Review of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling

[CraigM]

Originally Posted by munin

I have to admit, I have tried twice and have been unable to actually read through the supplement (so this post isn't an actual review, more like an AAR) -- army regulations are much easier to read than this supplement. Yet the examples of play I've read on Gaming Ballistic have made sense to me and seemed like fun. I've read those, and the "introduction", and I still can't read through the supplement.

My first experience with the supplement was that I hit that first crunch paragraph telling me to refer to a table in the back of the book. So in the middle of the very first paragraph I stop reading and flip to the back -- the table is mathematically intuitive so I can memorize the numbers easily, but the list of skills and techniques it applies to makes no immediate sense to me (I can't see an easy way to memorize them). The way I play, if I can't memorize it, I basically won't be able (or want) to use it*.

So now I try to go back to reading, but I'm already starting to think I won't be able to use this, so my heart is no longer in it. And still in the first page I keep hitting fine distinctions and exceptions to rules I barely understand.

[...]

TG definitely needed an introduction, talking about real-life grappling and how TG was going to model it. But the first chapter especially could also have used a "roadmap" -- an overview of how the material was going to be presented and how the mechanics were going to be introduced.

I vigorously endorse this comment; this was exactly my experience when I tried to read TG. There may be some good rules in there, but the presentation of them is intensely opaque. The book seems to be written on the assumption that the reader is already intimately familiar with the TG rules.