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Warning: This Is a Stupidly in Depth and Pointless Analysis and the Number of Self Replies Required to Fit This Mess May Be Disturbing to Sensitive Viewers

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Warning: This Is a Stupidly in Depth and Pointless Analysis and the Number of Self Replies Required to Fit This Mess May Be Disturbing to Sensitive Viewers Warning: This is a stupidly in depth and pointless analysis and the number of self replies required to fit this mess may be disturbing to sensitive viewers. Reader discretion is advised. Also, please reply to the main post directly or things will get... messy... Some people I hang out with asked me to do a detailed write up on martial arts, their techniques, and who should take them. And because they knew how to work me and flattered my ego, I have been suckered into actually doing it. So here goes. A primer on martial arts: Martial arts in SR have a history of being overpowered, lackluster, confusing, and overly simplified. In 4e, martial arts were mostly known for letting assholes like me make SONIC PUNCHUUUUU characters who totally ignored armor with elemental fist and gain insane damage boosts with boxing and critical strike. In 5e, they lost most of the innate passive benefits and now focus exclusively on their originally lesser used facet, their techniques. Martial arts in SR are, mechanically, mostly just a collection of techniques that knowledge of the martial art allows you to purchase. You are technically also allowed to buy a martial art as a specialty for specific weapon skills, which provides the specialty bonus when using that martial art's techniques with that skill, but that is, at surface level, their only thematic interaction with skills. That said, martial artists are still skill defined. Any martial artist can utilize gymnastics to become a fearsome fighter, where as unarmed, blades, clubs, throwing weapons, and firearms of all stripes can also can heavily benefit from martial arts if your character already practices them. So to really understand martial arts, we first need to look at the techniques, which fall into four broad categories that I totally just made up in order to help people understand what they are getting: Transformative new actions, situational bonuses, specialized new actions, and ­1 penalty reductions. Transformative new actions are the most important martial art techniques to understand, because they define the builds they are in, and allow you to undertake new actions that you will consistently be using. They aren't necessarily the strongest techniques for every character, but if your character needs one of these they NEED them. Situational bonuses give significant rewards for specific scenarios, or otherwise reward a normally substandard choice. They often boost damage, or allow you to deal damage when you normally wouldn't be allowed to. Because they often layer onto powerful non­damaging effects, these are some of the best techniques to learn if you are already blasting people down or slicing them up, and almost every serious conventional combatant probably should know one of these abilities. Some of these are Technically new actions, but in reality they just modify the attack with more damage. New actions are just something I made up to be distinct from transformative new actions. Sue me. They are new things you can do that range from neat to worthless, but aren't things that you tend to define your character around. These actions generally aren't going to be your bread and butter, you can't do these things every turn either because, you now, you need to get stuff done and the action doesn't advance the fight, or because the situation the action is not one you can always preform anyway. These are still good to learn, but unless you have specific needs its best to learn them from a martial art you already want to take for its situational bonus or for its transformative actions. Finally, there are the penalty negating techniques. These are the least impactful in general, and do very little to actually help your character compared to other things you probably could buy. It's not a total waste to grab these, especially if your already are rank 6, have a specialty, and the penalty is a common thing you are going to do like a vitals called shot, but you should never go into a martial art just to get these. Now that the totally arbitrary (well, mostly arbitrary) categories have been laid out, lets get to a rundown of the techniques that are worth mentioning. I am not going to go into every little technique, because there are a lot and I am pretty sure that is a fair use violation. I shouldn't need to tell you that grasping vines is utterly not worth your time. I will only mention unusually good techniques, ones with aspects most people miss, or ones that are unusually overrated. Average is average, and bad is bad. Transformative techniques: Clinch: Clinch is a game­changer of a technique because it allows you to easily control a target's movement, while also providing extreme penalties to ranged weapon usage in the engagement above and beyond the relatively minor ­3 that close quarters combat provides. Clinch makes being in a knife fight armed with a pistol terrifying, which is the dream of every melee martial artist in SR. You now actually have the advantage in close quarters combat unless you either bomb your clinch roll or your opponent somehow can afford to do a long full auto burst without taking recoil penalties. As a bonus, it sets up perhaps the most transformative technique in the game... Throw: Throw does it all. It functions as a counter­attack, letting you deal damage off turn. But it also allows you to attack, harm, and temporarily disable targets with an attack that doesn't really use strength. You need some amount of strength to throw your opponent, but it's a lot less strength than what you need to be able to strike to kill. This means many PCs who are helpless without a gun and don't have the super­human strength able to rend flesh can easily learn how to toss gangers around the room like rag dolls. The ability to forcefully move your opponent is also nearly unique to this technique, which can either mean nothing, or mean a bonfire or 50 stories downwards worth of something. Even if you can't toss someone in a meat grinder, sometimes out a one story drop is enough to temporarily remove them from a fight, making this technique almost on par with petrify or turn to goo in some situations. Throw in many ways is the martial art technique, it is something worth delving into the system exclusively for, because it suddenly makes people who are very bad at unarmed combat very good at it. If you don't know what technique to take on your unarmed combatant, grab throw and clinch. Sweep: Sweep does a lot for what seems to be a simple modifier to the knockdown called shot. It controls enemy movement, sets you up for a bonus on your next attack if you move before your opponent, and eats an enemy action at worst and forcibly keeps them on the ground at best. But the biggest change sweep makes is that it allows you to make non­lethal attacks with blades, clubs, and implant weaponry, which can matter a lot at some tables. Suddenly drawing a claymore or your bio­claws when you need to take someone alive isn't the act of a psycho, but probably your best chance at capturing someone, and many Gms like it when people don't leave a body trail. It also forces enemies to stay in close combat with you, and you always should remember that people who are prone need to make a roll to stand up if they are injured, which may outright take someone out of a fight. Pin: Pin is exclusive to throwing and archery, but it is a doozy of a technique that limits your target's movement (notice a theme?) and boosts your damage. If you are an extremely accurate fighter (and both of these weapon types reward extreme accuracy) you can create a scenario where your target can't help but either remain still or take un­resisted physical damage equal to your net hits. This is no martial art for dabblers, it requires dedication, but it makes your arrows and knives terrifying tools rather than simple alternatives to bullets. And don't forget synergy, check out mono­tipped barbed arrows if you are an archer, and hand grenades if you are into throwing. Situational bonuses: Crushing Jaws, Constrictors crush: Subdual combat gets a raw deal in SR, most people don't understand how simple and good it is because of the history of RPGs to run grappling in the most insane unstreamlined way in an attempt to simulate every detail. These techniques make subdual combat more threatening, which matters for beefy troll and ork types. Crushing jaws lets you rip apart drones while you dog pile them, so don't let the fact you don't want to kill people scare you off. Jiao Di: Generally is a +1 to DV the first time you attack a given target. You almost always charge anyway, right? If you have perfect time (and you should!) it lets you stack up to 5 DV on top of your base attack with a charging pouncing dragon! Pouncing dragon: If you are an agile ninja parkour type but have insane strength and like causing massive physical harm to people, this is your technique. You ever want to reenact the dive­bomb kills from Assassins Creed, this is how you do it. If you are super­humanly agile and have good gymnastics you can get a lot of mileage out of this.
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