kromm did most of the bits people point to, including me, but hey, I helped. Heh.

- This blog has really extensive articles on military topics, with pictures.

So as of 2017 at least, North Korea is fielding year 1942 variant T-34s? Guess so.

ISIS had a tank unit with a repair/customization shop, complete with good decisions (camoflauge!) and bad decisions (putting reactive armor on track skirts!)

You can see every major piece of hardware lost in the recent 40-odd day war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Lots of T-72s bit the dust from drones, apparantly.

- I endorse this kind of approach.

On Magic Weapons by Racial Background

I do this with cultures and races, when possible, so there is a lot of distinctive gear around and you can start to make predictive guesses. I probably should have codified it a bit earlier in Felltower, but it's meant to be a hodge-podge with no sense of a "culture."

- My news feed popped up a Vice article on wargames which includes a nice picture of men and women in NYC playing Fletcher Pratt's naval mini wargame.

GURPS Fixed-Effect Feints

Back in 2014 I put up a post about fixed Deceptive Attack. That's "fixed" as in "unchanging" not "repaired or put right."

Two-Tiered Fixed Deceptive Attack

I can't seem to find anything like that for Feint, although I did muse about Feint as a Deceptive Attack amplifier:

Alternate Feint for GURPS

I think this idea has some potential - to reduce the "swinginess" of Feints if that's something you dislike. It also is a useful option if you'd like to speed up Feints into a more simple yes/no effect.

Fixed-Effect Feint

Resolve a Feint, Beat, or Ruse normally.

If the attacker wins by the contest, the target defends at -4.

Extreme Feints

For high-skill fighters in cinematic games, this optional rule allows them to leverage their skill further. Resolve the Feint, Beat, or Ruse normally. If the attacker wins the contest, the target defends at -4. If the attacker wins the contest by 10+, the target defends at -8.

Notes:

- one concern is that "win by 10+" giving a -8 is that you just end up with what you've got now - a tendency of players who like Feint to maximize their margin. That's why I put it as an optional extension. It's useful for high-skill and high-defense games.

- it limits the value of a very high margins of success, at least with the base rule.

- if you apply additional effects to Beats, as some house rules do, apply them normally.

- it could push skills higher anyway, as players want to ensure they can't be feinted or DA'ed. In other words, you're looking at a race to very high defenses, especially if this is combined with two-tier fixed deceptive attacks, too. If the most you can suffer is a -8, you're "safe" if you can push your defenses into the low-to-mid 20s. That sounds crazy-high except that Rapier-20 gives you Parry 13, +1 for Combat Reflexes, +3 for Retreat, potentially +8 DB (large shield and Deflect or Shield), +3 for Enhanced Parry 3 gives a 28 . . . just saying.

- I think this could be workable and fast - and because it's fixed-effect, even a marginal success is still quite useful - much like hitting by 1 can still result in a high damage roll and a good effect.

Turn length in GURPS

On my last Felltower summary, Eric posted the following comment:

" In the confusion of combat GURPS is already generous about allowing free choosing of targets that should be difficult to even line up on a still target..." This brings up a question I've had for a little while: if DnD combat rounds are too long, are GURPS combat rounds too quick? How does the GURPS combat system rate, verisimilitude-wise, in the opinions of those who have martial arts training (armed and/or unarmed)? Your opinion, Peter?

I said I needed a post to answer. Here is that post.

This post will mostly be about GURPS.

Let's first just get this out of the way - 1 minute combat rounds in AD&D are long . . . long enough to not allow for some of the true speed of combat in real life. A lot can happen in a handful of seconds, nevermind sixty of them. But the one second turns in GURPS can feel a bit short.

GURPS isn't the only game that realized that one-second combat turns make sense, especially with firearms. TSR's Gangbusters used one-second combat turns. Oddly, you could only melee once every three turns (punch on turn 1, can't do so again until turn 4), but you could shoot every second. Fair enough - most guns either have a totally unrealistic ROF on a multi-second turn (six shot revolvers emptying in 2/5s of a five-second turn, or getting limited to 3 shots in five seconds), or put out so much lead that you can't easily resolve it (a SAW putting out 60 rounds or limited to just 12) or some abstracting mix.

That said, TSR's Top Secret had five-second combat turns, divided up into 5 1-second phases. Guns had some odd ROFs because of that - you can only fire one pistol shot per second, for example, or an Uzi 4 shots per second, well below a realistic actual max ROF - but it was workable enough in actual play. Still, it took abstraction and tradeoffs. You only managed a small number of offensive and defenses melee actions, as well, if you engaged in hand-to-hand combat, over those five seconds. For melee combat especially it seemed fine until I actually started to really practice combative martial arts.

An amazing amount of violence can happen in a few seconds. And a whole fight can be over in a fraction of a second.

