Martial arts affecting your GMing style

[ArghMark]

Hello all!

I'm aware that there are doubtless quite a few historical re-enactors, LARPERS, ARMA or various western martial arts groups as well as asian-style martial artists on this board.

Since I have begun historical fence and jujitsu my depictions at the gaming table have changed a lot. My fighting descriptions become idealized but gritty, rather than fantastical, mirroring what I know.

Interestingly, apart from humanoid monsters, the amount of large monsters has dropped from my games, taken up instead by multiple individuals of different abilities.

NPC's have different abilities in combat and understand that difference, and I try to involve NPC's in that equation. Respect is given to martial ability in non-combat encounters; people tend to treat warriors well, and within their groups the warriors have their own (perhaps informal) ranking of who is better than who. All of those good and bad little fighting cultures develop.

My plots tend to be human focused now, as well; duels, revenge and politics have very human faces.

I'm not sure if my experience is all positive; we don't have glorious battles with a million orcs and live any more. A dangerous fight is one where a single man wants to kill you, he has a knife, and you've got a beer bottle.

As a part of this factor of what i found I liked in my life and games, I left D+D as the 'go-to' game. I experimented with other systems, fixated briefly on Riddle of Steel (but didn't sell it completely to my group) and came to a compromise of Warhammer; grittier but not so mechanical with its blows. I still play D+D but don't GM it anymore.

Just wondering; has knowledge of swordplay or martial skill affected anyone else's games? Do you think about it at all, or downplay it? Does it come into descriptions, or into actual combat?

 

[pawsplay]

It definitely changes things. I don't know if non-fighters notice, but I definitely notice. I've also noticed, and this is just my experience, that people with fighting experience tend to be less bothered by attacks of opportunity and more fluent with readied actions.

In most games, I tend toward realism. In high-powered games, things become idealized, but realistic tactics are still important to me. But in some games, the fighting is all poetry. In some ways, being knowledgeable about combat helps me take the lid off and really cut loose when reality is removed.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It depends on the style of game you want. If you want the game to lean towards fast, loose abstract combat ( like old school D&D) then too much influence from the real world can muddle up the experience. When playing with semi-realistic tactical rules (GURPS), the little extra touches of realism can add to the experience for certain genres.

 

[papa_laz]

I am not a fighter, but I have done hard sparring and trained in various martial arts over the years. I am also a keen fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) competition in general, and this has definitely had an influence on the way I run combat. My descriptions of unarmed combat are a lot more detailed, and I frequently use grappling rules to recreate moves I might see in MMA, such as chokes, take downs, or slams followed by "ground and pound." I also enjoy describing attacks on prone opponents which often take the form of the "foot stomps" or "soccer kicks" made famous by Wanderlei Silva during his time at Pride FC.

This has definitely made unarmed combat more interesting and more entertaining for me at least. And I do enjoy putting the PC's up against powerful NPC monks with improved trip and improved grab feats, as it allows for colorful description of grappling and unarmed strikes.

 

[Jack7]

Well, I'm not sure that martial arts alone has had this influence AM, but being involved with real fights and combats has affected the way some of us play, and changed the ways we handled fights, starting maybe twenty years or so ago.

We rarely rely upon dice to resolve in-close combats anymore, instead we use Describe and Demonstrate to show techniques and affects/effects. As for some monsters, obviously we have to rely upon dice for creatures that can do things no person could do, but in the main we enact combats rather than role them. (There are much fewer combats in our games over the years, because people that know about real combat want to avoid them if they possibly can, but the ones we do have are all extremely dangerous to the characters.)

Various forms of martial art knowledge, armed and unarmed, have affected technique more than overt lethality in our games, but certain forms and certain methods of martial arts combats are obviously designed for killing impact and purposes, and so critical hits and that kind of thing under certain circumstances can become very lethal very quickly.

I prefer combats this way, as they are far more realistic. And dangerous. And exciting. And lethal.

Then again my campaigns also often involve warfare, and so war-efforts make a large showing in our games. And just like small scale tactical combats (in our game) in war people can lose eyes, become crippled and lame, wounds can become infected, disease is a problem, concussions can lead to brain damage, and other kinds of chronic issues can result. I for instance broke my back (or had it broken for me) in real life (in addition to suffering various other injuries and wounds, some serious) and very well understand how serious injuries can have long lasting effects upon abilities. Serious diseases can have the same or similar effects.So that is thrown in as well.

Now some of the younger players, like my kids, have no experience with such matters, or with real combats or serious injuries (Thank God) but they seem to learn and mimic us to some degree when it comes to in-game combat. And I'm teaching my kids Tai Chi right now to ready them for their instructions in boxing and other forms of unarmed martial arts. Later on I'll teach them to knife fight and gun fight (though they both are pretty good spot shooters right now), but for the moment I think they understand that fighting is serious, dangerous, scary, potentially lethal business, and is not a, "I'll flip over a twenty foot wall, run down a bamboo shoot and make a flashy sword twirl and kill thirty armed men while taking seventeen arrows in my gut cause I have three hundred hit points kinda endeavor." It's always much, much better to take no arrows anywhere if you can possibly help it. As for high jumping twenty foot walls and running down bamboo shoots, well, we're playing D&D characters, not superheroes. Spider climb with magic okay, jumping around like the Six Million Dollar Man without bionics, not so much.

A man with a combat knife slices open an artery or hamstrings you and you're in real trouble, I don't care if your name is Achilles or Conan and so that's the way we approach a fight. Fights aren't really something you get into cause you're just bored or looking for an adventure. An adventure is a good, brisk, pleasant hike through the Rockies living off the land for a week or so. A fight is a lot of heavy grunting, scared -less, desperate, sweaty, highly intense, exhausting, who's gonna kill who first, and how badly am I gonna get screwed-up and injured doing this kind of thing affair. Fighting every day for sport or just for the hell and high-water of it is not for men who want to live to see the grandchildren get married.

