Kiai - Attack or Concentrate?

[DouglasCole]

Huh, I've been reading things like Kiai and certain grappling moves that are Quick Contests that say "count as an attack" to prevent bad behavior like doing five takedowns and THEN making a "real" Attack maneuver.

Never occurred to me that you could or should stack Attack Options on those types of things, more like "I'm doing a Takedown or Kiai...that uses up my attack this turn."

[Carlos]

Kromm has said:

Kiai is just an attack. You use it like any other attack. It just happens to be HT-based instead of DX-based.

And later...

Originally Posted by Carlos

So it means that a Martial Artist with Trained by a Master wants to shout a cry and attack on the sequence as a Rapid Strike, both Kiai skill and karate skills would suffer the penalty for multiple attack?

Kromm: Yep. It's just an attack. I think people who don't quite grasp this are getting hung up on the fact that it isn't a DX-based roll, like most attacks.

[evileeyore]

Pardon my thread necromancy... but it's for a good cause:

Originally Posted by Bruno

It's specifically a bonus "to hit", not "attack rolls". It doesn't give a bonus on Maledictions, for example, regardless of the skill you're rolling and what attribute it's based on.

Re-reading the options in Martial Arts, there's nothing there that I'm seeing particularly applicable to Kiai either.

I pmed Kromm last night about this (it came up in a PbP I'm in) and this was Kromm's response:

Originally Posted by Kromm

I'm generally fond of allowing all "all-out" actions to have the option of a bonus. Sacrificing active defenses is kind of huge in GURPS, so it had better be worth the risk.

That said, I'd use +4 for that bonus only for DX-based feats in melee combat. I'd make the bonus +2 for things that "feel" more like use of force in melee combat (e.g., the +2 to ST-based rolls on p. 114 of Martial Arts), simply due to the fact that GURPS uses an implicit "each +2 to hit is worth +1 damage" ratio almost everywhere. And I'd used just +1 for things that "feel" like ranged attacks, which always get just +1 (examples include All-Out Concentrate to use psi abilities, on p. 34 of Dungeon Fantasy 14).

Kiai strikes me as being closest to use of force – not all force is ST – so I'd go with +2. For stuff like Push, say, I'd use the usual +4, because the skill is DX-based and the roll is an attack roll, to hit with the push.

[Plane]

If you had some kind of perk to float the use of Kiai from HT to Will (not sure if that's possible, Power-Ups Perks had IQ-based Karate I think) that would seem like a good basis for switching from Attack to Concentrate maneuver in doing it.