[CousinX]

Originally Posted by Gef

Check out Martial Arts, p. 58. If it didn't allow an attack at full skill with either hand, it would be poorer than any other combat skill in the game.

Sure enough. Yeah, that definitely needed to be fixed/clarified.

Originally Posted by Gef

Assuming the latter case, Off-Hand Training would be a good signature perk. You'd need a point each in Rapier and MG, then you'd add 6 more in MG...and then you need one more for the next level. Pull it out of rapier, put it in MG, and your rapier skill doesn't change, because now your default from Main-Gauche is just as good. However, now you've spent 8 on MG alone; if you have a couple in Fast-Draw, you qualify for a style perk, and Weapon Adaptation would be a good one.

That's pretty much exactly how I'm looking at it, save for the part about pulling the point out of Rapier -- as I see it, that point needs to be there as part of the style cost.

Originally Posted by Gef

If the off-hand weapon is less about distance flexibility and more a cool way to defend without a cumbersome shield, then Weapon Adaptation as a signature perk, and Off-Hand Training as your first style perk (and Unusual Training for Dual Attack as your second, if not a Weapon Master) may be a better way to go. Then you have only one skill for both primary weapons of the style, which I find cleaner, although your aesthetic sense may differ. Of course a style needn't have a sig perk, but this style seems a good candidate, because it requires a trio before you can fight in its most iconic fashion.

Agreed: for similar weapons, a single weapon skill is certainly cleaner, and much more point-optimized. But even in canonical styles such as Nito Ryu, Broadsword and Shortsword are both style skills, despite an even closer default, and not even any rules ambiguities that make Weapon Adaptation questionable.

Originally Posted by Gef

I say it "requires" three because I'm counting Weapon Adaptation. Without it, you take your default at -3 for one from the other. It's just not cost effective to buy up the default instead of improving the main skill thereby pulling the default along with it. Against a warrior with comparable training in a different style who uses paired weapons with the same skill, dual scimitars say, your fencer is always at a disadvantage unless you allow a Weapon Adaptation perk. Against a sword-and-shield fighter, who must also master a pair of skills, I suspect the latter enjoys more benefit from the diversity between his weapons than a sword-and-knife fighter (defense bonus, slam bonus, block missiles, low cost.)

Totally: Shield and Cloak are more useful as separate off-hand skills than Main-Gauche, which as written, is pretty much useless itself, or else makes -any- primary-hand skill it's paired with a throw-away skill. Why take Jitte/Sai if Main-Gauche can be used to wield Jitte/Sai weapons in both hands without penalty, and uses fencing weapon rules?

So it's not that I disagree on the point-optimized use of the rules; particularly with the clarification for Main-Gauche in MA, by-the-numbers it works better to dump Rapier from the style altogether -- especially if we allow Weapon Adaptation to be bought up front rather than as a Style Perk.

But it stills seems to be using a loophole (and bending a rule to boot) to get around paying for what would otherwise be a required style skill -- prerequisite to learning the style's traits, and included in style cost. Weapon Adaptation doesn't just move a single weapon to a new skill -- it moves all weapons covered by that skill to the new one. I can see no exception for defaults; unless I'm reading RAW wrong, Main-Gauche + Weapon Adaptation (Rapier to Main-Gauche) not only includes any weapon used with full Rapier skill, but also any weapon that can be used with the Rapier skill at a default.

As I'm looking at it, even if a rapier+main-gauche fencer does buy Weapon Adaptation to use a single skill for both, he needs that 1 point in each of Rapier + Main-Gauche if they're both style skills in the style that makes Weapon Adaptation available to him.