Check this exchange out:



Click here if the embedding doesn't display well for you.

(Discussed further in my post Longsword Sport)

So resolving GURPS fights at the one-second scale make sense.

But at the same time, sometimes it seems too short.

I've occasionally noodled about the idea of just increasing GURPS combat turns to 3-5 seconds; perhaps a slight increase in actions allowed but more time to do them. This would potentially allow for more actions than just swinging and casting as fast as possible - and battles that last more than 10-12 seconds for "long" fight. That's not a crazy length for a brawl, but for large battles, it's oddly short. Too much happens in too short of a time, with no one hesitating to act because, thanks to the minutes each second takes to resolve, they have a near-perfect knowledge of the battlefield and the actions of everyone around them. Player decisions mitigate against this, but it's quite possible to have everyone on a single side act in perfect harmony with each other's actions. That's unrealistic, and how unrealistic it seems and feels is exacerbated (I'd say multiplied) by the speed at which it happens.

That's where the issue lies, and it's very difficult for a game to do both well. One the one hand, a one-second time scale allows for realistic rates of fire, the flash of an exchange that leaves one combatant dead and the other living, and allows for rains of punches like you see finishing a TKO in an MMA fight or a YouTube video of some poor schlep starting a fight with a boxer. On the other hand, with a confused melee being resolved at a one-second scale you don't get the much more realistic overall length where a lot of time is spent in the OOD part of the OODA loop - Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting. Instead that happens in the meta, and everyone acts tightly within an identical loop. No confusion, no mistake, and no error of observation or orientation, only of decision. Making turns longer wouldn't change that in the meta-sense, but it would change it in the overall time it takes. You'd gain back some overall time cost to battles, and gain the ability for reinforcements to realistically arrive (nonsense on a one-second scale, unless the reinforcements are only yards away), non-combat actions to occur ("Hold them off while I pick this lock!" - not likely when it'll take one minute, just do it after), and combat to feel realistically long. Yet to do so, as I noted, costs in the observed reality of how fast you can dump an enormous amount of violence onto a foe.

So GURPS has verisimilitude on the micro-scale of actions, but less so on the macro-scale of overall time for a battle to occur.

New Technique: Head Crusher (Hard)

In honor of the late, great Dr. B.M. Smith, aka Brewmeister Smith from the martial arts classic Strange Brew, here is a new technique to put in your GURPS games. It's as effective as the double-handed Shatner punch. Which is to say, it's awesome.

Head Crusher (Hard)
Defaults: ST-4 or Wrestling-4.
Prerequisites: Wrestling and ST 15+; cannot exceed prerequisite+3

You can crush your opponent's head like a nut. To use this technique, you must first grapple your opponent by the skull with two hands; see Grappling (p. B370). Your victim may attempt to break free on his turn. If he fails, on your next turn,you can squeeze. Roll against your Head Crusher skill. Success inflicts Thrust crushing damage. Grappling adds +1 per die if you know it at DX+1, +2 per die if DX+2 or higher. Rigid DR (including the skull) protects normally. Such damage is incredibly painful - double shock penalties (up to -8, or -16 with Low Pain Threshold). Head crushing can also be used as an influence roll - substitute a roll against Head Crusher for Intimidation, or add damage inflicted to your Intimidation roll, whichever is better!


This technique is frightfully effective on henchmen and on armored lunatic hockey players.


I lowballed the ST requirement; Brewmeister Smith is extremely strong, capable of holding up a grown man by one ear with a pinch grip with casual ST. But even ST 15 weaklings should be able to learn this technique. Below the requirement, you can try it, but not study it.

Boxing Day - A look back at Boxing

While the actual meaning of Boxing day has less to do with Boxing than I think it should, that's no reason not to blog about Boxing.

Re-reading the Boxing style - and the box "The Sweet Science" from GURPS Martial Arts, p. 152-153, what would I change?

Writeup: I think the writeup is solid. Nothing really leaps out at me as something that needs changing. It's still accurate and engagingly written. The tough part is the Art, Sport, combat skill split - Boxing really does need both Boxing Sport and Boxing, but it's not like you learn one without the other. I've yet to meet a proper boxing trainer who will teach you to fight without requiring hard contact in both directions. Stay on your toes and move quickly or the focus mitt will find its way past your guard and onto your face.

It would have been nice to write it in light of the fighter between Mayweather and McGregor (highlighting expert specialist vs. expert generalist in a specialist contest) and the growth of bare-knuckle fighting again.

Additions: If I had to add anything, I'd add Targeted Attack (Boxing Punch/Vitals) for those liver-hunting left hookers that I know. I'd probably add a box somewhere - for fighters in general - with some disadvantages to reflect TBI (traumatic brain injury) and the cumulative effect of head blows on personality. It's not just lost IQ and lowered Appearance.

