OT: Western v. Eastern martial arts

[Foodstamp]

Are you really asking a question here? From your last post I can only guess the question is:

"How is learning to use a spear in an English military academy different than learning to use a spear in France?"

We would have to know a little about the teachers to answer that question I think. Or are you looking for something else, the question getting lost in your very verbose posts?

[WaltF4]

Omnirizon, what other experiences come with learning a martial art? Does the significance of these experiences depend more on why someone learns a martial art or how they learn that martial art? Are you actually concerned with stylistic differences arising from instructional differences in the use of same weapon?

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by WaltF4

Omnirizon, what other experiences come with learning a martial art? Does the significance of these experiences depend more on why someone learns a martial art or how they learn that martial art? Are you actually concerned with stylistic differences arising from instructional differences in the use of same weapon?

Walt, I'm not necessarily concerned with stylistic differences because they would be irrelevant in an RPG. I'm more concerned with the character affect impact they might have. For example what ELSE does someone learn in a military school in the English countryside? How about in a German military school? How about from a Master teaching the Yari, or the Naganita(sp?).

My idea is that no one learns the use of a weapon in a vacuum, so a simple skill point and you get "one level of spears" isn't sufficient. Rather, the pedagogy of weaponcraft has always come with other ideals and skills. What are these? I'd like something that can be reduced down to something easy to manage, maybe a few examples drawn from WEst vs. East martial pedagogy; thus my original question. I feel that the West - East difference in martial pedagogy offers the richest difference for cultivating weapon skill system ideas for a game.

[Fate]

So, here is my understanding of your question:

Different styles of fighting are taught in drastically different ways, even with similar or identical weapons. You want to represent this in a way more interesting than French spear fighters have +1 attack and English spear fighters have +1 defense or that kind of oversimplification.

I would counter that it is difficult to break this style of gameplay, especially when I don't know anything else about your game (such as whether or not you want to have stats or skills, and, if you do, what kind you would have). If you don't want a "The Punch does 8 crush damage" dynamic I am interested what you would replace it with.

You might want to look at the game "School of Sword" (an online flash game you should be able to play for free, though not without visiting obnoxious flashing sites). It is based on three areas (above, right, left) in which the player may make attacks or blocks. It is based on predicting where your opponent will strike and taking advantage of the long downtimes after every move. The important part, from my perspective, is the emphasis on the what is actually done with each move rather than abstractions (of course, you can always go farther in that direction).

If your interest is the learning itself, you might want to wonder to what extent the PLAYER learns different styles as opposed to their CHARACTER. You probably also want to consider what the basic unit of THING LEARNED (is it a style, a move, or something else?). Another part which is important, especially for many of the martial styles that come from militaries (as opposed to martial styles that came out of street fighting) is the other skills taught with equal or greater importance, such as marching and survival skills.

I hope that sheds some light. I can't give any more specific help without knowing any more about your game.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Fate

So, here is my understanding of your question:

Different styles of fighting are taught in drastically different ways, even with similar or identical weapons. You want to represent this in a way more interesting than French spear fighters have +1 attack and English spear fighters have +1 defense or that kind of oversimplification.

I would counter that it is difficult to break this style of gameplay, especially when I don't know anything else about your game (such as whether or not you want to have stats or skills, and, if you do, what kind you would have). If you don't want a "The Punch does 8 crush damage" dynamic I am interested what you would replace it with.

You might want to look at the game "School of Sword" (an online flash game you should be able to play for free, though not without visiting obnoxious flashing sites). It is based on three areas (above, right, left) in which the player may make attacks or blocks. It is based on predicting where your opponent will strike and taking advantage of the long downtimes after every move. The important part, from my perspective, is the emphasis on the what is actually done with each move rather than abstractions (of course, you can always go farther in that direction).

If your interest is the learning itself, you might want to wonder to what extent the PLAYER learns different styles as opposed to their CHARACTER. You probably also want to consider what the basic unit of THING LEARNED (is it a style, a move, or something else?). Another part which is important, especially for many of the martial styles that come from militaries (as opposed to martial styles that came out of street fighting) is the other skills taught with equal or greater importance, such as marching and survival skills.

I hope that sheds some light. I can't give any more specific help without knowing any more about your game.

This is some great info.

I was purposefully ambiguous about the game because I have no established system, just some basic scaffolding that I'm trying to get some ideas on how to work with. I have skills and stats, but I don't want classes. I've got stats somewhat mapped out, but I'm still in square one with deciding how to make skills work.


While most games have Humans as sort of the neutral, central race, mine does no such thing. Human's special ability is the exact thing we take for granted in everyday life, the ability to structure the world around us through our Mind. In fantasy, this can translate easily to the Sorcerer crafting spells that effect the world around him, but even in a more mundane way the warrior, through discipline, structures the world around herself. Knowing how to fight with a sword, how to march, how to survive in the wilderness, necessarily makes the world completely different to that Mind; this is the point of Kantian and Heideggerian metaphysics.

