Review of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling

[Gef]

The weekend before I started my current campaign, Technical Grappling came out. Since I conceived this campaign specifically to teach the combat system to new players, I decided to incorporate the new supplement from the beginning, rather than change downstream. I now feel qualified to review it not only on the basis of how it reads, but how it plays. Short version: It’s a net positive, because the system really works, but the drawback is that the material by nature is harder to DESCRIBE than to USE. I found it intimidating at first, but after actually gaming a few scenes with it, I found it easy to assimilate, certainly no more difficult than the combat system in general, in part because it organically extends concepts already present in that system.

The proof of this pudding for me is that I’ve seen grappling used more in 2 months than in 2 previous decades of GURPS, often at players’ instigation, and that when it was used, I and my players were better able to visualize the action than ever before. My impression of grappling under basic rules is that while it’s been critically important to melee fighters in the real world, it is a disadvantaged tactic in the game: While I’m grabbing you, you’re hitting me for damage. After I grab you, I can put you in an arm lock or something for modest damage, but in the same period of time, I’ve been damaged twice, and to a greater degree. Martial Arts introduced the concept of an armed grapple with weapon skill, but with the requirement that you drop your shield to hold that weapon with both hands, it seemed like a losing proposition as well. Technical Grappling makes a couple of things more clear: That grappling gets you a situational advantage that you can exploit to hurt the other guy more, and more often, and that this is especially true in weapon combat. Along the way, it makes rules for grappling more consistent with those of combat in general.

The book itself is 51 pages dense with crunch, organized in favor of reference rather than presentation. As someone with little real-world experience of grappling sports, I found this especially daunting. It contributed to a first impression of massive complexity that is not present in actual play. Fortunately, I persevered, and after the first pass, I had enough sense of the overall framework to read it again for understanding. The core concept is very simple indeed:

When you hit with a grappling attack, roll damage (thrust-based). This isn’t “real” damage but more like potential damage. Technically, it measures how firm a grip you got, but you can use that firm grip to break someone’s arm, hence potential damage. You can use it for other things, too, as the name that the author has chosen for this special type of damage makes clear: Control Points. My players have come to understand that if their characters can’t seem to land solid blows on their foes, then what they really need are some control points to improve the odds.

Of the rest of the book, half consists of special cases of this basic concept. In a game other than GURPS, many of those cases wouldn’t be necessary, but this system has to model what happens when hobbits grapple giants, or when an uplifted octopus grapples a bioroid with enhanced strength. About 10% of the page count is devoted to how different kinds of weapons affect grappling (flexible versus rigid, edged versus blunt, etc.). In practice, many situations won’t involve special cases, and of those that do, they’ll involve only one or two. My own campaign emphasizes these, as I have fantasy world that makes gladiators of races like centaurs and scorpion-men. The rules are robust enough to handle these cases plausibly.

Chapter 1 introduces the basic concept and many more besides, like the idea that if someone grabs you, their weight (with gear) affects your encumbrance, and your weight affects theirs. It’s all good stuff, but let me restate that it’s not organized for presentation, there’s no step-by-step process of how to game out a grappling attempt, although I understand that the current Pyramid issue has several examples.

Note: The author, Douglas Cole, has addressed my complaint in an article that serves well as the introduction missing from the book: http://gamingballistic.blogspot.com/...ng-basics.html

Since that hadn't been written yet, my solution was to read it multiple thrice, and having done so, let me level my criticisms here. All that’s right with the book flows from the concepts presented in chapter 1, and all that’s disappointing flows from the implementation thereof.

When you grab a foe and get control points, you can spend ‘em to inflict damage, or pain, or influence contests, like a contest of strength to force them to the ground. So far, so good. Until you spend them, they have a persistent effect: They penalize your foe’s DX and ST. That’s good too, except that melee damage is a derived statistic from ST, right? And defenses are derived from DX. Normally, you do the deriving in advance, one time, but with effective attribute scores fluctuating in a grappling situation, you may have to do it several times in a combat that represents only a few seconds of game time. And if you grab a foe in different places, then he may have different penalties for each limb. Of course, there’s a method to the derivation that could be brought forward into the general rule, but this brings me to gripe number two:

How much control you get in a grapple depends partly on native strength and partly on your skill in the application thereof. In short, high skill gives you a bonus, much as Karate skill gives a bonus to punching damage. That’s dandy. However, Wrestling skill gives no direct bonus to the damage (control point) roll; instead it gives a bonus to the ST score used to derive thrust-based damage. This bonus adds to the effective ST of the limb or combination of limbs used to grapple: Base ST for grappling with both hands, half that for grappling with one hand, 20% extra for grappling with both legs, and a formula involving square roots for other cases. For a fantasy race with many limbs (and big jaws), who might grapple with Wrestling or with a weapon skill yielding different bonuses, the potential combinations can fill a page, all neatly calculated in advance…until someone grapples that character and requires a re-calculation.

The good news is, the full potential complexity I just described is rarely seen in actual play, and when it is, a little hand-waving and guestimating is good enough. If certain situations come up a lot, it’s easy to come up with a simplifying house rule, and the author hinted at some suggestions to come in the Designer’s Notes.