Grappling and martial arts
Make grappling a martial arts skill?

Would it be a bad idea to tie grappling to Martial Arts?

Currently it takes zero combat skill to grapple someone. I think it's a little silly, because some scientists, deckers, and journalists can pretty much kidnap/murder someone else without knowing anything about fighting.

Moving sleepers and @trust to grapple can still be auto-successes.

Feel free to neg this into the pit as someone who doesn't know what she's talking about. 😛

But adding more utility to martial arts would be great, I totally support this. It does seem weird when you have people min-maxing into firearms with no unarmed capability, yet they can still grapple people exceptionally despite unarmed skill and grappling being tied together IRL.

And weapon variants should be a thing, with minor or no differences, since as far as I know only firearms have this, and not a whole lot. I still want weapon mods for all weapon types. I wanted to make an ideas thread the other day about adding some complexity to weapons, with quality values, durability and other effects, but I imagine it'll get dismissed as too intrusive. It is strange how forearms have all these things with maintenance, snipingg, assembly, ammo types, mods and... the other guy has a machete. Chop chop.

Is MA and Brawling balanced and on par? Not when pitted against each other, but in a more broad general aspect they are. Each one has different cons and pros, which one is better? Neither, it depends on how your character works and the progression you envision for them.

Weapons vs No Weapons? Weapons are always more dangerous, but catch someone without their weapon or take it away from them and they might be in a lot of trouble.

For good combat advice seek mentors IC IG, instead of speculating mechanics oocly in the forums.

But I can say from experience, that a dedicated pugilist can catch off-guard armed characters and defeat them if you know what you are doing. I've seen it, I've done it...and if stat correctly you could even counter the most dangerous streetsam to ever walk the streets of the Mix.

Now MA vs Brawling? How to make those two more equal? That's a valid conversation in my mind. I believe a while ago the idea of tonfa were brought up as a possible dual-wielding weapon for MA users. Perhaps the current MA weapon could be downgraded in price compared and the tonfa could be added in as a slightly more expensive but dual-wielder friendly option.

And maybe it was misunderstood, but I suggest we require skill for grappling well, not just pile on more skill bonuses with how it is right now. Unskilled grappling would get a nerf, and grappling as it stands would be closer to what a skills-weighted grapple would be.

But I do agree that being able to max out a skill and grapple anyone would be pretty insane. I think martial arts and maybe brawling should factor into evading grapples and busting out of them, leave initiation and holding it to stats.

Giving it to a single skill set would be incredibly unbalanced.

Anyway, another idea that's been thrown around before is a weapon or skill that focuses on incapacitating folks; doing mainly stamina damage. People suggested things like pepper spray and tasers, but I think MA could fit this niche nicely, and this would differentiate it from brawling nicely. Want someone kidnapped? Hire the sleek mano who knows 20 chokeholds instead of the caveman with arms the size of a lev, otherwise you might end up with a dead target, or at least a lot of broken bones.

Perhaps it could work better against unarmored targets or something along those lines, I don't know. I definitely favor the rock paper scissors approach to balancing, rather than to just try and make everything balanced and equal with just different fluff, because that's how you end up with headshots from a high caliber rifle that leave someone 'slightly injured'.

I dunno. But I'd definitely like for brawling and MA to be good for different things.

If they are a Mixer, maybe they have been around the block a few times and realized the Mix is dangerous, and thus are invested in "combat friendly" stats and some sort of combat skill that may or may not be a hand-to-hand skill. If they're a Corporate, maybe they hit up Weston's after work everyday.

The point is, if they are able to fend off a crazy immy or a malnourished murderhobo by grabbing them and choking them out, I don't see an issue with that. Someone of equal experience who is a pure combat build will dumpster they regardless.

What I have seen is a combat character with absolutely no hand-to-hand skills defeat a highly skilled hand-to-hand fighter through grappling, since it's so stats-weighted.

