Fighting Styles

From D20advanced

d20 Advanced, like other games before it, presents the idea of using various collections of feats to duplicate different fighting styles, including various styles of martial arts. This section expands upon that idea and offers some suggestions for creating your own fighting styles.

1 Unarmed vs. Weapon Styles
2 Skills and Styles
3 Attack and Defense Styles
4 Creating Fighting Styles
5 Sample Fighting Styles

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Unarmed vs. Weapon Styles

Some fighting styles focus on fighting unarmed, others with a particular weapon or weapons, and a few with both. The distinction between unarmed and armed fighting styles is largely one of flavor and description. Combat feats work the same whether you’re using them unarmed, armed, or with super-human powers. The GM may choose to apply certain situational modifiers based on a style’s usual weapons as needed.

Option: Weapon Elements

If you want a more detailed way of defining what weapons or attacks are usable with what fighting styles, you can use the following guidelines.

Each fighting style gets one "weapon element," an attack it’s intended to work with, automatically at no cost. So an unarmed style works automatically with unarmed attacks. An armed style must choose a particular weapon (or narrow category of weapons, like blades, at the GM's discretion). Adding another weapon element to the style is a feat (called Weapon Element), allowing you to use that style with an additional type of attack.

Example: The kung fu style is defined as unarmed, so all of its feats are usable with unarmed attacks automatically. However, various types of kung fu also teach the use of weapons, including nunchaku, swords, and staves. Each of these types of weapons is considered a Weapon Element feat for the style. A character must have the feat in order to use the style’s combat feats in conjunction with those weapons.

Note that characters can spend a hero die to emulate the Weapon Element feat like any other feat, granting a one-time use of a different attack in conjunction with a particular fighting style when the character doesn’t have that attack as a standard weapon element.

This option is best for fairly realistic games where it's important to differentiate between otherwise similar martial artists. For more general settings, it's probably more detail than the setting or characters require.

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Skills and Styles

Some fighting styles teach particular skills in addition to feats. A true expert in the style is likely to have at least some training in these associated skills although, like the style’s feats, you can choose how many points (if any) to invest in them.

The most common skills for fighting styles are Acrobatics, Persuasion (primarily aimed at feinting and demoralizing an enemy in combat), and Perception (primarily aimed at detecting and avoiding the previous two effects). Some styles also make use of Might and Reflex as well, and most styles can benefit from appropriate ranks in an Expertise specialization (such as martial arts).

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Attack and Defense Styles

Note that none of the fighting styles in this section have any specific bonuses to attack or defense other than those granted by their feats. You might also decide that a particular fighting style calls for the Attack Specialization feat for a particular type of attack associated with the style. Like other ranked feats associated with a fighting style, these feats are available in multiple ranks, up to the campaign’s normal power level limit.

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Creating Fighting Styles

Creating a fighting style is a simple matter of building a list of the style’s feats, plus any associated skills and weapon elements (if that option is in use). Characters trained in a style invest power points into its traits. They don’t have to take all of them at once; indeed, most students do not gain complete mastery of a fighting style all at once.

Generally speaking, a complete style should consist of between a half dozen and a dozen or so feats; fewer usually isn’t enough to constitute a coherent style, while more tends to represent branching out to master multiple styles of combat, unless you want to create a “master style” or secret martial art for your game encompassing every combat feat (true masters of such a style should be rare indeed!).

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Sample Fighting Styles

A number of sample fighting styles are presented here. You can use them in your game as-is, modify them to suit your own view of the style, and use them as models for creating new fighting styles of your own.

A note to real-world students of these and other martial arts: the material here isn’t intended for a detailed simulation of martial arts combat, but a general set of fighting styles usable in an RPG. Feel free to modify these styles as you like and to create your own, but keep in mind they’re intended to provide a useful shorthand for collections of fighting feats.