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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5444059" data-attributes="member: 4937">That not everyone writing about the military arts in China was an idiot.  Some of them in fact were quite ahead of their time, both compared to the East and West.  It's instructive to for example read both Sun Tzu and Sun Tzu's commentators... who often don't have a clue what Sun Tzu is saying and whose expounding upon the works of the master often hinders clarity rather than aids it.  In fact, in a few cases they expound precisely to obscure because what Sun Tzu is saying isn't 'politically correct' at the time they are writing. Clear insight and rationality would later get buried under a mountain of misinterpretation in the light of superstition, and then the schools founded based on the superstition and misinterpretation would become formalized and rigid and completely out of touch with reality.It would be sort of like mistaking fencing with a foil for true combat experience.  And in some cases you had techniques that had evolved specifically for dealing with a particular terrain - swampy bogs, ice covered scree, whatever - which were then exported to parts of china which had radically different terrain but which maintained the same formalism and eventually ritual.It's from all that you get Chi and talk like that.  There might be some actual value to the initial description, but the rather intelligent and learned guy who made the original description unfortunately described it in a magical way - not as leverage or such but as the flowing of natural energy up from the ground into your body.  The students of that master would then focus on the explanation for the technique rather than the technique itself and would then produce an actually wrong technique based on magic.  I once went into a dojo where the master was teaching the students that when their hand first made contact with the target that they needed to withdraw their hand as fast as possible from the target.  This would do the most damage to the opponent because by removing your hand, you'd set up a magical resonance in the target that would disrupt the target's chi.  If you pushed on the target with your hand, the chi would flow back into your body and you'd do little damage. Now, anyone with even basic physics knows that the momentum imparted to a target is a function of the moment of inertia, and the longer this moment the more force is imparted.  My grandpa taught me that when you aimed for a target, you aimed for the back of their body and you hit the back of their body.  You didn't aim for the face, you aimed for the back of the skull.  That's how you hit someone.  That's how you work a bag.  This supposed master was teaching the student how to spar without hurting their sparring partner, but he honestly didn't know that is what he was teaching them.  He was teaching them to make shallow surface stinging hits that do almost no damage, but his student thought he was teaching them how to hit hard.  He's was teaching his students how to get themselves killed by teaching them light sparring while teaching them that they were now lethal weapons.But my point is that Qi Jiguang from what I read of his works was pretty much saying about the culture he lived in what I've been saying here.  And he's in China.  He sees it clearly... which proves he's smarter than I am because I see it clearly only because I have something to compare it to.As you might expect, I don't use those rules either.  Even sorcerer's can't retrain in my game, and that's far closer to core than PHB2.  Those are gamist mechanics; they are meant to deal with the very gamist concern that what might be the most optimal spell at first level might be less useful later one.  But there isn't alot of in game reasoning behind that, and no real attempt at it either.  Some sort of in game reasoning might limit what you could retrain to the same school or to an improved version of an existing power (great cleave for cleave, major image for minor image).  But those are rules that make no attempt to justify themselves except at the metagame rulesish level.</blockquote>

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