[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by Kyle Aaron

Having at least 1CP in Brawling allows you to use a blackjack or sap or similar, giving +1 to damage. The punch will do basic thrust damage, for a ST10 character that's 1d-2, or 1d-1 for kicking. A blackjack/sap takes punching to 1d-1 - so the skilled brawler can do as much damage with their fists as the default brawler can with their feet.

Rules As Written explicitly allows brass knuckles, saps and other fistloads to be used untrained at full DX - see the equipment table on Basic 271.

Remember that by the rules, you cannot get defaults off defaults, only off Attributes or Skills with at least 1CP in them. So Techniques cannot be used until there's at least 1CP in Brawling. Most GMs would allow the default brawler to kick, but probably not disarm, etc. So if it does nothing else, the 1CP in Brawling unlocks access to those techniques - but you'd probably want to spend some CP on some of them.

Techniques that can be practically used by a 1cp Brawler are very few, and basically require Telegraphic or All-Out to even attempt. In some edge cases they can give an advantage over an unskilled fighter, perhaps.

And having techniques above default will be useful. For example, kicking at Brawling-2 - well, if you've DX10 and you kick at 8, you have just a 25.9% chance of connecting - and if you miss, you have to roll vs DX or fall over (and DX10 will give you a 50% chance of staying up or falling). Why would you kick? Because it does +1 damage, and another +1 if you're wearing heavy boots.

So the default brawler can try to kick and will usually miss and half the time fall down, the skilled brawler can kick and do extra damage. This extra damage means an extra chance of achieving a "major wound" (over HP/2), or crippling wounds on limbs (HP/2) or hands/feet (HP/3) or knocking them out by a blow to the head, etc.

The fighter with 1 cp in Brawling has exactly the same "skill" when kicking as someone completely untrained. My problem is not between Brawling at DX vs Brawling at DX+2, but between unarmed strikes at DX vs Brawling at DX.

Other techniques include: aggressive parry, disarming, elbow drop, elbow strike, eye-poke, eye-rake, eye-gouging, feint, ground fighting, head butt, jam, knee drop, knee strike, push kick, stamp kick, sweeping kick, two-handed punch, and uppercut.

And all of these will be useful at some time.

Again, all of those techniques can help a skilled Brawler, but the cases where they can be used effectively without additional training are pretty rare.