That is what I really want to stop. That is the truth of what's happening currently. Non-combat characters aren't abusing grapples from what I am aware. But whatever bonus to grapple defenses that hand-to-hand skills give is obviously inconsequential.

Should grapples be dictated by Martial Arts alone? No, in my opinion, Martial Arts and Brawling should be equivalents in all ways but flavor, and this goes for my views on grappling as a skill, as well. If one gets bonuses to grappling, both should. But people are understandably against grapple as a skill, even though I think if you haven't learned the technique as a skill, it shouldn't be so powerful.

My suggestion, at the VERY least, is to make Martial Arts and Brawling more meaningful when being grappled. When dodging doesn't work, have it be your parry/block against it, just like an unarmed attack would have you pass. When you're breaking out of it, have the skill factor in with your kung-fu techniques for busting out of headlocks or your brute-strength efficiency knowledge of brawling.

This is perfectly in line with the overall game design of SD.

Except when it comes to combat, since if an unskilled combatant went against a skilled combatant, even with wildly better stats, they would most definitely lose, regardless of most common stat disparities.

Which begs the question, why is grappling different than regular combat?

I get that to you it's obvious. To me that's an opinion, not an objective illustration of a severe balance problem. You're also leaving out a lot of relevant nuance:

someone invests their character concept and a significant amount of their UE into something just to be nullified in both mechanics and flavor by someone who barely cares about hand-to-hand fighting

OK, you're really wearing it on your sleeve now that "flavor" is bothering you. We've already discussed that.

What remains is that the MA expert didn't get nullified by "someone who barely cares about hand to hand fighting", they got nullified by someone who invested deeply into stats which allowed them to perform at this level.

Just curious, how are you privy to the hand to hand skill level, or stats, of the hand to hand master you mentioned? And how are you privy to the hand to hand skill level of the gunfighter that you mentioned?

Not trying to be a pain, but you are stating these things as if they are facts and i'm not sure that we're able to say that with certainty.

It might be worth bringing this up during the townhall meeting in order to get a more straight answer from the staff, just to know if this perception is misconstrued or not.

What I take from batko's words is something a long the lines "I don't like that more experienced characters with stronger stats but no or little unarmed skills investment can grapple a less experienced but more focused unarmed fighter." So the perception is that the skill bonus is not outweighing the stats bonus by much or at all...which in return make people who invest in these skills to feel they are less valuable.

As for MA weapons, we've been promised cyberware for MA for several years...code wise you'd think it wouldn't be that difficult to make, maybe we'll get lucky and the last @vote poll result lands in Cyberware then the coders could make something like this happen. It won't fix the disparity IMHO but at least it might tilt the scales of balance a bit.

That's fair, but I'm going off of what I know from interactions. If there are people out there roleplaying being martial artists and they were secretly only raising their decking skills the entire time, that'd be a really good gag, though. :p

Disclaimer: sometimes the real world way a thing works isn't the most fun implementation in a game, so I'm not necessarily suggesting that.

Grappling in real life is very, very, very skill dependent. If you have no training, and grapple with someone who has even a few months of training, it is realistic to say you cannot possibly win, and that you will be in extreme danger almost instantly.

I've witnessed skinny, trained 13-year-olds defend themselves easily, indefinitely, against 25-year-old weightlifters with no training, and who were visibly angry that a 13-year-old was making them look foolish. I'm not a large person, and I've easily controlled people much larger and stronger than myself. In my experience, an untrained person needs to be about 30 kg heavier and be very fit, in order to have a small chance to get out of my holds with brute strength. In many cases, if I really wanted to hurt them, they still wouldn't be able to muscle out without being injured (granted, this is without them being allowed to try striking me, which might help or hurt them).

It's realistic to say that most untrained people will commit a fatal mistake in the first second of grappling. A slight repositioning of an arm, a slight shift of their weight, and they've put themselves in an unrecoverable position, completely unaware until a moment later when they can't move anymore. Once a skilled grappler has you in a bad position, you cannot get out. They can now do whatever they want to you, with very little effort. The physics of the arrangement makes it so you can't use your limbs, or you can't breathe. It's like trying to pull open a push door; it just doesn't work.

