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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 511364" data-attributes="member: 5171">Yo Knight,I think that my biggest concern right now is the difficulty you've presented in getting to those levels, and the relatively small benefits that taking that Master fear gives.  I think that with the d20 Modern system as written, someone could take the Martial Artist advanced class, take whatever feats they want, and declare that they're taking Jujitsu or Karate just based on the feats that they take. With this system, people are going to start feeling as though they HAVE to take those feats in order to be a "real" Karate or Aikido master in your campaign.It's as if someone introduced a feat called "Spinning Kick", that allows you to use a full-round action to do one unarmed attack that gets a +1 bonus to hit and to damage, and treats opponents as flat-footed.  It's not a bad feat, but until you introduced it, people might have been saying "I do a spinning kick and knock the bad guy on his butt!" as part of their normal attacks.  Now you've declared that they can only do what you've just described by taking a particular feat.Right now, I see the martial arts abilities as interesting and balanced and fun. With the setup you've got, I'm worried that one of two things will happen:1) Because of the difficulty and strict requirements associated with the feats, only NPCs will take them -- so that you can hit your players with tricked out Master Martial Artist bad guys.2) Because of the "planning from first level" requirements associated with the progression, players starting at level one will never take them -- so only people who come in late, and can make a 9th level character from scratch, will put it all together.I don't think your defiling the spirit of the game or anything like that. I'm not as vehement as I might sound at the moment. You've obviously put a lot of thought into the progressions. I'm just concerned that you're putting too tight a mechanic on something that ought to be left to flavor text.And on a side note: in most good martial arts, the higher levels are all about the individual style of the practitioner. There are two 5th-degree students at my school:Featwise, I would have something like the off-hand fighting progression, and some of the defensive feats like agile riposte or defensive martial arts.The other fifth-degree student would have the power attack chain, toughness, and improved damage threshold.Both of us are good examples of Kenpo martial artists, but we also have our own distinct styles.  Maybe if you lightened the feat requirements and then said something like "these three feats, plus any three of the following" on your requirements?  Maybe if you just wrote down which feats were considered "martial arts feats", and then all styles required two or three feats, plus three of any of the martial arts feats?And I'll reiterate: you can get very very good at the martial arts -- good enough to be considered a master -- without sacrificing everything else. I wouldn't want to change the d20 system so that you couldn't be a good writer or a fast-talker without sacrificing martial arts abilities...-Tacky</blockquote>

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