So knowing the difference between hidden dragon pummeling you down to your last sixty hit points, and tiger crouching over your downed body ripping your throat out and bleeding you of your last good pint of the red stuff sorta changes the way you perceive things like that. It does for me anyways.

 

[Galloglaich]

Being a bit of a brawler in Ye Olde Punk Rocke days (TM) my friends and I always included realistic combat in our games, though not quite to the extent Jack describes of acting out fights, we still liked to use dice.

(Though I do remember one time playing a post- apocalypse game when everybody brought the weapons their player could be expected to have in-game, we had quite an arsenal there... which wasn't a bad thing since the neighborhood of the apt. where we played our weekly game was half a block from the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans)

Once I learned about Historical European Martial Arts in the 90's the combat in pretty much every RPG (with the exception of TROS while it was around) seemed too ridiculous to bear. HEMA confrimed and expanded upon my understanding of street fighting and influenced me so much that I finally wrote a book with an entirely new combat system for DnD to give me the 'grammar' I wanted to have with which to create the poetry of combat in our games.

I'm a fan of MMA and other martial arts as well, pretty much all of my friends have at least dabbled in Martial Arts of some kind, either Eastern or Western.

G.

 

[Galloglaich]

I'm not sure if my experience is all positive; we don't have glorious battles with a million orcs and live any more. A dangerous fight is one where a single man wants to kill you, he has a knife, and you've got a beer bottle.

That can be true... but this grimness can be exxagerated too much IMO, I think it was to some extent in TROS. We have to remember Armor worked really really well. Armor and training can make you relatively safe in a fight against a less skilled and less well equipped opponent, even more so with weapons than in unarmed street encounters you might have today.

As a part of this factor of what i found I liked in my life and games, I left D+D as the 'go-to' game. I experimented with other systems, fixated briefly on Riddle of Steel (but didn't sell it completely to my group) and came to a compromise of Warhammer; grittier but not so mechanical with its blows. I still play D+D but don't GM it anymore.

I kind of like Warhammer too, but there is still something missing there.

One note on the animals, you can make animals and animal-like monsters interesting with realistic rules if you think about them realistically and examine how they actually fight in nature-- such as for example, most canines or felines do not hang back and exchange blows like a prize fighter the way they do in DnD or pretty much every computer game, they pounce on, seize, and pull down their opponents and prevent them from getting back on their feet. Dogs or wolves will bite and shake. Bears will seize opponents with their claws and bite a vital area like the neck or the back of the head. Etc. This makes animals much more dangerous.

but interestingly, also easier to fight with the right techniques if you know how they fight and what to avoid, which can be fun. I don't think every combat should be almost certain death. As dangerous as combat is, real warriors liked to fight. This can be brought into your games, in context, it makes the whole experience a lot more exciting.

G.

 

[RangerWickett]

If you think about it, D&D is a world where the megafauna managed to become bad-ass enough not to be wiped out. I mean, on Earth we killed all our smilodons and mastodons and giant ground sloths, but on Oerth they had magic powers so the best we could do was create isolated pockets where they don't roam.

In such a world, if we took it as realistic, what sorts of fighting techniques would develop? How would you hunt displacer beast or wyvern?

How would martial arts differ if you actually could learn to telekinetically throw people, or shoot fire from your hands. I mean, Okinawans developed karate as a weaponless fighting style because they weren't allowed to have weapons. Ditto capoeira in the Caribbean and Brazil. How do tyrants keep the peasants from being a threat when a peasant can pray to nature and summon an insect plague to kill the tyrant's warriors?

I'm really intrigued by how magic would have influenced society, and not enough attention gets paid to the fields of finance and personal combat. People prefer flashy fantasy, not speculative fiction.

What do you think?

 

[ArghMark]

Wow, Jack, I must say thats impressive. None of my friends know that much about fencing or hand-to-hand combat other than boys mucking around. Could you explain your description system? I'd like to hear it.

Galloglaich: I exaggerated when I mentioned the beer bottle thing, but it was more of an example rather than anything I've GMd. My games tend to be heading more in those directions though. Maybe it's less to do with my study of martial arts and more of my grim, depressing nature.

I also have to agree with Warhammer. Nice but not quite. Riddle of Steel is nice, and I'm glad to have it and its supplements, but to really get the players into a campaign I had to merge it with Ars Magica and play in Medieval Europe.

I tend to take out major rules for infection and limb loss though, unless there are replacements available somehow. All well and good for NPCs to have missing limbs - a character with one leg quickly becomes not so enjoyable to play (unless you're a pirate, I guess)

I agree that too much grimness isn't good for the game. Does adding martial stuff in add grimness, or is that just me?

Rangerwicket: I think thats a very interesting idea. Perhaps instead of animal forms of kung fu, you could have manticore style and such?
Martial arts aren't any better than each other (eh, In my humble opinion, thanks) but they do get more specialised as time goes on. Guys who specialise in killing monsters but wouldn't be so effective against someone who trains against humans? Maybe something to think about.

I guess it would need a lot of rules/feats/extras to allow this in. I know most rule systems have martial arts as bulky 'extras' to the games.

 

[Starbuck_II]

Have you tried Exalted 2nd edition?

I don't mean playuing Exalted Solars, but Heroic Mortals?

Heroic Mortals are pretty decent representation of D&D guys; and the martial arts Charms are good enough to represent decent martial artist.

I think the PDF might still be free at RPG Now.

If you want to bring back spellcasters: lower Essence requirenent of 1st Circle Magic to 1 or 2 so others besides Solars can use it.