It's similar to an untrained chess player going against a master: it's likely that in the first few moves, the untrained player loses the game and doesn't even know why.

My experience is that it takes about a year of grappling training to be able to defend yourself briefly against an experienced grappler (until they eventually get past your defense). It takes a few months of training to be able to easily immobilize and control untrained people.

The disparity in skill levels is always enormous. When I used to train against a black belt, I felt like I couldn't put up the slightest resistance. Nothing I tried worked. It was like being untrained. Then there are world-class black belts who can easily defeat local gym-level black belts.

TLDR: grappling in real life is a skill that takes years to master. I'm not saying grapple should be a skill in this game, but my experience is that untrained people are immediately and completely at the mercy of trained people.

But that's not actually what is described in feedback. You're just grabbing someone in a non-specific way and holding/dragging them.

I think you can RP this in different ways (@trusted grapples being carrying someone for example), but fundamentally this is a general action rather than a specific set of techniques.

The disconnect for me, personally is, someone with knowledge of how to do those moves, holds, etc is very unlikely to be easily 'generally grabbed' that would be inviting some serious consequences.

Generally grabbing someone is exactly what the untrained do, and the result is usually instantly bad news for the one doing it.

I actually can see many situations where this could further the RP. Big bad boy, who could in any other situation stomp your face off and vat you, goes to grab you because he wants to teach you a lesson without vatting you. Now you've got him, what do you do with him? You just made him look like a fool, do you let him go and take your beating now? Do you choke him out and multiply your future beatdown by a thousand?

Hell he may laugh at his own mistake and offer you a job. There's a lot of potential here, but it does hinge on whether or not you think any particular Immy could handle that or not. Hell at that point there may just be no good option.

I see both sides of the argument really. There's a threshold for where training makes up for, and even surpasses what strength can do for you IRL, before that threshold the strong dude is gonna do whatever they want with you, period. After that threshold it changes significantly.

Again, mechanics wise I don't know how this stuff functions so its hard to give exact input, but I can assume from what I've read that grappling functions entirely off of strength stat so I'll assume that for my suggestion:

Tie resistance to MA or Brawling for whichever is higher, and by resistance I mean how easy it is for your character to resist to escape, but also whether you can be dragged or have some other maneuver pulled on you after the grapple is started. (Again, new here so I don't know if you can punch someone you've grappled or if it's rp'd only or what.) Have the offense roll off of strength as it is, so even if your Immy rolls in with a decent skill, they might escape if they're smart enough but they're not going to turn around and lay it back on you. It'd be pretty unlikely (though not impossible if strength and brawling/ma were their only focus) that they'd both get out AND turn it back on you.

This would make it so they might, even with a high starting strength lay a grapple on someone, probably will be easy for the more experienced character to just get out of if they have much combat experience in anything hand to hand or they might be able to get away and in super rare cases might be decent at both, but still won't hold a candle to a street sam that's been living the life a while.

This would also make it unlikely that Jim, the doctor (who in this case has no MA/Brawling and mediocre strength...not saying they couldn't its not unreasonable especially in the red, just this example) isn't going to be grappling anyone that doesn't @trust them. Not for long anyway.

Thoughts?

And if it's important for your character to be able to use grapples to 'flex' on lower-end characters, why is spending UE to do so such a bad idea? Isn't that what UE is for, building what your character should be able to do in your eyes?

I still think that defending versus a grapple should have more weight on skill that it seems to have right now, but I've already spoken on that quite a lot in this thread.

You can be armed with an Xo5 suit with a katana.

Then comes someone in immy clothing and a hood who can grapple, choke you out, snap your neck.

Sometimes it comes with zero roleplay because they don't want to reveal who they are.

Walk past a sewer drain, get grappled, dragged into sewers, choked out, dead.

