Martial Arts: Cycling Through Stances

[Greg 1]

Often, cinematic martial artists do something I'm going to call "cycling through stances", where they go through a series of mini-styles within the larger style.

For example, in Drunken Master (1978), Jackie Chan learns the "Eight Drunken Gods" style, and in a fight, will adopt the stance of each God in turn. So he might start fighting in the stance of "Li, the a drunken cripple with a powerful right leg" and when he's not winning the fight that way, he'll move on to the stance of "Fat Han holds the pot" and so on.

How would you represent this in GURPS?

[swampthing]

Offhand, it sounds like a version of the Shout it Out! cinematic combat rule, where you can learn "styles" whose only use is to get you +1 attack or defense for demonstratively adopting the style once per battle. Not presented as exactly the same trope, but it sounds like it would work similarly.

[Pursuivant]

The sort of stances you describe are too granular for GURPS, even GURPS Martial Arts. The authors of GURPS 4E made the choice to not include stances as separate martial arts techniques.

Instead, they are abstracted as high Karate skill level and maneuvers that take advantage of high skill, such as feints.

Swampthing's proposed house rule looks like a lot of fun, however, and suits the genre perfectly.

[Farmer]

Expanding on swampthing's suggestion, you could also consider a matrix of stances such that some are more or less effective against each other. So you could work out a combined plus and minus effect to each combatant. That may be more work than you want, or it might let you have fun as they cycle against each other trying to get the advantange, and using things like evaluate or style familiarity or other skills to read the opponent and even predict what their next stance might be.

A true master, knowing more stances, then has an advantage of flexibility to counter more effectively, or befuddle the novice with stances with which they are unfamiliar.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Greg 1

Often, cinematic martial artists do something I'm going to call "cycling through stances", where they go through a series of mini-styles within the larger style.

For example, in Drunken Master (1978), Jackie Chan learns the "Eight Drunken Gods" style, and in a fight, will adopt the stance of each God in turn. So he might start fighting in the stance of "Li, the a drunken cripple with a powerful right leg" and when he's not winning the fight that way, he'll move on to the stance of "Fat Han holds the pot" and so on.

How would you represent this in GURPS?

GURPS Martial Art has the rule that if you have a Style Familiarity which your opponent does not, you can avoid the penalty to Feints etc. for your opponent having the same Style Familiarity. So if Antinio has Style Familiarity (La Verdida Destreza) and Style Familiarity (Classical Rapier), but Marcello just has the second, Antinio can ignore some penalties which affect Marcello.

You are also welcome to declare that as you change tactics in a fight, you are changing something with a technical name in your style. The Shout it Out rule is also for this ("but if you had studied your Agrippa, as I have ...").