Worthwhile Martial Arts for Inclusion (make your case here!)

[FunsizeNinja123]

Ah. Well then I wish you the best of luck.

*Cries in the corner with his ideas

[John_Candlebury]

Well the dodge increasing your chances of a critical hit was a way of simulating you taking advantage of your enemy’s vulnerable stance after a failed attack (this really makes no sense when dodging ranged attacks i have to admit) but i guess this could be better incorporated int the game.

The highly unjustified increase of dodge after a critical hit was to make you getting “in the zone” when using the skill to be able to quickly dispatch crowds (like what happens to the mooks that are holding the protagonist at gunpoint in modern every action movie) perhaps i better example could be the old martial art that increased hit damage when dodging and dodging chances when hitting which is technically the same thing but with punches instead of guns

Other than that i like your special abilities and will be nice if they made it. Also a good addition could be eliminating the recoil penalty that you get when switching weapons so that you could alternate between knife-handgun and don’t lose combat turns

[An0n3]

Krav Maga teaches techniques for beating on people while holding a firearm. They dynamic art of pistol whipping suckas in the face.

I know the army field training manual has techniques for bayonet usage and rifle butts, I would assume the russian equivalent also has a section on how to take a modern battle rifle and eat it piece by piece because those guys are lunatics.

I would agree that the reasons given for TKD’s inclusion weren’t great but that there are other good reasons for it to be included. Functionally it could be implemented as a more dicey all-or-nothing counter-part to karate. Big articulate kicks that are very effective when they land, but have very severe drawbacks when they don’t. If I had to guess I would say Taekwondo and Karate are probably the two most commonly practiced martial arts in the world, so it makes sense for them to survive the apocalypse in some capacity.

EDIT: Also yeah, what Kevin said about gun magazines. That’s so NOT AT ALL HOW GUNS WORK I’d foam at the mouth if I saw it implemented that way. A magazine is only made to hold one type of ammo, be it a single caliber or a specific gauge and length of shotgun shell. Very very rarely you get situations where a gun is a little flexible on what it eats, like most .357magnum revolvers chewing on .380 just fine, shotguns being able to load shells of varying type and length (but always the same gauge).

Those are the exceptions and not the norm. I’d love to see someone try to stuff .50AE rounds into a .22LR mag.

[Rivet]

Very very rarely you get situations where a gun is a little flexible on what it eats, like most .357magnum revolvers chewing on .380 just fine, shotguns being able to load shells of varying type and length (but always the same gauge).

If you’re going to get anal-retentive gun-nerd on somebody, please make sure you have your facts right.

A .357 will happily load and fire .38 special rounds. It will, however, not load .380 ACP rounds because .380 ACP rounds are rimless automatic cartridges.

Also, not all shotguns will load all shells of the same gauge. Try loading a 12 gauge 3.5" shell into your 870 Express and see what happens.

[KA101]

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:51, topic:3299”]What do you mean? Power armor would conceivably allow for all sorts of interesting grapples and throws and strikes that just aren’t reasonable normally, if we add a power jump to it (which we might, come z-levels) we open up a whole LOT of possibilities for cool stuff.

There’s a lot more to martial arts than flexibility - and besides, the power armor is less encumbering than traditional armor, and there were martial arts perfectly compatible with those.[/quote]

Powered-MA wold be pretty embryonic: last lore I’d heard on the stuff was that it’d been in the prototype stage a week or so pre-Cata. Finding someone who’d worked out a style specifically for it…seems pretty unlikely. I don’t think there’d have been time!

(And it would help to pin down a clear definition: Deus Ex or GI Joe-style bodysuits, Fallout-esque massive nuclear-powered metal casements, something else?)

[FunsizeNinja123]

Holy wall of text.

I like it.

[KA101]

MA strikes risking self-damage: No. Just no. Seems like a great way to scare people away from using MA.

(Analogy: weapons wearing out and needing maintenance. Excessively tedious, IMO.)

Rest of it…well, I’m kinda fond of the existing styles. Thanks for not breaking everything.

