[Toptomcat]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

If he's got a friend or two, then Judo will put you in a pretty bad spot.

The original question specified 'an assailant', in the singular, and in my post I specifically mentioned that if things were otherwise I'd be thinking about Karate rather than Judo.

Why not a simple Kick to the weapon hand, using Karate?

A Judo Arm Lock is just about as disabling to the weapon arm as a good Kick- but it defaults to full Judo skill. With the three points it takes a karateka to raise Kicking to Karate level, a judoka can buy Arm Lock at Judo + 3...and the technique doesn't take Targeted Attack penalties, so a Judoka with skill 18 is Arm Locking at skill 21, where the karateka is Kicking at skill 14. This buys four points of Deceptive Attack while still retaining the critical-success benefits of an effective skill at 16+.

The knife-12 guy is likely retreating, bringing his Parry to 10 rather than 9. So the karateka, with an attack roll that succeeds 90.7% of the time (and crits 1.9% of the time), has even odds of being parried- while the judoka's attack succeeds 98.1% of the time (and crits 9.3% of the time) and has a 25.9% chance of being parried.

Buying up additional techniques like Sweep or Jump Kick can help the karateka...but this permits the judoka additional points to invest in more Arm Lock (possibly Technique-Mastered) or Counterattack.

The karateka does have the real and meaningful advantage that he doesn't need to wait to successfully parry before he can attack. But the point-efficiency case for the Judo approach remains very strong.