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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5443953" data-attributes="member: 4937">Right. Epee.  If you took even a little fencing, you'll know that the Epee scoring system is meant to simulate dualing with a smallsword, and that the foil is a practice weapon and its not meant to simulate any sort of actual combat.I know what the theory is.  Incidently, if your friend took Kempo, chances are its a 20th century martial art with heavy western influence.  My point about 'muscle memory' is much the same as the point I think you were trying to make about fencing with a foil.  Most martial art classes I've seen drill bad habits into the fighter by doing way to much kata and not enough free sparring.  I mean, I can remember having these arguments in the 80's and 90's with people, and back then I could understand how people believed that the eastern arts were the way to go.  But now we've got actual pankration competitions and I shouldn't have to have these arguments any more.  The majority of eastern martial arts have been utterly flattened and completely discredited in the ring.  The people that tried them got the snot beat out of them.  A few - like Muay Thai - have endured to contribute their part to the best the world has to offer, but Muay Thai also had had the advantage of being refined by nearly a hundred years of real competive ring practice, and had a high emphasis on conditioning.  This is simplification of the issue to the point of willful blindness.  It would be one thing to postulate a 'combat focus' or some thing that could be held or lost (and even that has some magical thinking to it, see for example 'psionic focus).  But this goes far further than that.  This says that you can only use a technique that you've learned if you first mediatate on using it and practice it just before you do so.  Now, I don't know about you, but I would think this a really wierd system for emulating say - boxing technique.  You mean I can only throw upper cuts or only do quick jabs if 5 minutes before the fight I meditate on them?  Gee, what do I take into this fight, my right hook or my counter-punching?  That's the problem here.  Pretending that its anything less than that is just evading the problem.Well, I agree with that.  Yes, it is fantasy.  Yes, it is just like a bard casting spells with music.  It's a Sword-Wizard or a Steel-Mage casting spells with a blade.  And that's ok.  I think a campaign with nothing but Bo9S/eastern martial art classes might be quite fun.  It would be like that seen in 'Wheel of Time' where one of the Forsaken says to Rand something like, "Do you remember when we took that game of swords and made a true Art of it?"  But it would be a wholly different setting than what I was going for.</blockquote>

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