[GlyphGryph]

I’m personally a fan of MA strikes dealing self-damage if not properly equipped for the sort of damage being dealt out.

Obviously it would depend on the type of attack you are doing and the enemy you’re fighting though - fighting robot turrets with bare-fist punches might not be the best idea.

[John_Candlebury]

^ Well I agree with that because you know common sense but not with the RNG randomly screwing you when you have low skill

Oops you rolled a 1 with that attack to the zombie, you broke your hand

[Leper]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:66, topic:3299”]^ Well I agree with that because you know common sense but not with the RNG randomly screwing you when you have low skill

Oops you rolled a 1 with that attack to the zombie, you broke your hand[/quote]

It’s actually surprisingly easy to dislocate or fracture bones in your hand when fist-fighting, unless you really know what you’re doing or have protective gear.
Even wrapping rags around your hand and weaving them between your fingers helps to keep bones in place.

I’m not an expert on the matter, and I certainly can’t find a balance between realism and gameplay here, but in real life hitting someone in the face is going to hurt pretty badly.

[John_Candlebury]

Well it also surprisingly common for firecrackers to prematurely explode and mutilate your hands, it also very common for things to randomly fall of your pockets while you are walking, waterthight containers puncturing and losing all that precious water, infections to be resistent to antibiotics, having heart attacks with no previous indication

But the point is that this is just a oops the RNG decided to screw you and there was nothing you could do to avoid it mechanic. The penality for fighting low skills should not be breaking bones and irremediably losing the character (remember that if this depends on skills it only going to happen to new characters which cannot build splints and have not chance of actually clearing a hospital) the penality is already enough at is: getting swarmed and killed because you thought your combat skill could take you further.

[Sharklaser]

How about self damage in form of rare hitpoint losses (out of the hat: 3% chance on normal strikes, 10% on criticals - and some maximum of damage gained trough this system. As your limbs get too damaged you would not use them anymore for attacks - thus player health sets boundary for prolonged use of these skills?

But - hitting enemies with unprotected arms/legs would cause often SOME pain. Chance of pain is initially something like 40% per hit, but this one would be capped too to maximum of say - 20 pain points overall from strikes. Also the chance to get more pain points from strikes decreases (you get used to) so the chance gets smaller for each additional point, like:

40% chanse to get pain per hit at pain 0
30% chance to get pain per hit at pain 1
25% chance to get pain per hit at pain 2
20% chance to get pain per hit at pain 3
15% chance to get pain per hit at pain 4
10% chance to get pain per hit at pain 5
etc etc etc…

You could reduce this pain by using gloves/paddings but this would affect the damage delivered too.

Also, the gear youre using would wear out sooner or later the more you punch and kick stuff (same chances as HP damage to bare hand). So you could not use this thing forever even when padded fully, each level of damage to equipment would mean 25% more chance that strike affects your hand directly. Having “reinforced” gear would eliminate one level of damage…

Maybe this would reflect the “self damage” aspect of MA? Maybe not really realistic, but gameworthy maybe?

[ShinQuickMan]

Maybe the level of pain/self-injury should depend on a function of skill level and technique used? So a low level boxer won’t be breaking his bones if he’s only sticking to the basics, but might if he tries repeatedly goes for some fancy maneuver he just got at his recent skill level up.

[KA101]

Or we presume that the player character wouldn’t do something self-damage-y.

Re kicks: MA fighters tended to shy away from kicks against competetent adverseraries, last I knew, since the consequences of missing or being countered tended to be worse.

Re pain-per-hit: It’s a serious debuff. IMO it’s not worth adding either.

way I figure it, meleeing machines (or other genuinely Hard targets) was solved by their blowing up when killed. That tends to severely injure all melee attackers, provided they survive to actually get in range and make the kill at all. Machine-critters tend to do good damage, IME.

Even if melee critters would take damage when attacking a character in rigid armor–which would be “only fair”–there are significantly more melee critters than the player character. All this does is weaken the player character.
“Realism” that only applies to make the player’s life more difficult is jagoff design.

