Question: Off-Hand Striking

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That does sound like a not obvious fact at least to those of us that have zero fighting skill. In gaming, we see our character with numerous strong features, but one "glaring" weakness. We want to do whatever we can to shore that up, rather than relying on all the strengths like a real person with limited time to learn every combination of combat under the sun.

I think you're overgeneralizing a lot there. Gaming characters built to have one strength (often hugely overdeveloped) and wide swathes of weakness are...pretty well known phenomena.

Gaming characters whose approach to combat is to try to escape it as fast as possible with a semi-desperate gambit based on a narrow set of fighting skills does seem more unusual, though maybe you'd see that in low powered horror games. (Needing to frequently escape real-life fights strikes me as a low-powered horror scenario, even if no literal monsters are involved!)