Grappling For Beginners: How To Strike, Hold & Throw

[imager]http://shop.enworld.org/images/engs/product1776/th.JPG[/imager]"How do the grapple rules work, again?"

The core grappling rules are somewhat unwieldy. These amended rules aim to make grappling in your game a little more fun! Grappling also includes unarmed strikes – kicks, punches, bites and so on.

This short, 7-page supplement is not intended to provide a complete martial arts system with fancy moves; it is intended to replace the grappling rules in the core books with something a little more elegant. The d20 combat system is abstract in nature: you don’t worry about hit locations or the exact specifics of an attack, and these rules adhere to that philosophy.

Unarmed combat is divided into three basic moves: strike, hold and throw. The grappling rules are rewritten, some feats are changed and a couple more added to present a streamlined, easy to understand system which allows your characters to engage in unarmed combat without having to ask "How does grappling work again?"

In fact, your character can easily throw his opponent to the ground, hold him there and use his own dagger against him! It's easy to combine the three moves to represent almost any unarmed martial art style attacks without going into too much detail which slows down play.

Grappling For Beginners: How To Strike, Hold & Throw by Russell Morrissey (me!) is available now for $2.49!

Grappling

I've always been unhappy with the core grappling mechanic too. It's a nice document with a pretty straight forward solution. What other "beginner" rules were you planning to write?

I'm glad you liked it! It's my first effort, so I'm more than willing to accept criticism, and will update the PDF if necessary. In addition, if anyone asks any questions (clarifications or what-have-you), I'll update the PDF to make things clearer if it should prove necessary. I hope it's fairly clear though - I went with a very bare bones, basic style.

I've prepared Drinking For Beginners: How to Survive Dwarf Spirits!, to be released this week, although that's not original material - it's the drinking rules by Rangerwickett and myself from TF&T.

I'm also considering a Grappling for Advanced Students: How to Master Your Chi! - some new feats and PrCs, etc. I've made a start on that. My basic philosophy is that a "martial artist" isn't a superman, and mastery of unarmed combat is no better than mastery of, say, a sword.

Other than that, no specific plans. Ideas are welcome, though! I enjoyed the process immensely, although my layout skills aren't the world's best.

The "move while grappling" rules raise some problems for me. If I am holding another creature, it says the creature can opt not to move with me. It seems unlikely that the creature would cooperate with my intention to move elsewhere, so it pretty much boils down to saying that you can't move while grappling.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rules (I literally just read it), but it seems to me that requiring a grapple check to move up to 1/4 of your speed would be the best fix.

BTW. How do you handle fractions? If your base move is 30, do you move 7.5 feet?

That's a good catch, Cheiro. I think I meant to specify more regarding the creature opting not to move - a grapple attack roll is the best way to handle that. I'll amend and re-upload (it should show as "updated" in your Bookshelf when I'm done).

For the fractions, I treat it like Slow - round down to the next 5-foot increment. Again, I'll add a couple of words to clarify that.

OK, the file's updated.

One other thing I notice is that unarmed attacks now do normal damage- to be able to do non-lethal damage you have to take the improved unarmed strike feat (or have the equivalent class ability). I'm not sure I like this; folks should be able to recover faster from a brawl than a knife fight.

Oh, and I think there is a typo in the "Press Hold" feat- it gives three options, then says "you may choose which of these two options is in effect..."

Unless you changed this in the updated file. I haven't bothered to download the new one yet.

Cheiromancer said:

One other thing I notice is that unarmed attacks now do normal damage- to be able to do non-lethal damage you have to take the improved unarmed strike feat (or have the equivalent class ability). I'm not sure I like this; folks should be able to recover faster from a brawl than a knife fight..

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Oh, that's totally deliberate. It's always been one of my bugbears. For a start, damage/HP in D&D is supposed to be abstract, so why differentiate between the two? Only the last hit or two is supposed to represent real damage.

But the real bugbear I have is this: what difference does it make what you're hit with? Why does a fist magically do a totally different type of damage to a club (which, incidentally, does the same type of damage as a rapier).

The only difference is the amount of damage done. If someone sticks a knife in your gut, it does more damage than if someone punches you in the same place. If someone nicks you with a knife and does little more than a shaving cut, it does less damage than if someone catches you with a solidly planted uppercut which knocks you flying. There's no point going for realism when the rules let you hit someone with a 5 foot sword and have them barely notice. That's not what damage and hit points are.

So I got rid of the differential between lethal and non-lethal damage. There's just damage of various degrees (i.e. a little bit of damage or lots of damage). It's just another pointless complication to the grappling rules in my opinion. If you want to beat someone to death with your bare fists, go for it! If you haven't any special feats it'll be a lot more difficult than with a 5-foot sword, but it should be possible.

If you're not keen on that, it's a simple change to make unarmed damage non-lethal in your game.

When you explain it like that, I'm not sure why there is any option for non-lethal damage at all. I take it you drop it entirely from your game?

But yeah, now that I think about it, non-lethal is kind of a weird mechanic. Why should some kinds of damage heal 20 times as fast as other damage?

Cheiromancer said:

When you explain it like that, I'm not sure why there is any option for non-lethal damage at all. I take it you drop it entirely from your game?

But yeah, now that I think about it, non-lethal is kind of a weird mechanic. Why should some kinds of damage heal 20 times as fast as other damage?

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I think it's one of those hold-backs to old editions. I've put the option to use the core (non-lethal damage) version in as an option, but included a link to this thread so those interested could see why I changed it. I guess it's just one of those things which suits some people and not others. But the, I didn't like much of anything about the grappling rules, which is why I wrote this book.

But yeah, non-lethal damage never comes up in my game (along with anything else I think is too cumbersome to bother with). Gaming is fun; accounting is not.