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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1207607" data-attributes="member: 5171">This might be heresy, but if you want a viable martial arts character that is fun and balanced and doesn't break the feel of the game, then maybe D&D isn't what you ought to be playing.I think that one of the reasons that people don't like martial artists, be they monks or unarmed fighters or whatever, in D&D, is because D&D is not designed with unarmed and unarmored combat in mind.  I would posit that grappling, a vital part of unarmed fighting, is kludged into the system.  It's worlds better in 3.5, but it's still different enough that a lot of people don't understand it very well -- and it doesn't ring of the fun and flair that you get from watching a movie where an unarmed guy grabs somebody's punch, locks their arm, and slams them into a wall or over a railing.You can fix a lot of that with flavor, but it seems (in my utterly subjective opinion) that the basic design of the system is less dynamic than that.  The system ALLOWS you to handwave things that make martial artists more interesting -- for example, I will almost always give that +2 bonus to hit to anyone who wants to descrive leaping over a table to kick the gun from the bad guy's hands, or that +2 bonus to defense to somebody doing a running slide under a table while bad guys fire at them -- but it isn't designed with that in mind, and most players end up not thinking of it.d20 Modern, as noted in my examples above, goes a little ways toward trying to fix that, but to really get martial artists to be statistically powerful, you need to shift away from D&D's form of combat abstraction.  Martial artists get a lot more viable when armor becomes a damage soak rather than an AC bonus, or when you get more combat bonuses for striking very well (beating AC by a larger number) -- so that instead of saying "The guy's unarmed attacks are Now as Dangerous as a dagger; two levels from now, they'll be as dangerous as a shortsword; two more levels, as dangerous as a longsword; and two levels after that, as dagerous as a greatsword", you're modelling something more dynamic.I don't think this dynamism DOESN'T exist in armed combat -- but I think that most of us are prepared to handwave armed combat more than we are unarmed combat -- which is why there are so many books out there trying to "fix" martial artists.</blockquote>

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