Confused...difference between maneuvers, techniques, perks?

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Refplace

LOL. I disagree but we shall see what the public opinion is once its finally published. But the Pin and Takedown sections pretty much are.
Thankfully.

To prevent this from being entirely too cryptic, the change I am talking about is the generalization of takedown into a broader selection called force posture change. It allows for self-defense type moves such as dropping someone to their knees as well as the more standard throw them down prone. It also incorporates penalties and bonuses for the attacker changing posture, pulling in sacrificial takedowns and throws into one overall technique.

[Kromm]

In GURPS Third Edition:

• A maneuver was one of the choices you could make for the action on your turn: Move, Change Position, Ready, etc.
• Confusingly, a maneuver was also a "sub-skill" that could generally be improved on its own. For a combat skill, this most often meant a specific attack or defense; e.g., Kicking, improved sparately from Karate.
• There were many options possible during your maneuver (first sense) – for instance, evading, targeting hit locations, and close-combat strangles and takedowns – that had no specific class name. Sometimes (but not always!), uses of attributes or skills for these feats were improvable as maneuvers (second sense), or even spoken of as such when they weren't improvable.
• There was nothing called a perk.
• There was nothing called a technique.

In GURPS Fourth Edition:

• A maneuver is one of the choices you can make for the action on your turn: Move, Change Posture, Ready, etc.
• A combat option is something like evading, targeting a hit location, Rapid Strike, Deceptive Attack, or a close-combat strangle or takedown. It defines a specific way of using a maneuver (e.g., "I take an Attack maneuver and use it for a Rapid Strike aimed at the vitals").
• A technique is a "sub-skill" that can generally be improved on its own. For a combat skill, this most often means a specific attack or defense; e.g., Kicking, improved sparately from Karate. Some techniques have particular maneuvers and/or combat options built-in.
• A perk is a one-point advantage which, in a combat context, either acts as a bonus to a specific combat roll or "switches on" an extra combat option. Again, it might specify a particular maneuver and/or combat option. Martial-arts styles teach a mixture of such perks and techniques.

As others have stated, the confusion is most likely over the ambiguous use of the term "maneuver" in GURPS Third Edition – though the lack of a clear term for "combat option" in that edition is also confusing, and there's some room for confusion in the way that GURPS Fourth Edition allows techniques to specify maneuvers and combat options, and separates the tricks of martial-arts styles into maneuvers and perks.

[DangerousThing]

So there is still one confusion left for me.

Why is a feint both a maneuver and a combat option?

[Kromm]

A feint is really just a combat option. It quite literally replaces an attack – it explicitly does so for All-Out Attack (Feint) and throughout Martial Arts. It's probably best not to think of it as a maneuver, but as "an attack to lower defenses rather than cause harm," much as a disarm is "an attack to knock away a weapon rather than cause harm" or a shove is "an attack to cause knockback rather than harm." These things are all basically combat options . . . and improving the use of a skill for a sufficiently narrow combat option is valid grounds for a technique, as the technique-design rules in Martial Arts make clear.

[Balor Patch]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

So there is still one confusion left for me.

Why is a feint both a maneuver and a combat option?

History. GURPS 1st edition didn't have combat options so Feint was included as a Maneuver, and subsequent editions have left it there.

[DouglasCole]

Note the Pyramid article Delayed Gratification takes this Combat Option concept to a logical extreme with the Setup Attack option.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

A perk is a very small advantage.

Also note that some Perks are levelled.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Here's your problem (and your book is not prior to 3e, 1e Martial Arts was for GURPS 3e). 3e Martial Arts isn't compatible with 4e. In particular what 3e called "maneuvers" are now "techniques" in 4e.

Isn't it more correct to say that the problem is serious jargon changes, rather than fundamental incompatibility?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Isn't it more correct to say that the problem is serious jargon changes, rather than fundamental incompatibility?

The core mechanic of Style Familiarity is radically different and so the entire concept of Styles is very different. 3e didn't have perks at all, perks are central to 4e Styles. Most of the rules for techniques and combat options are significantly different from 3e equivalents. 3e didn't have Heroic Archer.

[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by Balor Patch

History. GURPS 1st edition didn't have combat options so Feint was included as a Maneuver, and subsequent editions have left it there.

Ahh. Backwards compatibility.