So, now that martial arts changes are in mainline and we can add weapon-based martial arts styles, what kinds of weapon-styles would people want to see in the game?
Nun-chucks, a staff, hmm…
Video-game style weapon handling.
Katana’s suddenly become twirly swords of death, baseball bats can knock a head clean off with a crit, kicks are spam attacks, you can use ladders as a badass weapon.
I’d love to see tonfas in this game. Maybe even a ball and chain (usable by really strong characters)
I could be wrong, but I think swwu was looking for more martial art styles that use weapons, rather than weapons that can be used in martial arts.
Maybe something like eskrima, if that’s not too difficult? I don’t know how hard it would be to integrate the use of two weapons into the game.
I’ve got GURPS Martial Arts in storage; can dig it out if I finally get a compiler working. Italian Rapier Fencing was a formal style therein, and I think I’ve heard GlyphGryph talk about it from time to time. I think Tai Chi can accommodate swords, or was that Wing Chun?
Kenjutsu would be the Katana style; Kendo might be easier to find, but sporting styles would probably kinda stink in actual combat.
(As I understand it, Japanese styles use -jutsu or -jitsu for the “fighting” form and “-do” for the sport/art form. “Ken-” is sword style. But that’s a fairly uninformed opinion, fully open to correction.)
Not sure what the technical form would be for European broadsword training, or French/other fencing styles.
Think I saw this somewhere here, but re-linking just in case: Katana v. Rapier
Weapon styles…and mutation based martial arts variants.
Kickboxing with Velociraptor foot talons? Yes please.
The two major european styles would probably be best referred to as Kunst des Fechtens for the German style and L’arte dell’Armizare for the Italian one. Both would have to bbe heavily gameified and their differences caricatured, of course, but thats true of all the martial arts. Those two and sports fencing should be enough for the European styles I would think.
As far as effects go, the German style is hard hitting with strong blocks while the Italian style is more about keeping distance and using the opponents momentum against them to create openings.
Maybe, silambam from india? Used with all forms of spears, heavy sticks and mops.
GlyphGryph’s comment reminded me. To avoid getting too bogged down in “but this style should really be able to…” and similar issues, I’d like to suggest when a style is added, it gets a short description written for it, and that description is the cannonical reference for how the style works in the game.
Yes this caricatures styles, but frankly if you don’t do that they all end up being nearly the same.
The comment on -justsu vs -do is accurate as I understand it. T’ai chi makes heavy use of the chinese straight sword (proper name Jian, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jian), but also uses various staffs and other implements. As an example of strereotyping I’d say restrict it to the Jian and other swords that are similar enough, for example a rapier or foil would handle very similarly in practice, and possibly a longsword.
I really like the idea of having “sport styles” that aren’t all that great, with kendo being a great example. On the other hand some sport styles, like boxing might be very practical.
For implementation, a question is which do we annotate for compatability with a martial art, the style object or the weapon? It seems more pertinent to annotate the style with a list of compatible weapons, but there might be some reason that doesn’t work. Also weapons are relatively simple and styles are relatively complex already, so keeping the complexity in the style definitons is also a plus.
On the subject of styles that use weapons, most kung fu derived styles (which is um, most of them) use weapons, it’s probably more common to have weapon-only styles than styles that are only unarmed.
Most branches of Karate use a whole boatload of weapons, as do most kung-fus, definitely ninjutsu*, Akido and Judo kind of stand out as being light on weapons, but I’m no expert on either of them. Escrima and Brazilian jujutsu use a variety.
With the current system, I’d just make “Escrima sticks” (or a more proper name?) a singular item you equip together, similarly with Tonfa if you’re using two. Possibly apply them to each other to pair and unpair them.
*From what I know of ninjutsu, being to incorporate most any weapon into the style is a major focus.
I remember there are a style for the zweihanders involving the combination of spear-, axe- and sword-moves
And also nunchacks