Default between one- and two-handed use

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Not really, you learn footwork, you learn distance, you learn balance and movement, and you also learn how to manipulate different weapons and such in different ways with your footwork and knowledge of distance.

What do you mean? Every renaissance European martial art I know of organized teachings by weapon form. If the same person taught a group of forms, and knew what he was doing, he would integrate the movements and tactics he taught with each into a cohesive system, but its clear that there were lots of people who were, for example, really good with a spear, but tolerable with a sword. I don't think the current system, where an expert with the club is just as good with the sword but a complete novice if he picks up an axe, is perfect, but it is simple and consistent with the rest of the GURPS rules.

I looked over your linked thread, but I'm not good enough unarmed to have many thoughts about its realism. It looks like you are suggesting that all skills should cost [1] or [2] per +1, and that unarmed combat skills should be broken up into "Strike with hands," "Grapple with hands," "Kick," "Grapple with legs," "Arm Lock" etc. techniques which default to DX?

I'm not sure how well this would work, or what your system would base parrying off (the striking/grappling technique?), or how defaults would work. One thing to be careful of would be that GURPS uses lots of techniques to represent some things (mainly unarmed combat) and very few to represent others (such as most single sword styles). If you have to buy every technique up from DX, with no defaults, then it would be much more expensive to be competent in an unarmed style than in an armed style plus the "Grapple with hands" and "takedown" techniques. Also, representing knowledge of unarmed fighting with one or two skills and possibly a few techniques saves space on character sheets, and allows for players who know nothing about fighting and aren't experts on the GURPS rules.