To give some contrast, and display how another race can operate without the ability to structure the world around them, consider another race of mine, the Machinists. They are completely textual and logical. Humans think through axioms, deductions, and presence. We can make connections in our mind which have no logical arc and which we can't prove, and yet act on them productively anyway and actually shape the world through them; this is in fact basically what science does. Imagine a race of beings which could only think through context and logic, nothing has any set meaning and truth occurs at the point of interpretation. They would be unable to proactively shape the world around them without first assimilating it textually. At that point they would be able to reassign truth to the world and manipulate it systematically. A race like this could never develop a martial art because nothing would have a meaning outside of its text; they could never envision style and form. Such a race would probably never have specialized fighting forms, and may be more like our "put a point in swords" cliche system of modeling skill. However, since they can't even envision the style of a sword, nor follow the disjunctive arcs that trace the from the goal of killing a person to using a sword to do it, they would have never developed a sword. It's questionable they could have survived at all, but through some deus ex machina the can always be placed in the game world in a survivable position.


For some basic ideas, i'm thinking that learning to use a weapon could come packaged with a few other skills, but I'd like to go beyond that. Perhaps practicing in a specific style or heritage causes a certain stat to raise at an accelerated level (although I had kind of hoped stats would remain constant). Or perhaps as the practice of the weapon goes up other skills are being raised too, depending upon which school is being practiced within at the time. Perhaps the "school" is something different from the "skills" and which school is being trained with raises those skills at some rate, but at a certain level that school becomes more difficult to advance with and the warrior may be benefited by learning from another school. Therefore, someone who wanted to be a "warrior's warrior" would train with several different schools and masters, while a character who needed a weapon for defense but wasn't a warrior could learn a few moves or even perhaps in one school without having their life dedicated to weaponcraft.

Also, I'm not averse to just giving some kind of "special ability" dependent on the specific martial art.

Given this ability to learn structural and axiomatic skills, you can see that Humans have a very distinctive advantage. They will need it given what the other races have though... However, all races will have this to some extent, I just think that we humans have just mastered it and should gain significant benefits with it.

[JimMorrison]

Honestly, it seems like there are 2 problems, as far as giving directly helpful advice -

First, if you really want it realistic, then you will have to research the individual martial arts themselves, and then through anecdotal recordings of students of different philosophies, assign "personalities" to each art, and assign effects accordingly. However, I don't think anyone would fault you for just kind of making it up yourself, as long as you try to apply at least a superficial logic, ie- students of Tai Chi have enhanced Balance, and ability to Meditate. What does that mean though? That's the other problem.

And that is, it sounds like you want a non-traditional character design, which is definitely cool. But while cool, it means it's hard to just jump in and offer something well thought out, and hope that it applies to how you envisioned your system. It could be fun to assign factors like "Balance", that as they increase, give stealth bonuses to certain things such as Dodge, or a resistance to being knocked down. But do you want that info transparent, or hidden? We just don't know these things. I do agree with the different moves concept though. Perhaps one school of spear would get a critical strike bonus because they focus on powerful thrusts, while another school is more attentive to footwork, giving you enhanced mobility between strikes.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

Are you really asking a question here? From your last post I can only guess the question is:

"How is learning to use a spear in an English military academy different than learning to use a spear in France?"

We would have to know a little about the teachers to answer that question I think. Or are you looking for something else, the question getting lost in your very verbose posts?

Well I tried to ask (paraphrased):
"What is difference between learning a Eurpean martial art in a military school and learning an Asian martial art from a Master in a Dojo?"

in this question I suggested that there must be SOME difference because Eastern styles have strong consistent terminology whereas Western styles do not and instead are typically associated with a certain military school.

However, in response I got mostly pounced on by people exclaiming that European martial arts were just as highly developed (in fact probably more so!) than those in Asia, but that the Europeans were more fluid and quickly absorbed new styles and techniques into an overarching style and blah blah blah blah Europeans do EVERYTHING better than Asians blah blah blah is why we don't have such a rich heritage of specific martial arts in Europe blah blah blah.


So to avoid running into what is an obvious but subtle sore point in the Western mindset, I attempted to repose the question. Instead of saying "learning spear in military school" vs "practicing sojutsu", I said "learning spear in english military school" vs. "learning spear as an art for sake of learning to use the spear with the ideal that it may lead to higher levels of self actualization, and doing it in Europe, perhaps in France." Of course this sounds absurd, and the reason why illustrates the reasoning for my original question. But people seemed unhappy/unwilling to indulge a question in this form, and instead wanted to offer up examples of how the West had their own in depth martial arts. So when I tried to appropriate this in a way that would pose "military school" against the colloquial "martial art" without involving the East, it sounds pretty stupid; however that's basically the logical conclusion of what people were suggesting to me.


If you're willing to accept a non-essentialized difference between the East and West, and offer up ways in which the Eastern pedagogy of martial arts is different from Western pedagogy of martial arts, then please share with me. I'm looking for ways to model it in a game system. It could be anything... I'm NOT saying one is better than the other, I don't believe they are. I just don't believe the "put a skill point in swords and you learn swords" is a good model; easy, but not good. Learning a weapon comes with a lot of other ideals attached. I'm not afraid to be creative here, what is mundane to us could be good fodder for special abilities in a game world, and might even better model for the mundane than a simple skill point.