Why learn a martial art?

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The effect is that if you have Style Familiarity, and your opponent also has Style Familiarity with every style you do, your Deceptive Attack's effectiveness is reduced by one (unless you use a technique that doesn't belong to your style).

I believe what it represents is that they know pretty well how people who fight like you fight, so they can anticipate the ways you try to get around their defense.

You can have no style by not having any style familiarity. Really nothing complicated about it. Using styles in a game does not forbid not using styles. (Somewhat akin to how using powers does not forbid 'wild' advantages.)

Not sure if I am following, but I definitely see the folly of interjecting myself into this conversation, for which I do apologize. It is too much like referencing one language to try and comprehend something similar (me posting, not the topic at hand); while some terms match up, others don't. Useful term by term, but not for anything overly complex, which I now understand would be this situation.

Yes... I was being rather thick. >.>

Just to explain where I am coming from... Style Familiarity used to be an Advantage for styles the character was not proficient with; without it you defended at -1 against attacks from someone using a style you didn't know. It was not associated with the character's own proficiency in the style.

If a setting was bothering to use "Styles" as more than flavor, any given method of combat technically had a style; it is just that outside of real world "martial arts" there often was little reason to dwell on the differences. It may be a "double standard", but to a degree it was justified; players weren't really worried if how one culture used a sword was different from another unless the differences were already extreme enough (re: different skills or different "styles" of the same skill) to bother keeping track.

So getting back to the topic at hand... even if RAW states you can have a "generic" martial arts style, I'd personally would require the player back it up or pay for any advantages generated (as compared to having a specified style). Unlike a wild version of an advantage, we are discussing how one represents the performance of a related series of actions and utilizes a body of knowledge. It is one thing to have (for example) the "wild" generic version of Luck in an "all in" Powers heavy setting - Luck there can still just represent the manipulation of game mechanics, of exchanging points for a more desirable outcome.

This feels more like trying to get a second Native language for free... though I don't remember how 4e handles that (for 3e it was just a Special Effect or Unusual Background cost similar in price to simply buying the language up to that proficiency). The difference is being born into a bilingual family (or environment) is a lot more likely than inventing your own form of advanced combat skills.