No evidence, no problem.

3 Step Grapple

1. Setup - the aggressor moves into position according to the rules of held weapons and combat distances (i.e. a person with a firearm is trying to keep distance, a person with a knife is trying to close distance, etc). Distance between aggressor and victim play a role in the victim noticing something is about to happen. Recent combat makes the victim wary, boosting their ability to get the head start they need.

2. Closing the Distance - the aggressor needs to move across the room from whatever distance they're at in order to grapple their victim. If the victim noticed the aggressor's movements previously, they'll be able to act sooner and likely evade the grapple.

3. Overpowering the Victim - much like the old grapple system, your ability to overpower depends largely on your physical strength and your potential skill at holds.

Over all of these, fatigue, aiming, stealth, encumbrance, are all now being factored into the algorithm too.

Moving them for interrogation. Good.

Holding someone down. Good.

Kidnapping. Good.

An easy way to stealth kill someone who is geared with zero RP to avoid being detected. Not good.

As I still haven't actually fought anyone, RP or not, my suggestions are all theoretical, and several responses indicate that they may very well already function exactly the way I'd expect.

That doesn't mean getting choked, dragged into a sewer and executed would be fun by any stretch, but is there really any way to know if someone had/needed a good reason to do so anyway? The only way I could see that being true is if you're required to log a note every time you kill someone listing why, even if it's just a brief "I was hungry and I'm a cannibal."

Still, just because you can do something with the coded systems doesn't mean you should.

When someone initiates a grapple, they are putting themselves into a close-up, hand-to-hand full-contact situation with another combatant. If you do that with someone who is trained in hand-to-hand and grapple-based disciplines especially, and you're not, you -should- get your ass beat. You just made the terrible decision to take the fight to an area where they far outdo you.

But again, I don't see a flat defense of not getting grappled in the first place as necessarily enough in this case. You moved the fight to an area where they have control. They should be able to reverse, or throw you (throwing meaning to the ground in a MA maneuver) out of the grapple. As opposed to an untrained grappler who simply uses 'resist' to get out, and, presumably in the theatre of mind that is combat, putting distance between the combatants, especially gun users, to move away from the full-contact hand-to-hand situation.

The options should increase with the grapplers skill.

On the other hand, if you are fighting an MA user and they wish to grapple you, there is no reason why your opponents skill should undermine your ability to keep distance (again, combat is theatre of the mind, you're not hugging by default, even if other verbs let you literally give/take things within arms reach in the same room) dodge, move, notice their intention, and so on. A skilled grappler might try to apply a 'fancier' hold, but they still move with the same speed an untrained grappler with the same reflexes would when trying to, so no bonus to achieving the grapple is warranted.

I'm sure the staff have gotten the feedback, we don't need to make X, Y and Z claims about mechanics to provide evidence for the arguments.

It's totally valid to suggest ideas and not explain why, or provide any justification. They're not implemented based on popular acclaim.

I’m also suggesting two new mechanics that could help balance martial arts:

Sweeping: Martial arts has leg sweeps, etc, that can leave their opponents unbalanced and on the ground. The way that it could work is either have a manual command to attempt to sweep an opponent off their feet and stun them, or have it happen automatically as a sort of ‘crit’ attack.

Throwing: Martial arts tends to have throws when grappling, why not give trained martial artists the ability to throw a grappled person to the ground? I’m imagining a ‘throw’ command after having grappled someone to throw someone to the ground and stun them or, on a failure, just release them.

Stunning someone would give you a higher success chance of fleeing, and also lower the stunned person’s dodge and preventing them from attacking for a short period of time.

I think this fits with the theme of many martial arts being based around self defense, and by giving more defensive abilities to the skill it would make martial arts less bad compared to other skills and give it strengths that skilled players would use well, rather than just give it a damage buff or whatever. I'd just like to see martial arts as more of a defensive art with a wider variety of options you can take while in a fight.