Removals: Although I very much like the Uppercut technique (also useful for shovel hooks!) if I had to cut something I'd cut that entirely and cut it from Boxing. It's not something that necessarily needs its own rules. It doesn't need cutting, but it could be cut and leave the style usefully intact.


Overall, I think we did a good job on all three versions of Boxing - modern, Ancient Greek, and Bare-Knuckle.

Reading from Storage: GURPS Martial Arts Adventures

I've long owned a copy of GURPS Martial Arts Adventures. I mostly got it for the Kung Fu: 2100 scenario, as I once briefly played that mini-game with my cousin but a) didn't get to complete the game and b) never saw it again.

Given a chance this past weekend, I went and pulled this out of my voluminous GURPS book collection to read.

The art really shows its age, and it's weird to go back to reading books with sidebars and not boxes . . . but it might be fun to run "Pawns of the Clonemaster" or "Dark Arena." The first is based on Dennis Sustarre's Kung Fu: 2100, the second is the classic "kidnapped and forced to fight in an underground martial arts tournament-to-the-death." You know, in that weird world where the very best martial artists (including Bolo, of course) die in dingy underground fights before rich patrons.

I'm really happy to get my hands back on my paper copy of this one.

Lethwei in real life & in GURPS Martial Arts

Back in 2005 or so, I did the style writeups for Kachin Bando and Lethwei for GURPS Martial Arts. Those two writeups hold a special place in my heart, as I learned Kachin Bando from Phil Dunlap in Mahwah, NJ as a result of discovering him while researching the book. That led to my full-contact MMA matches, and those were very important in my life.

In any case, there is a big Lethwei rematch coming up, between Myanmar's Tun Tun Min and Canada's Dave Leduc. I watched both of their previous matches because, a) it's Lethwei, and b) it's easy for me to root for a rangy North American.

Tun Tun Min vs. Dave Leduc 1

Tun Tun Min vs. Dave Leduc 2

Here is some of what I observed in these fights from a GURPS perspective:

- a strong emphasis on attacks that are Committed Attacks and All-Out Attacks - all of which look more like (Strong) than anything else. This is strongly advised as a way to play a character with the style in the writeup for Kachin Bando (p. 152).

- I didn't see much that looked like a Feint, which is something that my Muay Thai instructor in Japan taught me to use, but didn't show up in my Kachin Bando instruction at all. Even the spinning elbows look more like AOA (Strong) than the combination feint-attack that they are statted up as. About the only thing that might qualify is Dave Leduc's low-high changeup kick.

- You clearly need extra FP and HP for these fights, and Fit, and Damage Resistance (Tough Skin) wouldn't hurt, either. Hard to Subdue seems useful, and likely - both fighters take some hits that could floor a fighter and they shrug them off short-term. The whole list of advantages in Kachin Bando is a good buy, and seem like good in-game choices to reflect the fighters.

- clearly some of the rules have changed from the Lethwei writeup (p. 186) with a 5-round championship and purely timed rounds.

- similarly, it's win-lose-draw, and it's not decided by judges, scorecards, or anything else but in-ring violence. Submit or incapacitate your opponent if you want to win. and yes, they'll revive you after you go down and see if you want to continue. like here.

- the fights have a lot of short spurts of action, much like any other competitive fight. The rules for Tournament Combat (p. 134) would represent this well.

Countering Feints / Recovering from Feints

I like the concept of recovering from a Feint. Douglas Cole presented one way to do this in his post on Viking Shield Fighting. I think it could use a tweak or two, but I think this is a good, playtest-ready rule:

Feint (Recovery)

You can attempt to recover from the penalty inflicted by a successful Feint against you. Roll against your own weapon skill, using the same statistic used to counter the original Feint (ST or DX for a Beat, DX for a Feint, IQ for a Ruse.) Apply your margin of success against the penalty imposed by your opponents feint, negating the penalty on a one-for-one basis. This never provides a bonus.

Example: Sir Agrippa uses a Beat against Sir Ferro's rapier. Sir Aggrippa has Rapier-16 and makes his ST-based roll by 5, Sir Ferro has Rapier-15 and makes his DX-based roll by 1 and is at -4 on the next turn. Sir Ferro takes a Feint (Recovery) on his next turn, and rolls against his Rapier-15. He rolls a 12, making it by 3. Sir Agrippa's Beat only imposes a -1 to Sir Ferro's Parry the next turn. Had Sir Ferro rolled, for example, a 5, his margin of success would have been 10. He would remove the entire penalty for the Beat, but not gain any bonus to defend.

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Notes: One issue with this is whether this is a Ready (you're spending a turn to recover) or it's a variant Feint used to just reset yourself in position. This is an issue because of the rules for Feints and Multiple Attacks (GURPS Martial Arts, p. 127). If you can swap in any kind of Feint for an attack (even part of a Rapid Strike), then you should be able to do a Feint (Recovery) as well.

