Why learn a martial art?

[tbone]

Originally Posted by MrGreezy

I was having trouble wrapping my head around it all for some reason and you guys have cleared it all up. Well played.

Even for long-time players (or at least me), the richness of martial arts skills and styles in 4e requires some effort to grasp. You're not alone there. For example, reading this thread, I drew a complete blank on what the official rule is for whether you can buy up a combat skill's Techniques when the Style Fam Perk is lacking. (PK cleared it up nicely: it's a GM option.) There are other detailed bits, too, that always send me back to Martial Arts for a re-check.

But in any case, I call it "rich", not "complex". 4e does good stuff with martial arts. Getting back to the initial question of the thread, back in 3e I couldn't figure out what made a "style" different from a bunch of skills, mechanics-wise. That lack of a difference didn't break anything, but it was unsatisfying. 4e's simple Style Fam Perk nicely handles this.

4e addresses other little issues, too: for example, 3e would give some styles little freebies, like acrobatic feints for Capoeira, that made for nice descriptive and mechanical touches, but again, were vaguely unsatisfying ("so, I can just toss in stuff like this for free? Anywhere I like?"). 4e again uses Perks to nicely codify these tweaks.

Sorry, I ramble. But while the whole 4e combat skill/style system isn't necessarily what we'd ideally build new from scratch, I thought I'd take this chance to tell the SJG folks that, with 4e, they've updated legacy martial arts rules with some very nice design work.

Oh, and I have a question too. One thing easy to overlook in Style Fam is a touch of disadvantage that it carries. A style includes the benefit that you can better read a fellow stylist, and better defend against his Feints and Deceptive Attacks. That seems fair. But it also means he better defends against your use of these moves. And if he has a second style that you don't have, he can use Style 1 to better defend against your actions, while using Style 2 to more effectively attack you.

My question: In this specific situation, wouldn't you be better off having no style at all, thus becoming less "readable" to your foe? If that's so, is there anything you can do about this during the battle? Can you declare, "I throw a Deceptive Attack, but it's with generic Karate skill, not my style"? Yeah, it sounds a little cheat-y, and I can see the GM ruling this out if the attack is one that clearly required the style (like a bought-up Technique). But if it's just a generic Karate punch, the same punch that you could throw if you had nothing more than the unadorned skill, is there a mechanical reason why you can't throw the punch "out of style"?