Why learn a martial art?

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

If that drawback is supposed to be a huge deal that you can't get out of, it shouldn't be so easy to get out of it. I'm just proposing a way out of it that makes it possible for the same character to fight with 'no' style (which any character without a style familiarity can do) and to have knowledge of styles. I don't think 1 point is too little to pay for the privilege.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding. You could buy Style Familiarity without learning the style right now (a good example is that Masters of Defence stylists can learn Style Familiarity (Italian School) without learning that style. You can learn a style with the Self-Defense lens and have no Style Familiarity right now, although you must forgo the benefits of having that perk as well as its downside. You can create your own style, too, which pretty much no one else will be familiar with.

I'm just saying you shouldn't be able to take advantage of the upsides of a style (reduces penalties from DAs from other stylists, better access to perks, access to some perks not commonly available, social advantages, excuse to buy up techniques, etc.) and the advantage of not having one (no one gets a benefit against you). I just think buying, say, Goju-ryu and BJJ and then saying "I throw a non-style punch!" using the points you've claimed as an excuse for buying a Technique from Goji-ryu and counted for buying an extra style perk, to avoid the one downside to having a style.

In more detail, to make my point as clear as I can:

Joe has 20 points in the skills and techniques, etc. of Goju Ryu. He uses this to justify buying 3 perks - two style perks (1 per 10 points) and one general combat perk (1 per 20). Is it fair for him to then say, when he runs in Miyagi Chojun's great-grandson in a fight, "I use a non-Goju Ryu punch on him with Deceptive Attack, and he can't ignore -1 of that because it's not a punch from his style"? I think the answer is no, and that the easiest way to control that is to just say no. The harder way is to decide what points are from what learning, and I don't play games that meticulously detailed, but I suppose you could. I just don't see the upside (do you have a Goju Ryu unch at Karate-15 but an unschooled punch at Karate-13, because that's where you were before you joined the school? Maybe, but that seems like a headache.)

A perk to say my style is no-style isn't unbalanced from a cost perspective. I just can't wrap my head around how you learn that without, basically, not learning a style in the first place.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Did anyone actually suggest that?

I thought that was the end result of what T-Bone was asking about here. I'm saying "I think this is the end result of doing what is suggested" not "people suggested this end result." If I could call my strikes as being in-style or out-of-style, there is no benefit for in-style outside of a situation where throwing an in-style strike wins me some points in a competition or impresses someone. In a fight to the death, the out-of-style strike is always better because no one can ignore -1 in penalties from you. So I think the logical result is everyone chooses to do that in almost all cases. If that's going to happen, just ignore styles anyway.

That's why I answered T-Bone's question that way.