The downside to this is that it makes Feints even less useful against foes with Multiple Attacks (just swap in a Recovery, every time) and useless against high-skill foes with multiple attacks from any source. The upside is this makes high-skill multiple-attacking martial artists, swashbuckler-types, wuxia swordsman, and chambara movie samurai able to engage in really cinematic combat. It also means feints are a very useful way to deal with multiple-attacking skilled foes, if you're skilled as well - make your Feint, force them to choose between an attack or undoing the Feint. So attacks and feints and attacks and recoveries are all meshed together in a web of action economy until someone cracks.

Making a Ready means it takes your whole turn to avoid suffering from the Feint.

Making it a Ready is probably the most conservative approach, and imposes the most cost.

If you play with hidden feints, like many do, this is pretty much useless unless it's a Beat (which is always obvious.) So you'll need to allow people to notice a feint.

Noticing Feints

At the beginning your next turn after your opponent has attempted a feint, roll against your best Per-based Melee Combat or Unarmed skill. If you succeed, you know your opponent has attempted a Feint. You don't know how much the contest was won or lost by, however - it won't be resolved until your opponent's next turn. If you take a Feint (Recovery) action, resolve it first and apply your margin of success against the results of the Feint normally.

Skill-Based Beats

Yesterday Douglas Cole put up a post about Viking Shield Fighting.

One thing he mentioned was shield-on-shield jostling.

One problem with a Feint is that it's skill vs. skill. The attacker would roll with Shield, the defender with Shield or another skill if it's better. Forcing the defender to roll against Shield might make sense, but it's really going to weird when the defender isn't using a light buckler-style shield like a Viking shield.

Beat makes a lot of sense, but Doug says his experience shows it is more skill than ST.

There is a simple solution - a perk.

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Skilled Beats*

You've learned to use your skill, not your strength, to execute a Beat (Martial Arts, p. 100). You must specialize by weapon skill. When executing a beat, use the better of your ST-based or DX-based skill. Your opponent opposes the beat normally.


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This way you can get a skilled fighter using his agility and skill, not his strength, to move people's weapons or shields out of line. Yet a strong foe can still oppose it with ST, which seems appropriate (not everyone is using a buckler and is equally taught to use skill to defend it.)

You might say, "Why not just Feint?" For the usual reasons of using a beat - you want to share the effect with others.

GURPS Martial Arts in POD

Thanks to Matt Riggsby for pointing this out:



GURPS Martial Arts is available in softcover for $29.95! It's been out of print for a long time. I get a tiny fraction of each sale as royalties. More importantly, my players and I can finally get some extra copies of the book.

Alternative Feint - Feint Cap / Feint Attack - Revised

This is a second look at something I posted the other day:

Alternative Feint - Feint Cap / Feint Attack

The more time I took to mull it over, the more I think it needed a tweak, especially Feint Attack.

As written, if the attack would have been a critical hit, it's both a Feint (capped at -10, if you use the Feint Cap rule) and an Attack. Not a critical hit, but a normal hit.

I think that needs some modification to avoid, essentially, Feint-only approaches vs. skilled foes. It should still be a viable option to just straight-up attack. It also left open the question - does this attack benefit from a prior Feint? It's possible abuse to say yes, but it's also logical and sensible to say it does. You're banking on a good roll if you just string feints together hoping the next one will bring an attack that benefits from this one.

Still, getting a hit in on a 6 or less when you're a good feinter is probably not a good idea.

One way to avoid this is to say, "If the roll for the Feint is a 3 or 4, the Feint proceeds normally and you strike your foe - roll randomly for location and resolve defenses normally, unaffected by this Feint. Defenses are affected by a successful Feint done before this strike!"

I think that's a superior approach to what I had before.

You could equally supe this up and say a 3 on this roll is a critical hit and a successful Feint, or that a 3-4 on a Feint roll is a critical hit instead of a Feint. But in that case once you're highly skilled and regularly hit the Feint Cap of -10, you are generally better off doing the following:

Rapid Strike (-6/-6, -3/-3 with Weapon Master or Trained By A Master)
Split this into one Feint at -6 or -3, and one Attack at -6 or -3, per the Feint/Attack tradeoff approach allowed in GURPS Martial Arts.

This way you get a Feint and a potential critical hit, followed by an attack that will benefit from the Feint.

I can't think of a better combination off-hand, but I bet my players can. That's why "converts a 3-4 to a critical hit" or "adds a critical hit on a 3" seems abusive. If you really can't do much more than critical hunt on a target, well, why not do it this way, preferably with a Beat so others can take advantage of the move even as you hunt 3s?