Quilone/MMA

Mortal Martial Arts

by Quilone

Note: In these pages, I will be using the acronym XMA to indicate Supernatural Martial Arts as a broad genre - Terrestrial (TMA), Celestial (CMA), Sidereal (SMA), as opposed to Mortal Martial Arts (MMA). I'll probably just type 'Supernatural Martial Arts', but in case I get too lazy, here's a note.

This is the index page for a project I'm going to be working on during the summer. It's inspired by an idea I threw around for a while, and it's definitely nowhere near a state of readiness. Bear with my lack of Wiki-fu, I'm going to try and put this together so it's all organized and stuff... eventually this probably will go into the Martial Arts section under that 'misc' part.

General Idea

What inspired this project was a peeve which many people seem to acknowledge, which is that Martial Arts, the ability, is rather Big and All-Encompassing. This is due, in part, to the fact that there exist Martial Art trees which let you roll 'Martial Arts' to do a whole range of things which are only tangentially related to combat, such as flower-arrangement (to use the example from the Player's Guide). That...isn't exactly what this is setting out to fix, but as I've worked on this, I've found some possibly useful ideas which could help alleviate some of these problems. The other thing which some have noted is that mortals who take Martial Arts as their main combat ability end up being far more versatile (and therefore, powerful, as they're saving skill points) than practitioners of any other sort of combat skill. That's more along the lines of what this might help.
In response to the very wide-ranging nature of Martial Arts, and with the expanded Thaumaturgy rules from the Player's Guide, I had the idea to try 'fleshing out' Martial Arts, on a mortal level, to give the ability more flavour, and possibly mitigate the effects of mortals using the Martial Arts skill as a shortcut to ultimate combat efficiency. Also, going on the fact that Exalted is a Kung-Fu movie, it makes sense that this ability should get some detail, in the setting. I am a proponent of there being a Martial Arts sourcebook for Exalted, along the lines of Savant & Sorcerer and such, with lots of detail on how exactly Martial Arts fit into the world, on every level of power. That...will probably not happen. I'm working towards giving a sense of what exactly such detail might look like...

Goals

• To create a stramlined system capable of modelling a vast number of styles,
• Which would give Storytellers and players a wider choice when developing Martial Artists,
• To allow Martial Arts to more easily play a larger role in games / in the setting, and
• To expand Martial Arts combat, especially unarmed, in a way which is cool:
  • Focusing on technique, philosophies, and schools,
  • Allowing a wide scale of potential integration into games: from the wide, 'all extras and their sister are Martial Artists', level, to restricting it to Heroic Mortals or even Exalts.

Caveats

Most Important Rule: MMA must not impinge upon Supernatural Martial Arts. Mortal Thaumaturges (any mortal with the proper Merits to gain Essence 3, really) can already learn Terrestrial level Martial Arts with sufficient effort/training.

Therefore:

• The effects must be subtle and 'non-magical' - possibly willpower costs at the high end of certain styles (possibly replaced by mote costs if applicable), but this would be the exception, not the rule.
• Scaling: to portray a world full of martial artists, there should be different inherent levels within mortal limits.
  

The range goes approximately from 'Judo' to 'Shaolin Temple' in terms of what students can accomplish. In between, there are the 'professional' martial arts schools which are selective of who they accept, but which aren't anywhere near 'secret Wudan mountain' in status.

• Exalts should be able to learn and apply MMA abilities. This means...
  • Either these abilities 'stack' with XMA,
  • Or they specifically do not,
  • Or each XMA style has an associated 'mortal' form,
    • Which may be prerequisite,
    • Or come as part of the XMA (cf. Immaculate style abilities, which are gained upon learning the first Charm of a tree, if I remember correctly);
      • Furthermore, how do they relate to form weapons and the Immaculate abilities?
• The powers granted through MMA should not dramatically increase the power of Exalted martial artists, but should give more flavour and options to all practitioners of Martial Arts.

The Project So Far

Streamlining: ideas on how to integrate MMA into games.
/BasicMMA - minimal system changes, MMA as more of a guideline than a new ruleset. Adds flavour, to taste. Suitable for all games.
/MiddleMMA - small additions to the existing rules. MMA styles begin to gain mechanical differences, but nothing groundbreaking. System changes comparable perhaps to non-Shaolin martial arts in Deadlands. Suitable for adding a little zest to Martial Arts in games without many new rules/abilities.
/ComplexMMA - extensive detailing of individual styles. System comparable to Thaumaturgical Sciences. Requires much more work on part of the Storyteller and players. Best suited for Exalted games heavily focused on the Martial Arts, perhaps mostly those with Heroic Mortals / God-Bloods etc.

Other aspects:

/WhatAboutBrawl - some thoughts on how to possibly, mechanically, differenciate Brawl from Martial Arts. Nothing definite here yet, at all.

/TiersOfSchools - three tiers of MMA schools, with approximate power levels and themes.
/LuMaoSchool - a mock-up attempt at what a first tier school might look like.

Requirements and Advantages of MMA

/MMAvsXMA - how the 'dot' system for styles could help 'balance' XMA.

