Parrying weapons with Karate/Judo

[TheOneRonin]

The thread I started on Unarmed vs. Knife, along with Douglas Cole's Gaming Ballistic and Peter Dell'Orto's Dungeon Fantastic blog posts have got me thinking a lot more about being unarmed and dealing with an armed attacker, from GURPS mechanics, Narrative Description, and Real Life angles.

1st Thought: Parrying the Arm

Originally Posted by Basic Set, pg 377

You are at -3 to parry weapons, unless the attack is a thrust or you are using Judo or Karate (in either case, use your full parry).

This assumes you are parrying the weapon. If you are using Boxing, Brawling, or (Sumo/Normal) Wrestling, why wouldn't you choose to Parry the arm instead? If you are dealing with a Reach 1 or greater weapon, you'll need to do a Retreat (Slip) to move into CC in order to reach the arm, but what about vs. something like a Reach C knife?

If your opponent has to be in Reach C to attack you, you don't need to move into Reach C to Parry the limb holding the weapon.

Does this mean it's safe to say that none of the Unarmed skills face any penalty for Parrying Reach C weapon attacks?


2nd Thought: Narrative description, unarmed Parry vs. weapon

Going back to Judo and Karate Parries vs. armed attacks, how do you GMs out there describe what such a defense looks like? My RL training often intrudes here as most of our empty-hand "parry" defenses vs. weapon attacks involve contact with the opponent's hand or arm. We only really make contact with the weapon if A.) we are dealing with a thrust and/or B.) it's a blunt, non-edged weapon.

So assuming you don't narrate the defense as "parrying the arm", how do you describe this sort of thing at the table?

3rd Thought: Unarmed vs. Weapon, is it risky enough?

If you take a look at Doug's blog (linked above), you'll see that the % chance of being damaged by a parry from the knife guy is really small, and gets even smaller if the attacker is using Judo or Karate. Here is the relevant bit from the Basic Set:

Originally Posted by Basic Set, pg 376

Parrying Unarmed Attacks: If you successfully parry an unarmed attack (bite, punch, etc.) with a weapon, you may injure your attacker. Immediately roll against your skill with the weapon you used to parry. This roll is at -4 if your attacker used Judo or Karate.

If you use GURPS: Martial Arts, then you take a further penalty on the attack roll = to the normal hit location penalty (-2 vs. Arm, -4 vs. Hand), so that's -6 to hit the arm, -8 to hit the hand.

How do you feel about those penalties? The sucky thing about them is that the skill level of the attacker is mostly irrelevant (outside of the chance of landing the initial parry). If the Knife guy manages to pull off a parry vs. the unarmed guy, it doesn't matter if the unarmed guy is Skill 10 or Skill 25...the Knife guy still has a very small chance of doing any damage.

Does this make your unarmed players less risk-averse when facing armed opponents? Does it play into their tactics/mindset at all?

I'll probably add some more later, but I wanted to throw this out for the community to chew on and maybe give some feedback.