So Im inspired to make a drunkin master character, and I am thinking that it's a style of kung fu, but its brought up a couple of questions and concerns;

1) must you specialize in unarmed combat(martial art) at CharGen or can you just take the quality?(bp vs karma makes specializing at CharGen unapealing)

2) Kung fu seems kind of week as far as martial arts go, and I feel that Drunken kung fu is unique enough to make a seperate style for. the main thing I want to do is to incorporate drinking into the advantages. like "you can sustain your current level of alchoholism without increasing to the next addiction level" or "you can ignore one box of damage while drinking" then keep the +1 to parry,dodge,or block.

does this sound reasonable? any other suggestions? I'm not trying to overpower it, but when you consider krav maga and firefight, I think this is pretty reasonable.

3) the spitting alchohol at a lighter thing, just stupid? do-able? just take spell knack "flamethrower" and fluff it?

You can just take the quality.


You realize that actual Drunken Boxing has nothing to do with actually being drunk, right?


Heh. Laughing pretty hard here.

Okay, to be helpful: Drunken Boxing techniques generally focus on weaving and staggering (Dodge) and lying prone as a set-up attack (Feint) for a hard strike to knees and/or genitals (+DV). You're going to get more out of roleplaying the style than trying to set up special gimmick mechanics for it.


It can be done. You will get burned doing it. If you actually want to injure somebody with it, you're looking at an Exotic Ranged Weapon skill.

1) The martial arts specialization of unarmed combat and the martial arts quality are independant of each other.

2) Sounds fine to me, although I'm iffy on the alcoholism deal. One of the dangers of Drunken Style is alcoholism. By ignore one box of damage, do you mean the penalties incurred? i.e. a temporary high pain tolerance quality.

3) It's a cool idea but I don't see it doing alot of damage. Of course if you manage to douse the target in accelerant, things might change a bit.

In general I like your ideas and with some refinement I would allow it in my game. Kudos.

The whole point of narratives or games involving drunken boxing is not to be realistic, but to be fun and over the top. Stat accordingly. If you must, give it tremendous strengths but also tremendous drawbacks.

Cybergland + Spit + Surtr?

- J.

RAW does not state whether they are or not either way. I recommend that you rule in a manner consistent in your game.

I do not presume to know the intent of the martial arts Quality and the martial arts Unarmed Combat specialisation, although from AH's comment, you can just take the Quality. As a House Rule, I would suggest that you can take the Quality without the specialisation but you cannot take the specialisation without at least one Martial Art Quality.

imma throw my hat in the ring.

you could go with the deceptive and unpredictable side of it.

in sr3 i have a pdf or file of some sort, its been awhile. anyway for drunken boxing you roll your drunken boxing versus the opponents reaction and each hit gives the opponent a negative modifier against acting against them. now some of you may think this is uber.

just a suggestion. maybe an opposed roll each hit or two hits the drunken boxer gets over the opponent reduces the opponents dicepool by 1.

krav maybe, but do you think firefight is powerful? I don't tend to think it adds much in the way of power myself. Have other folks found it to be pretty effective?

Bottle of liquid paraffin and a match will do.

This is what most modern fire spitters use. At least the ones I know.

Dustfingers speaks to fire and it comes alive for him.

Wait. Wrong fiction.

If you are actually interested in taking Drunken Boxing as a martial art, where is what I think would be a reasonable one:

Drunken Boxing (Zui Quan, Drunken Monkey):
Increase the number of boxes of damage before taking damage penalties by 1 (represents learning to fight even when dizzy and distracted)
+1 DV to unarmed attack (represents learning to put your weight into strikes as well as striking weak points)
+1 to dodge (ranged and melee) but not block or parry (represents learning to use staggering movement to dodge)
+1 DV to improvised weapons (represents learning to use your environment to your advantage)

You could also add a maneuver:
Spit Fire
Make a melee attacks instead using Reaction + Unarmed. The attack has a DV of 4P. After wards, the attacker must roll Body + Reaction only to absorb 2P + Net hits.

Bah. Where's your sense of imagination?

- J.

Here is something I never groked about SR.

It doenst make sense at all for a martial art style to be an specialization of "Unarmed Combat" skill. Instead it should be THE skill. The "Unarmed Combat" skill shouldnt exist, because it implies an personal combat skill that encompasses all spheres of fighting - standing fighting, ground fighting, grappling, punches, kicks, pins, locks, counters, takedowns, throwings, etc. In real-life, such an skill simply DOESNT EXIST.

A player who wants to make an martial practitioneer should pick "Capoeira" or "Aikijujutsu" or "Street Fight" or "Bites and Nails" or whatever he practiced on as a full SKILL, and specialize according to his style focuses - the Capoeira skill could have "feints", "kicks strikes" or "sweeps" as specialization, while an Aikijujutsu skill could have "standing pins" or "counter-throwings" or "fighting while seated" as specialization, and so on.

