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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7368531" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, there's this, Musashi won, won a stupendous number of times, and against stupendous odds. I don't think he was being 'flashy', he was being EFFECTIVE. So, yes, I don't really radically disagree with you, its possible that the most effective thing to do at a given time might be cutting someone's arm or whatever. What seems unrealistic to me is when that's the WHOLE ESSENCE of your tactics. Realistic martial arts (broadly defined) seems to be that you attack in the most effective possible way commensurate with the situation. So you'd expect a strong element of killing blows, probably more so the more skilled you are, and some mixture of weaker attempts to disable or even just disadvantage, your opponent. The exact mix will depend on the types of weapons in use, the relative skill levels of the opponents, and the tactical situation.So we could see Musashi as the extreme case of 'skilled opponent' who simply struck first with such speed and power that he often ended fights with the first blow (IE the famous duel on the island with the improvised boken). Weaker combatants opt for relatively less risky attacks in the hope that they can disable their opponent enough to swing the odds in their favor. Of course we shouldn't get too caught up in realism either, but its always a nice place to ground our approach to mechanics as a first cut since it makes it a lot easier to create coherent narrative and establish unambiguously what the fictional positioning of the characters means. That was always why I found such things as an archer as a controller so unsatisfying. While you can certainly invent fantastical imaginary reasons for it to work, its hard to make that stand up to the application of even genre logic, let alone anything real-world.</blockquote>

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