[EskrimadorNC]

Now it's my turn to split my response up into two posts.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

If your foe is capable enough to perform a telegraphic rapid strike, then you're in an MMA type situation where the skill levels are equal. In that case, you see a lot of striking, full-body grapples, and only then are you following that up with ground-level locks that leverage weight advantage, relative position, and (frequently) beating the holy heck out of the other guy, taking advantage of shock.

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of if that way. A telegraphic rapid-strike nets out to -2...a guy with 13 Brawling would be throwing both punches at skill-11. Maybe that's more of a trained fighter than I was thinking of, but I normally don't equate Telegraphic Attacks with trained fighters. Usually I have untrained foes, or barely trained brawlers throw telegraphic attacks. Most trained characters stay away from them, outside of answering All Out Attacks. But I will certainly have to chew on that.

If they think that - and no denying it's awesome - then to enable this you need to turn on the cinematic switches. Because these partners - and stunt men are partners - throw telegraphic all-out attacks, which are merrily parried by the hero, and then freakin' stand there as hero does Cool Martial Arts Stuff to them.

I am not trying to be dismissive of the skill of the primary actors or their stunt-man partners. I know a few of these guys and they're amazing. But those movies are designed to show off intricate skills through careful choreography, and Real Life is messier than that. You've trained: you know this!

Yeah, I am well aware that film fight choreography is generally several orders of magnitude different that actual fighting, which is quicker, messier, and far less one-sided. But I don't think it's unreasonable for people, especially those that don't have any fighting or combatives training to expect that their trained paper man can pull off at least some of the stuff you see on screen. In fact, I would expect that most of said people make such characters EXPLICITLY because of what they have witnessed in media and wish to reproduce it at the gaming table.

And I totally get that there are some requirements to make this sort expectation materialize at the table, some of which include:
-PCs with relatively high point values, likely investing in Judo, Karate, AND Wrestling
-PCs with advantages like Extra Attack 1 (almost a pre-req), Enhanced Parry, High Pain Threshold for ignoring shock, etc.
-Mook foe that generally lead with All Out Attacks, so they can't defend against that PC's follow up attacks
-For Technical Grappling, switches like Cranking it up or Quick and Dirty (I prefer Quick and Dirty)
And a host of others.

It's part of the GMs job to level-set the PCs, and make sure they understand that their 100 point modern character that is a yellow-belt in Krav Maga isn't going to fight like Rama or Jason Bourne.

But with those switches turned on and with the appropriate skills/advantages/mook behavior, I EXPECT my 250 point Action Hero Martial Artist to be able to do EXACTLY that. That's why it bothers me when you still can't duplicate that stuff.

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

But it works great if the bad guy only AoA's, which is what most of the movies represent. Shock penalties impact their ability to strike successfully, and my read of many of those scenes (including most of Black Widow's supposedly expert opposition in the scene in Iron Man 2) is "stunt man AoAs and stands there as Hero beats 'em up."

So your "Technical Natasha" article is actually what led me to pick up a copy of Technical Grappling, and I've been all in on it since then.

One thing I did want to mention from RL regarding this, though, is timing and flow are critically important in landing techniques, and there are ways string together techniques in a manner that prevents or reduces the chance of a counter attack. And those ways don't necessarily involve landing a stunning hit so your foes has to take a DO NOTHING maneuver on his turn, nor do they require a willing stunt-man who will just stand there and take hits.

The only solution I've found to this in the GURPS rules structure so far is try and compress things to a single turn when really they should take 2 - 3 seconds of time. While that may not be realistic in terms of time-scale to execute, it's one of the few ways make stuff work. As it stands now, you need one or more of the following:

-Extra Attack (REALLY expensive, not always allowed)
-AoA Double (Generally a bad idea, especially if there are multiple bag guys)
-Rapid Strike (HEFTY penalty, need really high skill to overcome)
-Bought up Combinations (better than plain RS, but gets really expensive for more than one Combo

And of course that doesn't count any of the supernatural stuff like ATR.

Some techniques really do have to be strung together, you should be able to build a character in GURPS who can do this effectively without having to spend 200 characters on JUST unarmed competency.

Check out https://youtu.be/EElqjVt2joY?t=79 this series of techniques moves for what I am talking about. Granted, this is a demo and not something being done under duress, and the uke here is not really resisting or trying to counter, but it's about 4 seconds of techniques where the uke really only gets one or two opportunities to counter attack at best. You do see exploitation of relative position, and possible vitals striking that might result in stunning. But regardless, a well trained PC with appropriate levels of skill should be able to pull something like this off, but shouldn't need 100 points of unarmed combat skills/advantages/techniques to do it.

Incidentally, look up the rest of Maul's videos. He has some really cool stuff, and there is a lot of cross pollination between his Silat and the Modern Arnis stuff that I train in. I especially like his Axe/Tomahawk stuff.