If im missing something here, somebodey please tell me, because it is something that existed in all editions of SR, and I never managed to make sense of.

Before I answer Silva: Is it okay to nap the thread? Are we done here?

You're missing the fact that SR's rules aren't meant to model real life, for starters. A lot of skills are very broad in application, while others are narrow. This is more for general playability than any sense of realism.

For example, look at what Hardware can do. It's one skill that encompasses *everything* you can do with the guts of an electronic device, from slapping together your own Commlink to disabling a security camera to bypassing an electronic lock. Software has the same issues - by your logic, hackers should buy points in whatever 2070 programming language they specialize in.

Trust me when I say that "everything you can do with code" is at least as broad as "everything you can do with fists, feet, elbows and teeth."

Hell, assault rifle training (Automatics) teaches you everything you need to know about machine-pistols and submachineguns, but nearly nothing about sniper rifles. If you want to be a good sniper (Longarms) you should start practicing with a sawed-off shotgun.

Needless to say, this doesn't QUITE work the same way in real life. I'm willing to excuse this because my Elf's shotgun training allows him to snipe dragons with explosive shells more effectively.

Basically I'm just going to agree with everything Meatbag said.

Time and time again people will pick on one aspect of the rules as "unrealistic" because they happen to have some real life understanding of it, and immediately demand some overly complex solution to this perceived fault. Every time, someone else can counter with their own "unrealistic" area that they know about, and if everyone gets their way then the whole system would just spiral out of control and become an unplayable mess.

Tweaking the rules for realism is all fine and good (I do so myself in games that I run), but whenever you try to do so, always ask yourself "Am I adding anything to the game by doing this?"

Good points.

I think the fact me and my group were martial arts afficionados made the default rule bother us. But for the other gamers out there, this degree of emulation is not really necessary.

But then you get a whole "martial arts expansion rules" built over the default concept, making the whole thing even more bizarre for a martial arts concious group like mine. I wonder why the authors didnt just made the change I proposed above (changing Unarmed Combat skill for [Martial Art Name] skill; or even making it just like Etiquette skill, so it would be like Unarmed Combat (Karate) ).

They already have such a system - that's precisely what the Martial Arts Specialty is for,

Unarmed combat (Karate) gives you the bonus for using karate's maneuvers or methods of choice, as I understand it. Allowing Unarmed Combat (Martial Arts) is a bit too broad, since with the right selection of qualities, it can be made to apply everywhere.

At least, that's how I interpret and run it. I may well be wrong.

As a gun nut, several bits of SR4's terminology annoy me, like the continual use of "clip" in place of detachable magazine. Or the fact that the Steyr TMP is still made in 2070, despite Steyr selling the design to Brugger and Thomet in 2001.

They don't make the game less playable, though, so they don't bother me. I even keep the TMP, because "B&T MP9" doesn't roll off the tongue as well.

I'd keep it pretty simple and just use whatever reasonable DV, etc, modifiers the GM suggests, as tweaks to the core Kung Fu style...

And for any zany "lololo, better when he's drunk!" stuff, I'd make the guy an Adept with a weird geas. That way the actual martial art is realistic and down to earth and reasonably balanced, and any crazy over the top Jackie Chan stuff you want to pull off is magical in nature, and as such can be game breaking (compared to mundanes), rather than a part of the martial art itself.

That's quite a good idea, IMHO.
Hollywood drunken boxing doesn't actually exist, real life drunken boxing ™ works quite a bit differently, so the best way not to tinker with the plausibility of your game world would be a adept with multiple levels of increased unarmed combat, better reflexes and what have you with the geas of being drunk (or at least tipsy).
Then again, if you want your game to emulate an action movie, go right ahead. There's nothing wrong with that, just make sure the rest of your group sees it the same way.

Sounds like a great way to commit suicide.

I thought the whole point of this game was to emulate action movies (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)
the adept with the drunk geas makes sense, but it sadens me to have a world with sober drunken boxers. and I worry that a severe alchoholic, close combat fighter may prove "short lived" after spending 105 BP on his punch attack.

QFT. All Martial Arts rely on precise control of one's muscles. Ingesting a drug that inhibits that control is counter-productive.

Um, most martial arts I'm aware of cover all the basics. I think you are mistaking the difference between being an expert at locks and knowing the basics of how to do one. The basics is covered by the skill, the expertise is covered by specialization or the martial arts qualities. Also specializations are no longer as narrow as they once were, its not specialization Ares Predator its specialization semi automatics(usually a no brainier). So a specialization counter throws would be ridiculously narrow in comparison to the other skills. Still as pointed out lots of skills cover more than is reasonable in order to make the game fun.