Re: Things players say to me
 

I'm not a Tae Kwon Do expert but I did get to my red stripe, so that's a thing. I could kick above my head at the time too, no problem.

He's smoking some kind of crack if he says his TKD teacher teaches that the head is an easier target than the body. It might be a higher value target in a tourney (I never did tournament fighting) and GURPS certainly models it being a high value target in a real fight, but it's definitely a harder target (and not just because you have to lift your leg up further). Once you've got your leg up around your hip you can strike the entire torso and upper body with about as much leg-lifting-difficulty and speed. Hitting your target and not getting blocked is another thing entirely.

We definitely were taught to Telegraph our kicks, and I would say as a non-tournament practitioner I was merrily All Out Attacking too, even though the kata include miming defenses against imaginary opponents from all directions. The operative words there being "miming" and "imaginary".

Re: Things players say to me
 

I do have a problem with the enormous -5 to hit the face and -7 to hit the skull. Hitting the skull (from the front) is 75% as difficult as hitting an eye. Which feels utterly excessive. But I agree there should be SOME penalty.

Re: Things players say to me
 

Their arguments are iffy because they don't actually know what they are talking about.



Agreed, and with some strikes, swings, or kicks, the skull is easier to hit than the face.

I've always felt the Hit Location table was overly harsh, what with the ease of punching people in the face, head, groin, and knees.

Especially the knees. And no, I've never bought the notion that these were techniques that were specifically trained in. I mean yes, those were strikes I trained in, but no more so than body blows, kidney strikes, jabs to the solar plexus, etc.

But the face? It's just so punchable.

Re: Things players say to me
 

Well, do whatever you want of course, but this is a problem in gaming in general and it's not system dependent. The problem is many gamers just don't understand reality. They are young or get their ideas from movies or whatever. This causes them, through lack of meaningful life experience, to believe silly things.

You could play with those same guys in some other system and they would continue to think other thoughts divorced from reality. No fixing that. You just have to learn to accept it if you are going to play at Cons or otherwise engage with a large volume of gamers. The only solution is to play with a narrow group of selected people.

Re: Things players say to me
 

I've nearly always used that strategy, and it's worked well for me. But then I've attended only one gaming convention; at science fiction and comic conventions there have been too many other things to do for me to commit time to running a game.

Re: Things players say to me
 

I don't know jack about MA.

But it seems to me that you should not be practicing by kicking people in the head.

Re: Things players say to me
 

I didn't kick actual people in the head on a daily basis any more than a boxer punches people in the head on a daily basis. However, the boxer trains to punch people in the head, and a TKD tournament fighter trains to kick people in the head.

Kicks landed on the head count for more points than kicks landed on the body (usually), and strikes landed on limbs Just Don't Count. So you do a lot of training to get good at landing full strength blows at headish-like targets. Then you do practice sparring, where you aren't using full-strength blows (and everyone is wearing body armor and head protection) and train landing blows on actual defended heads, lightly. In full contact matches you put those two parts of your training together and punch and kick people in the head. Yay.

You can see why I didn't do tournament fighting.

Re: Things players say to me
 

My understanding is that for Olympic-style TKD, the watchword is "jarring contact." That is, if you kick someone in (say) the chest, is only counts if you rock their world a bit. The head is rather substantially easier to "jar" someone by hitting. Or end the fight right the heck then via knockout.

Therefore, not only is it a lower-percentage move to hit the body, kicks are prioritized to a huge degree (it's harder to jar a dedicated practitioner with a punch), it pays off to adopt a guard stance with the hands held substantially lower than many other arts, since you can be pretty sure that the attacks will cross the plane of the waist, and that punches are mostly ignorable.

So from that perspective, the head is "easier" to hit than the body, because (a) the hands are right there protecting the body, and (b) the impact to the body is not always "jarring" enough to get a point. Olympic TKD practitioners also don't have to worry about getting their sensitive bits kicked in as they go for high kicks, and don't have to worry at all about someone catching their leg and doing a takedown.

That's not to say these guys and gals aren't phenomenal athletes that can kick the head a lot, and really hard. But the rules of the game they're playing encourage a certain set of techniques that are honed meticulously.

I've also trained (briefly) at a TKD-centric school where the instructor was a huge fan of Hapkido as well, and extensively at Hwa Rang Do (which in many cases resembles a blend, if one must, of TKD, Hapkido, and Jiu-Jitsu and all can be used in sparring matches). These folks still like to go for the head, but other techniques are much more common, and the vulnerability to getting your leg caught and your other leg swept during kicks, especially high kicks, pours water on the "there's no downside to a head kick!" issue.

Re: Things players say to me
 

One time at a con-game I ran...
Let me set the stage first. [Warning for grossness]

The game is using BESM (an anime style game but similar in many respects to GURPS). The PCs are various pregenerated chars who are all on an airplane that crashes on the north pole. Most people on the plane died as it crashed but the PCs all had Powers that awoke as part of the crash. As the PCs crawl out of the ship and realise they are stranded, the very first action of one of the players is to - and this is were it gets gross - he wanted his character to consume human flesh.

I immediately pulled out of game and told him it would be wildly out of character for his pretty normal high school kid to suddenly want to eat people. Maybe search for survives - try to find a way to call for help or something? Or, if he was hungry there were airplane-meals scatteres around the area. But no, because, as he pulled me aside and told me in confidence, he had heard it tasted good...
This is the only time I have ever in any game ever GMed stated "no, you do not do that".
And then the alien robots who was supposed to turn up after some tension-building showed up and we had a fight scene. During the next scene the player decided to assault an alien base alone. And I was thankfull to simple tell him "you died" and ask him to leave so the rest us could try to have a normal 'super magical anime heroes stranded on the north pole battling alien robots'-game thank you very much!

[Edit] Sorry I had a point that was relevant to the OP: Some people are just crazy, they turn up at game cons. Forget about them and focus on the people who are having fun at your game.[/edit]

Re: Things players say to me
 

This reminds me an old twitter post from PK.