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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galloglaich" data-source="post: 4753916" data-attributes="member: 77019">But you are missing the point, the players don't need to know anything about historical martial arts, only the game designer does.  This makes the game more intuitive and logical. More specifically, my assertion is that the weapons and armor of Medieval Europe, Japan, China etc. make a lot more sense in the context of how they were actually used.  If you, as a game designer, look at their actual physical properties (i.e. mail armor stops cuts) and work from there, they all actually make sense in how they different systems interract (if mail armor stops cuts, suddenly there is a role and a reason for a military pick, for example) resolving many common game designers dilemma such as what to do with such weapons in most systems. My position is that this is also more intuitive for ordinary people who come to an RPG with an expectation of how things work in real life.  You don't have to be a martial artisti, a military engineer or a physicist to guess that a spear or a staff has a greater reach than a dagger.  If my friend Michelle has a wizard character and buys a staff in the expectation she can fend off enemies with it, she will be disappointed in most RPGs where weapons play no role in defense, wheras a system designed on a realistic basis would match her quite reasonable expectations. Similarly if she pushed the villain out the window of a 5 story building with her staff she would reasonably expect them to be dead or very seriously hurt.... and if she saw him running away barely scratched, not being a gamer she would assume there was some specific supernatural reason for it, i.e. he was a werewolf or a ghost or something.  It is kind of hard to explain why there wouldn't be, unless you've been playing DnD for ten years...   With the codex rules, you could actually describe such an action in completely  role playing terms, i.e. "I'm going to wait until he takes a swing at Bob and then try to nail him".  The DM rolls the villains attack against Bob, using up his MP.  My friend Michelle literally has tactics in her hand (her dice), she can decide how much and when to attack, defend, move etc.  She really doesn't need to know the rules, she doesn't have to know about all different kinds of actions, when she can and cannot move, etc..  The MP is intuitive, she has it in her hand.  Active Defense is intuitive, again, in her hand.  She doesn't have to know either word (in fact, most people playing in my current campaign don't know almost any of the rules... they just know basically what their characters are capable of) By way of comparison, I really can't imagine how a normal person deescribing normal intuitive fighting ideas they might have gotten from an action movie into the (to me at least) counter-intuitive combat concepts of a game like 4E. Readied actions, Combat actions etc. don't exist in the codex, incidentally, they are replaced by the Martial Pool.  But I'm not basing my comments exclusively on the Codex, it could be any system based on a realistic historical / physics model, at any level of abstraction you wanted.  Codex isn't a perfect system and it's not the only realistic one ever made, For example The Riddle of Steel is a realistic system which is more complex, Burning Wheel is a (to me) realistic system which is much more abstract.  I think for that matter Cthulhu Dark Ages and Warhammer FRPG are pretty realistic compared to a lot of RPGs I've seen, in spite of being quite simple.  Glad you like it Alex.  I hopefully just answered your main question on there.  I know the Codex is pretty dense, for now the boards serve to help provide support for understanding the new paradigm, though the best way to learn once you have the book is to play.  We are going to be releasing a new expanded "2.0" version with a lot more 'fluff' and special rules for integrating into a 3.X campaign etc., but that is still a few weeks away yet.  For now as you probably noticed there is a lot of support material, downloadable PDF's etc. on the Codex boards. G.</blockquote>

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