Brawling

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

We were tribal apes for a long time before some of us became warriors who specialized in fighting strangers.

Well, speaking as one of those warriors trained to fight strangers, all I can say is that several cliches apply here:

1) "He's dead and I'm alive, and that's the way I wanted it to be."

2) "Never give a sucker an even break."

3) "If you're trying to have a "fair" fight, you're trying to lose the fight!" (one of my UC instructors in the Army)

And really, aren't we creating "trained warriors" when we create a warrior character? So, at the end of the day, unless the characters are just horsing around, dirty fighting is going to be the standard form of fighting, I suspect.

One of my bosses in the Air Force, who was a former Marine who'd served with Force Recon in Vietnam, had a K-Bar knife on a stand on his desk. The tip was bent. One of our NCOs asked him one day if he'd dropped the knife or something, and the Colonel replied; "No, I bent the tip of that knife on the breastbone of an NVA sentry who was about to give the alarm as my team infiltrated into the target. I kept it as a reminder of just how bad things can get sometimes." I don't think the sentry managed to give the alarm...