Please explain to me Martial Arts styles' optional traits

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Note that most techniques are Hard, and it costs 2 points to buy the first +1. So raising two of them costs 4 points. But for 4 points you could get +1 to the underlying skill and thus to ALL the techniques that default from it.

You can efficiently buy one Hard technique, or one Hard and one Average, or three Average. Raising one Hard technique gives you a distinctive specialization as a character, which seems about right.

You can efficiently raise two or three Hard techniques as long as you raise them both by at least +2 and you use them almost every time you use the skill. Also, if one of the techniques is harder than the other(s) raising it until it matches the penalties of the rest and then switching to raising the overall skill can be efficient even though you have 'too many' techniques.

To me techniques are clearly intended to be for that one (or maybe two) thing(s) that a character does with a skill that stands out from their overall level of skill. Thus they shouldn't be cheap enough that a character can (and should) have many of them for each skill. Aside from anything else, that encourages enormously fiddly character builds.