So: Oppose.

[KA101]

I liked MA as it was, and can support streamlining the amount of styles. I certainly support making them teachable in-game.

I oppose making MA impose any chance of self-damage, whatsoever. Cata has a limitless supply of Critters with little-to-no self-preservation. Self-damage is a hefty Nerf to MA, which doesn’t need one IMO. (Dodging and Blocking reworks have adequately handled that.)

I oppose needlessly complex armor mechanics. “Whoops, you forgot knee pads. Whoops, you wore your helmet when it’s warm out. Whoops, you didn’t put your helmet on before meleeing. (Yes, I’ve heard comments–bodytemp discussion, IIRC–insisting that people should be microing their helmet-use.) Whoops, you can’t do that Grab because you had knuckles equipped.”

I oppose having to micro each attack, or even the “intensity” of attacks. That’s handled well enough by switching styles, IMO.

In short: I oppose overcomplicating the melee system. So far as I am concerned, your proposals do so.

[kevin.granade]

The only place I could see adding self-inflicted pain (damage is right out) is if you’re using the default “no style”, are relatively unskilled, and are not using any protective gear.
As has been pointed out, we aren’t and don’t plan on tracking wear on anything other than particularly delicate or ill-suited tools for the job at hand, and I don’t see any reason to apply this principle differently to unarmed attacks, if you’re ill-prepared and “doing it wrong” (e.g. have no unarmed skill and punch or kick a robot barehanded), it might make sense to have bad consequences for that, but the threshold of preparedness that eliminates all risk of this happening should be really low.

Side issue: even if robots blow up, they perhaps shouldn’t blow up instantly. I’m wondering if we should spawn a robot corpse that’s an armed bomb? This allows:

1. run away (mostly a no-brainer)
2. (requires some skill) messily disable bomb by tearing/smashing it, reduces harvestables from robot.
3. (requires more skill) disable bomb with finesse, maximum harvestables from robot.
   Also robots that are intended to interact with the public shouldn’t explode, I see “explosion after destruction” as a boobytrap feature, and something only military bots should be doing.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I’m wondering if we should spawn a robot corpse that’s an armed bomb?

Newb player just killed bot.
“Oh hey, a tankbot! Lets go loot the shit outta him!”
*[E]xamine
a. Active tankbot
b. (random stuff)

“WtF?” BOOM

[Sheb]

Would give a real use to the trapping skill.

[Logrin]

The messily removing bomb option should definitively give you an armed bomb still counting down–Just yank it out and toss it down the hall.

Also, on the topic of wrestling and boxing as martial arts, I’m all for this.

Boxing:

• Boxing’s first ability and something to set it apart from the others should be doubling up on the jab ((gamewise this should be a weaker punch attack that precludes your normal strike)) As in real life this would be the boxer’s work horse and really start to shine once they get feint and rapid attack.
• Secondly, when a boxer eats a melee strike to the head give them a chance to straight up CROSS COUNTER that sucker–attacking the attacker during his turn. This should be distinct from counter-attack in some way, maybe through an auto-crit or stunning the enemy?
  OR
• Have you seen Rocky? Give boxer’s an ability that occasionally mitigates the pain ((but not damage)) they suffer from a blow to the head or body.

Wrestling:

• I’d call it Pankration and make it a heavy 1-vs-1 favoring style. For instance give it a buff called “Grappling” ((Maybe activated with the G command)) that lets you push enemies around like furniture and damages them for colliding into things ((and what the collide with.)) Using this command should preclude dodging or blocking other enemies to account for the satisfaction of slamming a zombie dog through a dresser.
• Maybe high-skill wrestlers could get a human shield ability? A chance to divert damage they’d normally take from other enemies to the one they’re grappling?
• A chance to unleash a brutal lariat or clothesline on zombies that lunge in for the bite; this should apply on any creature that attacks in a similar manner.

[Slax]

Boxing’s a big field.
In- and out-boxing is already pretty different. Wikipedia does of course offer some meek information but it’s hardly conclusive.