KEEP TAEKWONDO. It’s a brilliant foundation for moving into other martial arts such as kickboxing and depending on the style of Taekwondo practiced, can incorporate elements of Judo and straight-up boxing. Solid offensively AND defensively.
Hmm. Potential upgrade paths, purely hypothetical?
Fists>Boxing…>Savate? (Less formal training, more practical, weapons possible)
Boxing>Kickboxing>Muay Thai? (H2H, use of all limbs)
Karate/Taekwondo>Kung Fu (Balanced offense/defense, bonuses)
Systema/KM>Eskrima/Pentjak Silat (H2H, weapons)
Capoeira (anti-group, Style)
Having one style upgrade into another starts to assert that one is better than the other.
You say that too loudly and it’ll spark one of those internet champion “my style can beat up your style” shitfests.
None of this is actually a reason to keep taekwondo.
Also, Kung Fu is not a martial art style.
[quote=“An0n3, post:43, topic:3299”]Having one style upgrade into another starts to assert that one is better than the other.
You say that too loudly and it’ll spark one of those internet champion “my style can beat up your style” shitfests.[/quote]
I have no problem doing that, ignoring the participants, and occasionally dropping into the argument to laugh at them 
Heirarchial progression or not, we will be implicitly asserting that some styles are better than others simply by the fact that they will actually be better in game, that is if you take seriously the idea that the styles in the game substantially reflect real martial arts, which is an absurdity. The goal is to have a single-paragraph description of each style, and THAT is the definition of the style for the purposes of the game. Also this description will be a caricture of the style in order to make the differentiation between styles greater.
Anyway, I don’t see that it would be an “upgrade” so much as a prerequisite anyway, I’ve actually run into this, where I’ve had a teacher refuse to teach a particular style until the students have learned another style to his satisfaction.
Hmm. A style suitable for beginners, that works as a solid offensive and defensive form, and can be built upon…only GlyphGryph wouldn’t take that as a reason to keep it around. :-/
Yep, “Kung Fu” is not a martial arts style of itself, despite my using it hear to refer to “whatever cinematic MA animal styles get kept”. It’s Chinese MA, generally. Literal translation is “hard work”/“great accomplishment”.
8 styles listed, at hand:
An Ch’i
Chin Na
Pao Chuan
Praying Mantis KF
Shaolin KF
White Crane KF
Wing Chun KF
Wushu KF
And apparently T’ai Chi isn’t that far removed.
As for style-chaining: I was going for progression into more difficult forms, not necessarily “better”. Kevin’s got it with the “prerequisite” line. I’d been thinking that a Pentjak Silat or $KUNG_FU_STYLE instructor would need some convincing to teach the player, for instance. (No, simply beating up the instructor wouldn’t work.)
Re better/worse styles: Situational.
Boxing may be pretty good against a single human target, but loses out against groups.
Capoeira works well against groups, but loses out in a confined space.
Dragon Style KF let intellectuals still fight effectively, but doesn’t have the raw damage output of KM or MT.
Krav Maga can special on every turn, but that’s it.
Taekwondo soaked damage like nobody’s business but had trouble dishing it out.
Muay Thai did good damage and evened the odds against large critters, but the blocks didn’t work as well.
I’d say the way to go would be to level up several styles and switch as needed.
Some sort of GUN KATA or flashy unrealistic handgun related martial art
It should be heavily based on perception and dexterity requiring possibly a 14 to be used most effectively and the bonuses should be something like this:
-A melee dodge (or a bullet dodge if you have that fancy CBM) greatly increases the change of shooting a critical hit
-A critical shot gives you small extra chance of dodging the next attack and a chance of a melee stun
-Recoil diminishes much quickly after firing more than 3 shots in short sucession
-Melee with handguns have extra chances of stunning
-Firing at stunned targets is an almost guaranteed criticl hit.
(Technically turning you into a steamroller as long as you can dodge, are surrounded and have enough ammo to continue the spree)
It would be a very fun and quick way to attack crowds at the cost of requiring pretty much zero start game benefits and a heady reliance on the RNG It also give you an extra incentive to use and train handguns instead of the usual run to window shoot arrows through it for ranged characters.