/PolesAndMMA - as everything in Exalted, location changes a lot. Some ideas on what mortal styles might look like in the five corners of Creation. How prolific is basic martial arts knowledge in the Realm? What the heck do Northern martial art styles look like?

Progress / Overview

10th April 05
Started this page from paper notes. Mostly everything is up in relatively simple form now.
At the moment, I have quite definite ideas about how everything should look and feel, but the real task is to develop content and mechanics which synch with the rest of the game, and which give that special MA flavour to everything. The main problem here is my total lack of knowledge of all things Art and Martial. I've set it upon myself to study into many RL styles, as well as mythical ones, to gain inspiration towards what kinds of effects might be seen in MMA. Leaping ten feet in the air or shattering a boulder with a fist are bread and butter to Exalts; Heroic Mortals can already achieve such things through stunting and merits like The Flow Of Essence. MMA needs to be more about the feel of things, but it's a delicate thing not to get into XMA style territory. Snake Style, for instance, has Charms which do things like hit pressure points, which might have otherwise feisably fallen into the realm of a MMA of even relatively weak power - it's not exactly a feat of magic by RL standards to debilitate someone using Aikido training.

So how do they shape up so far?
Well, the thing I want to stress is versatility. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of schools of every level in a world the size of Creation, especially if Martial Arts are performed in all directions (cf. /PolesAndMMA). I like to think of this project as 'the book idea that never was'. Ideally I want to get to the point where someone could grab a set of guidelines and write up their very own set of schools for their setting, in the same way a designer throws frameworks at writers to get a sourcebook fleshed out. If you're reading this, and you think it's an interesting idea, please feel free to comment below. I'm fully aware that Martial Arts doesn't 'need' this kind of expanding. This is just a pet project, honestly; I'm not really aiming to 'fix' Martial Arts in Exalted. I just think it'd be cool if there were some real backgrounds for Creation's martial arts culture.

Here's what a style looks like, in my mind, at the moment. Consider it a teaser before I develop those subheadings:
One: It has a tier. The renown of the master factors into this somewhat, but mainly it depends on who the school is ultimately for: everyone, dedicated students, or prodigies?
Two: The school has minimum requirements to those who join, which relates directly to the tier. You can't be a martial artist if you aren't athletic (Athletics) enough to run up the temple steps thirty times every morning before breakfast (or Endurance). Or if you don't know eight hundred poems to the shape of a lotus blossom in Resplendent Wood (requires Lore or Linguistics). And so on. Three: Students who practice the style get something from it in return. Alright, you're pretty tough to get into the Death Rhino School (requires Endurance, Resistance), but once you get out, you'll be even tougher (raises both). Or else it's teaching students the beneficial effects of herbs as part of understanding the katas they practice every day (adds to Lore, Medicine). A particular sifu's training exercises are sure to make your smile brighter and your face more welcoming. (adds to Appearance.)
Four: Depending on what level you're using, you're either bestowed with ideas for stunts and the odd bit of plothook, or you're actively spending experience raising your level in the style, and gaining advantages and disadvantages when you use the style. A current idea of mine is that you can't use two different styles in the same turn unless you master them. Xing Juniper Blossom teaches her students how to use their elbows to disrupt the force of an opponent's blows (adds +1 to parry attempts while unarmed, using your elbows, with Martial Arts), but practitioners of her style tend not to use throws (the style does not allow throws). Think Formulae for Thaumaturgical Sciences.

And here's an idea, finally: you could roll martial arts to determine what style an opponent was using, and therefore its strengths and weaknesses. Face would make this roll easier, though naturally if you were using the complex rules, you'd still have to know what techniques that particular school had...and which of them the opponent knows.

I'll update this...as I get the opportunity. When it eventually gets more done, I'll be gladly accepting anyone's suggestions for example schools and their features and so on (not just copying RL styles, either; they'll all have their own unique themes and feel and most importantly, histories)

I may very well contradict myself at times, especially on different pages. When this becomes less of a work-in-progress and more of a work-getting-refined, I'll sort stuff out.

Comments

I really like the premise of this project! I've been a practicing martial artist for about 20 years now. So if you wanna pick my brain about RL MA i will do my best to help. My personal E-mail addy is Spacemann420@hotmail.com - Issaru

I might take you up on that. I basically want to get the system for these up and stable enough to begin creating a list of possible styles. The trick is going to be making styles which feel like RL ones but which aren't carbon copies with different names. -- Quilone

Out of my own vain curiosity, have you seen my 'Mortal MA' write ups for the styles? I was trying for a conversion to the nWoD system, and using Fighting Style Merits in place of a Martial Arts skill. The notes are a mess, and not for the same system- but they might provide some more inspiration. They're over at DariusSolluman/StorytellingExaltedMerits. - DS

I hadn't seen those, no. I had a look though just now, and I think it looks a lot like what I was trying to do in the 'Medium' level of integration. Small benefits, simple system. Mainly, I'm not sure how such little modifiers work out in Exalted. Granted, on a mortal level, even a +1 dice modifier can be huge. -- Quilone