Medieval re-enactment as martial arts styles

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

I tend to allow PK's houserules, or some versions of them, as a matter of course, but especially if I were running a campaigne about SCA members getting dumped into Yrth, or another such setting (or otherwise having a high probability of needing to fight with TL3-or-so weapons fairly often, in order to survive), I would point my players at that rule specifically, so they know they're not so screwed as they otherwise would be.

I've taken to calling Art/Sport forms unique techniques defaulting to Combat skill - 0 with no upper limit. That is your first 2 points should go into a combat skill, so everybody with a sport form has some minimal combat effectiveness, and the rest go into the art, allowing you to buy it up pretty high cheaply, with no additional combat improvements.

This seems fairly reasonable - you do learn the basic moves and a little of what's dangerous with an art form - it's the stuff the safety rules tell you not to do - but the practice you put in to safe moves is fairly useless in a real fight. Of course for full contact sport, I might suggest alternating your points between the Sport technique and the actual combat skill, and anybody with a serious hobby involving real exercise should consider spending some of the points to buy up DX or ST, so you'd still get a little better at hurting people.