Please explain to me Martial Arts styles' optional traits

[Hrafnagudh]

Hello,
I am enjoying Martial Arts but I have a doubt about styles and the optional traits. I understand that skills are depending on "setting" if they are requested or not, but about advantages and disadvantages, how do they work?
Do characters taking the styles automatically and for free taking those advantages and disadvantages, or are something to eventually add as of the skills, increasing the cost of the overall style?
In case the advantages are something that come for free learning the style, isn't it a huge advantage in term of points spending?

[Ulzgoroth]

Nothing is ever, ever 'for free'.

Those are just suggested traits a practitioner of the style might have. That's all. Maybe if you need a justification for someone adding those traits, practicing a style for which they are mentioned could be such a justification.

[ravenfish]

If your GM insists on an in-universe justification for specific training before you spend your points, the optional traits can help provide guidance as to what's available.

[Hrafnagudh]

Thanks.
I was just overcomplicating myself xD
So one pays for the familiarity and needed skills, the optional traits for the campaign and gains the techniques?

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Hrafnagudh

Thanks.
I was just overcomplicating myself xD
So one pays for the familiarity and needed skills, the optional traits for the campaign and gains the techniques?

You don't need to buy the optional traits, that's why they're optional (though yes, some campaigns do make some optional traits Required or Recommended). You buy the required skills and get the techniques that default from them at default level (and should probably buy up one or more of the techniques that you're going to use a lot, especially if it has a high penalty). You decide for yourself whether to get the optional ones, as long as they haven't been switched to required.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

You don't need to buy the optional traits, that's why they're optional (though yes, some campaigns do make some optional traits Required or Recommended). You buy the required skills and get the techniques that default from them at default level (and should probably buy up one or more of the techniques that you're going to use a lot, especially if it has a high penalty). You decide for yourself whether to get the optional ones, as long as they haven't been switched to required.

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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Hrafnagudh

So one pays for the familiarity and needed skills, the optional traits for the campaign and gains the techniques?

See "Buying a style", on p. 146 of Martial Arts.

The "cost" of a style is just a shorthand for a point for Style Familiarity, plus a point in each of the style's skills. When you have bought all of those things, you have the style. Of course, you'll probably want to spend more points on some of the skills, maybe buy up a technique or two and consider buying some of the optional traits.

Just as it's perfectly possible in GURPS to be a magician with no combat magic, it's equally possible to be a martial artist who isn't much good at serious fighting. It's part of being generic and universal.

[Kallatari]

On a role-playing/world-building front, Optional Traits are also a nice way to make different "schools" (use appropriate term for given style) within a style.

Both Master John and Master Jane might teach the same style at their respective schools, but the students of the two schools will learn slightly different techniques or put more emphasis on certain things over the other. For example, Master Jane's school might not care much about the ancient traditions of her style and focus much more about self-defense and full-contact sparing giving most of her students the "Optional" advantages of Combat Reflexes and High Pain Threshold, while Master John may be much more traditional and insist that all of his students learn the "Optional" Language, Meditation skill and Philosophy skill. The GM can accentuate the differences between schools of the same style by sliding different optional traits from the style's list of optional traits into their curriculum (effectively making them required for that school, but not necessarily for the style writ-large)