Also the possibilites of combining this with uncanny dodge will certainly be awesome
I think it would be a great example of fun>reality
You know what would be quite interesting - a martial art based on future tech that can only be found in the game. A martial developed specifically for those using power armor, perhaps?
I see a guy in power armor punching and kicking things with huge amounts of strength. He uses this arms to hit a lot of things, though. HEADBUTTING.
Awww you didn’t told me if you liked the idea
BTW I dont see power armor offering the flexibility or a martial art that involves more complex moves than supah punching everything but i could see one based around uncanny dodge
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.
It seem we imagine power armor very differently then; i kind off think off something like the bulky fallout like ones. But I suppose that if canonically they are more like the crisis ones they do offer for a lot of interesting things.
You still haven’t said what you think about firearm martial arts
Yeah and I’m not going to because I don’t.
aww you guys never like my ideas D:
I mean i see no reason no to add that one it is pretty different from all the rest of things you are discussing and will indeed greatly impact the gameplay of people using it just like a meaning full martial art should be.
te concept is its not even that far fetched is just like being trained to do counter attacks just that instead of doing grabs or throwing punches you are shooting things at point blank range there’s nothing even unrealistic about it.
I’m great with having styles that interact with ranged combat, I think the US and Russian military styles are going to do this kind of thing.
Specific feedback:
-A melee dodge (or a bullet dodge if you have that fancy CBM) greatly increases the change of shooting a critical hit
This makes no sense, but you will get the same effect as I’m planning on having hits on the player decrease aim / increase recoil, so dodging will prevent the accuracy loss. (yes, ranged in melee is going to get HARD, as it should be)
-A critical shot gives you small extra chance of dodging the next attack and a chance of a melee stun
Nuh uh, critical hits do things to the target, they don’t do anything to the attacker, especially with a ranged attack.
-Recoil diminishes much quickly after firing more than 3 shots in short sucession
Sure, a style could totally interact with how well you manage recoil, call it double-tap or triple-tap maybe?
-Melee with handguns have extra chances of stunning
Mimimally we could mark firearms as unarmed weapons for the style, which is generally going to be better for purposes of attack results, and allows them to use style techniques.
-Firing at stunned targets is an almost guaranteed criticl hit.
This could also be an effect of the double/triple-tap technique, I like it.
Additional effects:
Tactical reload - Enhanced reload speed at the cost of dropping spent magazines on the ground (Requires magazines to be seperate items)
Firing Cadence - Alternating fire/pause/fire/pause results in ehanced recoil recovery and aim speed.
Tactical entry - Smashing a door with the style active and a fully loaded eligible gun equipped results in a practiced series of actions, shoot the door lock, kick/shoulder open the door, and fire at a target inside.
I think you can see where I’m coming from, I don’t see any reason to sacrifice realism for fun, because I think we can generally come up with a realistic way to get the fun effects.
I like the magazine idea.
You would have to [A]ctivate the empty mag in your inventory and put the bullets into it. For the sake of… simpleness there will be a pistol mag, a rifle mag, and a SMG mag. Shotgun mag for the saiga. Then come the problem with bullet size restrictions. Maybe code how much of a kind of bullet you can put into a magazine? Say 15 for 9mm and 10 for .44.
Example:
"What will you load into the magazine?"
a. 9mm (100)
b. .45 ACP (100)
c. .44 magnum (100)
“You load 15 9mm bullets into your pistol magazine”
And when you don’t have a magazine with the proper bullets for it:
“You need a magazine with 9mm bullets in it”
You will need to be holding the gun and have the corresponding ammo for it in your hands. Then comes the problem for how spare mag and extended mags will work. Um…
“You attach the extended mag to your rifle magazine”
Heh, nope, this is a “careful what you wish for” situation. If we have discrete magazines, they WILL be typed to only fit one type of ammo, on the other hand every gun will come with a magazine. as with SO many things, I know exactly what I want to do to develop this, but have almost no time to do it.
Ah. Well then I wish you the best of luck.
*Cries in the corner with his ideas
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
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.